As the unexpected increasingly becomes part of the everyday, Kenan Institute Distinguished Fellow Kathleen M. Sutcliffe discusses the capabilities and processes that allow businesses to face their moments of truth with resilience.
Join us for an afternoon with SEC Commissioner Michael S. Piwowar, who will share how the SEC is protecting investors, maintain the integrity of markets, and facilitate capital formation. Michael S. Piwowar was first appointed to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) by President Barack Obama and was sworn in on August 15, 2013. Dr. Piwowar was designated Acting Chairman of the Commission by President Donald Trump from January 23, 2017, to May 4, 2017.
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.
In honor of National Fintech Day on Tuesday, Aug. 20, Kenan Institute Senior Faculty Fellow and Rethinc. Labs Faculty Director Eric Ghysels gives an update on the state of fintech initiatives at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School and more broadly, at UNC-Chapel Hill.
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.
Does the quality of startups increase when the quantity drops? Does entrepreneurial experience help or hurt a corporate job candidate? Do diverse teams make for better startups? The 2022 Trends in Entrepreneurship report brings together our global network of affiliated experts to address these questions and more – with key findings highlighted in this week’s insight.
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 Kenan Scholars program has exploratory funds allocated for scholars to attend conferences and other activities that contribute to their education in a meaningful way. Because of the exploratory fund, senior scholar Emily Arnold attended the 2019 Solutions for Affordable Housing Conference in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 3 and 4.
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.
While the gender pay gap has received significant attention in recent years, little progress has been made to close it; in fact, in 2019, women still earned only 82 cents for every dollar received by their male counterparts for equal work. Policymakers in recent years have developed creative solutions aiming to close the gap, including bans prohibiting employers from asking for a job applicant’s salary history. However, in this week’s Kenan Insight, new research from our experts examines whether such well-intentioned bans are inadvertently lowering wages for all employees.
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 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.