In this study, we use hourly data on store traffic, sales, and labor from 41 stores of a large retail chain to identify the extent of understaffing in retail stores and quantify its impact on sales and profitability. Using an empirical model motivated from queueing theory, we calculate the benchmark staffing level for each store, and establish the presence of systematic understaffing during peak hours.
State and local economic development is often conceptualized as a series of successive waves, with each wave representing distinct policy priorities. In this study, we rework the standard wave metaphor to recognize the gains for regional economies when practitioners reach across established boundaries to work together to create a strategy mix.
We present institutional change as a creative and experimental response to emergent or competing logics.
Theoretically, wealthier people should buy less insurance, and should self-insure through saving instead, as insurance entails monitoring costs. Here, we use administrative data for 63,000 individuals and, contrary to theory, find that those with more wealth have better life and property insurance coverage, controlling for the value of the assets insured.
Nonwage benefits have become increasingly important and now represent 30% of total compensation (BLS, 2021). Using administrative data on health insurance, retirement, and leave benefits, we find dramatically lower within-firm variation in benefits than in wages. We also document sharply higher between-firm variation in nonwage benefits, compared to wages. We argue that this pattern can be a consequence of nondiscrimination regulations and the high administrative burden of managing too many or complex plans
Recent Congressional proposals have advocated restricting companies’ ability to buy back their own shares. Some would suggest that imposing such restrictions is a bad thing.
We examine how firms’ accounting quality affects their reaction to monetary policy. The balance sheet channel of monetary policy predicts that the quality of firms’ accounting reports plays a role in transmitting monetary policy by affecting information asymmetries between firms and capital providers.
...Gap Financing constraints can hinder individuals who want to add or upgrade skills to take advantage of a changing job market. Skills-based training through earn-and-learn programs paid for by employers,...
On January 18-19, 2018, the Frank H. Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise and its affiliated Center for Entrepreneurial Studies will convene a highly curated group of 100 thought leaders to discuss leading-edge research on private business ventures and explore ways to sustain and advance entrepreneurship.
The Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise has started a new Management Research Centers Papers series within the Management Research Network of the Social Science Research Network (SSRN)
The local levels of economies have felt the impact of technological change and globalization. These forces have triggered the need to understand the dynamic mechanisms that enable locales to respond to such changes. For example, the downsizing of traditional employers because of a major loss in market share due to new competitors, acquisition by global firms, or off-shoring of production or services was traditionally thought to be beyond the scope of powers of local policymakers, thinkers, and business leaders.
When the federal government, state governments, industry, foundations and nonprofit organizations support scientific research, they do so with the goal of uncovering innovations and advancing science. But what about private donors? Their funding goals may not be as clear as those of mission- or profit-driven entities, but the substantial gifts of high-net-worth donors have substantial capacity to support significant scientific findings, societal outcomes and economic returns on investment. CREATE Project Manager Emily Nwakpuda shares her research in this area.
Post-COVID, tech firms are likely to continue to spread out across America’s cities. What factors determine their choices? For cities that seek to recruit the next Amazon HQ3, what do they gain from winning the competition? And from the perspective of their lower and middle-income residents, is it good or bad if they win?
Leaders play a critical role in creating the ethics agenda in organizations. Their communications, decisions, and behaviors influence employees to act ethically or unethically to accomplish organizational goals. To be sure, various reviews within the behavioral ethics literature have highlighted the crucial role that ethical leadership plays in gearing organizations and employees ethically. Yet, numerous documented ethical failings in organizations have evidenced the impact of unethical leadership—where leaders’ unethical conduct or influence on employees promotes unethicality within organizations and generates harmful consequences.
Our goal in this report is to assess the demographic and economic impacts of immigrants or the foreign-born on North Carolina regions, counties, and communities as well as The State as a whole.
The selection of novel ideas is vital to the development of truly innovative products. Firms often turn to idea crowdsourcing challenges, in which both ideators and the seeker firms participate in the idea selection process. Yet prior research cautions that ideators and seeker firms may not select novel ideas. To address the links between idea novelty and selection, this study proposes a bi-faceted notion of idea novelty and probes the role of task structure.
Networks of serial entrepreneurs, investors, and their affiliated companies play a critical role in driving entrepreneurial behavior, investor focus, and innovation hot spots within specific industry sectors and are critical for shaping the character of robust regional economies.
This study builds on the knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship to examine the factors that influence the decision of latent entrepreneurs to move from opportunity recognition to opportunity exploitation and emergent entrepreneurship.
Organizations vary significantly in the rates at which they learn from experience (i.e., learning by doing). While prior work has explored how different categories of prior experience affect learning outcomes, limited attention has been paid to the role played by the organizational context. We focus on one important aspect of an organization’s context—goals—and examine how the degree of goal relatedness across an organization’s diverse set of activities affects the rate at which it learns from experience. In doing so, we argue that even where otherwise diverse activities are knowledge related, if they are not goal related, learning by doing is likely to suffer.
On April 4, the Kenan Institute celebrated the achievements of the first graduating class of Kenan Scholars. The 2019 graduates witnessed the birth of the Kenan Scholars program and have played an instrumental role in its development.