As the U.S. continues to face COVID-19 and supply chain disruptions, experts debate just how worked up the economy is in its current state. This week’s Insight serves as the first in a two-part point-counterpoint series, in which Kenan Institute Executive Director Greg Brown and Chief Economist Gerald Cohen hash out the arguments both for and against an overheating economy.
The coronavirus pandemic has been especially traumatic on our country’s African American working poor. From being disproportionately concentrated in low-wage hospitality and service sector jobs to struggling with caregiving and food insecurity issues due to shuttered daycare facilities and food banks, working-poor African Americans are facing an inequitable share of financial, social and psychological challenges. What can be done to ease the burdens of working-poor African Americans, both during the pandemic and moving forward? In this Kenan Insight, Urban Investment Strategies Center Director and William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship Jim Johnson invokes a little-known federal program, the Southeast Crescent Regional Commission (SCRC), as part of a strategic response to providing a coherent, place-based development plan.
Johnson, director of the Urban Investment Strategies Center, discusses how his research sheds light on key issues that will help determine the state's economic future.
This study investigates how the organizational reporting structure of the university technology licensing office (TLO) and the educational background and experience of the TLO director affect the technology transfer process.
With the upcoming November election and calls by President Trump for 1 or more vaccines for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) to be ready before the end of the year, if not by the election, many have started to wonder whether the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) can withstand this type of political pressure.
We use the 2008 short selling regulations to test whether short sale restrictions can increase informed short selling. For the preborrow requirement, we find more negative price reactions to short interest announcements though no reliable increase in the price impact of short sales volume.
In business markets, marketing and sales functions often conflict over customer acquisition. Marketers are seen to complain that sales representatives disregard the leads they generate, while sales representatives question the revenue potential of these leads. How should firms resolve such conflicts? We investigate these questions using relatively novel sequential principal-agent models with risk averse agents where asymmetry of information exists regarding leads’ revenue potentials.
Older adults will drive U.S. population growth over the next quarter century. Projected to grow four times as fast as the total population, older adults will make up of 22 percent of the population in 2040, up from 15% in 2015. We believe this population aging can be a new engine for innovation, business development, and employment growth in the U.S.
We document that seasonal temperatures have significant and systematic effects on the U.S. economy, both at the aggregate level and across a wide cross-section of economic sectors. This effect is particularly strong for the summer: a 1F increase in the average summer temperature is associated with a reduction in the annual growth rate of state-level output of 0.15 to 0.25 percentage points. We combine our estimates with projected increases in seasonal temperatures and find that rising temperatures could reduce U.S. economic growth by up to one-third over the next century.
Older adults will drive U.S. population growth over the next quarter century. Projected to grow four times as fast as the total population, older adults will make up 22 percent of the population in 2040, up from 15 percent in 2015.
Traditional instruments of market analysis are no longer enough for the big markets of the 21st century. Data Science creates new opportunities to understand competitors as well.
In various forms, research on stress and well-being has been a part of the Journal of Applied Psychology (JAP) since its inception. In this review, we examine the history of stress research in JAP by tracking word frequencies from 606 abstracts of published articles in the journal.
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) allowed for the creation of Opportunity Zones (OZs) — specially designated census tracts encompassing low-income neighborhoods meant to stimulate investment through large tax incentives. But critics say the program has not spurred additional investment as much as rewarded politically connected investors. In this Kenan Insight, we investigate what role, if any, bias and political party affiliation plays in the selection of OZs.
More than ever, businesses are tasked with pleasing both shareholders and stakeholders, including employees, customers and even communities. But can it be done? In this week's Kenan Insight, our experts explore the most successful strategies employed by a class of businesses that have been navigating this debate for generations: family firms.
This paper conceptualises the array of social practices as a continuum of social innovation and empirically demonstrates variation not captured by legal designation. Using a survey from the US state of North Carolina, this paper examines how organisations across the continuum responded to the 2008 economic recession.
The authors find that hedge funds during the 2008 financial crisis did not systematically benefit from opportunistic trading, which could have generated systemic risks in financial markets. Although some funds that used leverage actually performed worse than expected given ex ante risk-factor loadings, this result was most likely caused by meeting redemptions rather than by forced selling during the crisis.
Healthcare services provided to patients with similar health conditions are known to vary. Standardization of healthcare delivery is a relatively new, yet hotly debated approach to address clinical variations. Previous research on process standardization in health services has focused on measuring adherence to established protocols that are available only for a limited set of disease states. We create an alternate construct that quantifies process standardization measured in terms of consistency of services rendered, and apply it to the healthcare setting using detailed nonpublic inpatient discharge data from about 35 million inpatient stays at 296 acute care hospitals in California between 2008-2016.
We construct a new data set tracking the daily value of life insurers’ assets at the security level. Outside of the 2008–2009 crisis, a $1 drop in the market value of assets reduces an insurer’s market equity by $0.10. During the financial crisis, this pass-through rises to $1.
This paper experimentally tests the Fox-Tversky (1995) source preference hypothesis as axiomatized in Chew and Sagi (2008) where people may have preference between equally distributed risks depending on the underlying sources of uncertainty.