The staffing of parallel servers in a queue has interested operations researchers for decades, resulting in countless mathematical models studying queuing behavior. But to achieve tractability, these models typically assume the service rate and productivity of individual servers is independent of other servers and the status of the system. We question this assumption and consider whether inter-server dependence impacts queue performance, specifically through server task selection.
We conduct a field-experiment at an automobile spare-parts retailer to examine the profit implications of providing discretionary power to managers.
We document what fraction of the housing stock in US cities is affordable to different family types. Rather than looking at what fraction of their income people actually pay in rent in each city, which reflects a mix of households’ ability to pay and supply conditions, we look at the extent to which the housing stock is affordable using discrete housing expenditure share cutoffs and the distribution of rents in the American Community Survey from each city.
We propose a method for decomposing private fund portfolio performance into effects from timing, strategy selection, geographic focus, sizing of fund allocation, and fund selection attributes.
We undertake the first empirical analysis of profit shifting by U.S. firms during foreign tax holidays.
A panel of experts convened by UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School and its affiliated Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise offered a press briefing via webinar on the disruption caused by COVID-19 on local, national and global supply chains on Tuesday, June 2, 2020. This briefing featured UNC Kenan-Flagler Professors Chloe Glaeser, Ali Parlakturk and Jayashankar Swaminathan, as well as Grant Thornton LLP's National Supply Chain Practice Leader Jonathan Eaton.
My inductive analysis using case studies helps identify and understand the processes whereby B-Corp certification can bring about a change in perception and practices at different levels.
Many business-to-business (B2B) selling situations involve outside sales (OS) representatives (reps) interfacing with customers and inside sales (IS) rep largely supporting OS reps. Put differently, OS reps are linchpins, while IS reps generally have auxiliary roles. Perhaps for this reason, the economic value of IS reps for the B2B IS-OS selling process has received little systematic investigation. The authors propose an approach that quantifies the incremental value of IS using observational data that are commonly available in organizational customer relationship management systems.
Using a convolutional neural networks approach to process the images, this study reviews Airbnb listings in two cities and derives a descriptive model of image technical features, content, and other property attributes (e.g., price, textual information, characteristics) to predict demand at the property level.
Using #BlackLivesMatter as a case study, this research documents the tensions and harms associated with trademarking online social movement hashtags.
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 established a new program called “Opportunity Zones” that created tax advantages for investment locating in Census tracts with relatively low income or high poverty. Importantly, only 25% of eligible tracts in each state could be designated as an Opportunity Zone. We use detailed establishment-level data and a difference-in-difference (DiD) approach to identify the designation of a tract as an Opportunity Zone on job creation.
Immigrant inventors produce more patents than native U.S. citizens, among other key findings, according to a new Entrepreneurship Center and Kenan Institute report.
Greg Brown, executive director of the Kenan Institute, says policymakers, companies and individuals need to focus on longer-term solutions in order to move forward through the pandemic.
Urban Investment Strategies Center Director Jim Johnson weighed in on the initial surge and subsequent decline in Black bookstore sales during the COVID-19 pandemic in a recent article by CNN Business.
The list of stores that have closed or gone bankrupt in 2020 reads like a “who’s who” of venerable retail giants. Although retailing has been experiencing tectonic shifts for several years, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated both challenges and opportunities. In this Kenan Insight, we explore four major trends in retail, particularly in food retailing.
The global COVID-19 pandemic has been a recurring theme throughout the 2020 U.S. elections, and its health and economic consequences will be felt far beyond November 3. In this Kenan Insight, we look at both the challenges and potential opportunities the pandemic has created for accelerating innovations in healthcare delivery and pharmaceutical development.
We conduct an experiment designed to understand how social preferences affect investment decisions by observing subjects’ stock allocations and probability assessments. Key to the design is that subjects’ investment outcomes are treated by neutral, negative or positive payoff externalities on social causes. Our findings of asymmetric responses in probability perceptions and allocations suggest negative, but not positive, responsible investment (RI) externalities have significant effects.
Kenan Institute Executive Director Greg Brown is quoted in this recent Los Angeles Times article on what some entertainment venues are doing to make up for lost revenue due to COVID-19 restrictions.
Considerable scholarly analysis and media attention has documented the racially disparate impact of coronavirus infections, hospitalizations, and deaths. Constituting 13 percent of the general population, Blacks reportedly account for 25 percent of those that have tested positive and 39 percent of the COVID-related deaths in the United States.
We examine the impact of four classes of workplace interruptions on short-term (working hours) and long-term (across-shifts) worker performance in an agribusiness setting. The interruptions are organized in a two-by-two framework where they result (or do not result) in a physical task requirement and lead to a varying degree of attention shift from the primary task.