The Frontiers of Business: Building Business Resilience conference capped our 2024 Grand Challenge with stimulating discussions on what business resilience looks like in a world of rapid change. Here are three lessons we heard.
Please join us for an exclusive conversation with LabCorp Executive Vice President & President of Diagnostics Brian Caveney on Friday, Nov. 13. This virtual fireside chat is part of the Dean’s Speaker Series, hosted by Kenan-Flagler Business School Dean Doug Shackelford. The discussion will be led by Brad Staats, Associate Dean of MBA Programs, Professor of Operations, Sarah Graham Kenan Scholar & Faculty Director of the Center for the Business of Health.
The Anchor Institutions Create Economic Resilience (AICER) initiative seeks to stimulate distressed economies through anchor institution-community partnerships.
Designing modern call centers requires an understanding of callers’ patience and abandonment behavior. Using a Cox regression analysis, we show that callers’ abandonment behavior may differ based on their contact history, and changes across their different contacts.
On Sept. 9-11, 2019, the Kenan Institute and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Institute for African-American Research will co-host the second Black Communities Conference, an international gathering of scholars and community leaders from across the African diaspora. The conference's core mission is to connect academics from a variety of disciplines with black communities, with the goal of enhancing the life of those communities.
To increase revenue or improve customer service, companies are increasingly personalizing their product or service offerings based on their customers' history of interactions. In this paper, we show how call centers can improve customer service by implementing personalized priority policies.
Most organizational leaders have come to recognize that hiring and retaining a diverse workforce is a business imperative. But many struggle to achieve their diversity goals. In this Kenan Insight, we explore how organizations can measure their “organizational equity” — that is, their internal distribution of power and resources — and build a diverse workforce that leads to greater organizational success.
With growing prominence of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) issues, we witness enhanced scrutiny of the public stance and statements of organizational actors. For example, two such statements by Tucker Carlson, known for his primetime show on Fox News, one on immigration (2018) and the other on the Black Lives Matter (2020) movement, pushed nongovernmental organizations, such as Media Matters, to sociopolitical activism by putting pressures on advertisers to boycott the show. This mingling of DEI, sociopolitical activism, and associated economic effects raises a critical research question: what is the economic consequence of DEI stances that arouse sociopolitical activism and what are the underlying mechanisms for the economic consequences?
Universities have become essential players in the generation of knowledge and innovation. Through the commercialization of technology, they have developed the ability to influence regional economic growth. By examining different commercialization models this book analyses technology transfer at universities as part of a national and regional system.
The slope carry takes a long (short) position in the long-term bonds of countries with steeper (flatter) yield curves. The traditional carry takes a long (short) position in countries with high (low) short-term rates. We document that: (i) the slope carry return is slightly negative (strongly positive) in the pre (post) 2008 period, whereas it is concealed over longer samples; (ii) the traditional carry return is lower post-2008; and (iii) expected global growth and inflation declined post-2008.
We examine the effect of higher wages on firm performance during the 2008 financial crisis. To identify variation in wages, we rely on heterogeneity in the timing of long-term wage agreements for a sample of UK firms. We instrument for firms signing long-term agreements overlapping with the crisis by the presence of a contract signed in 2006 or earlier and expiring before September 2008.
With homebuying season here, many Americans are eyeing the housing market, looking for signs of improvement. Will unfavorable conditions abate and the number of affordable homes begin to rise?
In our last post, we examined the history of how downtown Durham, North Carolina became one of the hottest destinations for people to live, work and play, and how that makeover is raising questions about economic equity, gentrification and displacement. In this post, we take a look at Durham’s future, and how local government and community leaders are working to address the issues surfaced by Durham’s transformation.
The crash of the stablecoin TerraUSD last month prompted talk among policymakers of tighter regulations for cryptocurrency markets, a world that was built around the ideas of independence and privacy. In this week’s Kenan Insight, experts who participated in a recent webinar discuss how regulation can move crypto forward and what form new rules and infrastructure might take.
In a series of very influential studies, McKinsey (2015; 2018; 2020; 2023) reports finding statistically significant positive relations between the industry-adjusted earnings before interest and taxes margins of global McKinsey-chosen sets of large public firms and the racial/ethnic diversity of their executives. However, when we revisit McKinsey’s tests using data for firms in the publicly observable S&P 500® as of 12/31/2019, we do not find statistically significant relations between McKinsey’s inverse normalized Herfindahl-Hirschman measures of executive racial/ethnic diversity at mid-2020 and either industry-adjusted earnings before interest and taxes margin or industry-adjusted sales growth, gross margin, return on assets, return on equity, and total shareholder return over the prior five years 2015–2019.
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.
A women-owned food hub for local pasture-raised meat farmers and an advisor for an energy and utility industry management consulting firm are the recipients of the 2019 UNC Sustainability Awards, presented Sept. 5 at the North Carolina Botanical Garden in Chapel Hill.
Gregory W. Brown has been named director of the Frank Hawkins Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise at the University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School.
Business incubators are taking on a greater role in the development of entrepreneurial ecosystems, but debate continues over whether, how and in what situations they work. In this Kenan Insight, we explore what makes incubators successful and how communities can determine if one is right for them.
The Blockchain Club at the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School was proud to host the Power of AI and Blockchain conference on Friday, Nov. 16, 2018. The goal of the conference was to expand student and community understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain topics with a focus on application.