We examine a brick-and-mortar retailer’s choice of which product to include in a promotional display (e.g., an “endcap” display). The display provides a visibility advantage to both the featured product and its category, but it also has consequences for customer traffic and substitution.
This paper provides evidence on the determinants and economic outcomes of updates of accounting systems (AS) over a 24-year time-span in a large sample of U.S. hospitals.
This paper aims to advance the use of numerical experiments to investigate issues that surround the design of cost systems. As with laboratory and field experiments, researchers must decide on the independent variables and their levels, the experimental design, and the dependent variables. Options for dependent and independent variables are ample, as are the ways in which we can model the relations among these variables.
We consider a decentralized supply chain consisting of a retailer and a supplier that serves forward-looking consumers in two periods. In each period, the supplier and the retailer dynamically set the wholesale and retail price to maximize their own profits. The consumers are heterogeneous in their evaluations of the product and are strategic in deciding whether and when to buy the product, choosing the option that maximizes their utility, including waiting for a price markdown.
We examine realized spreads and price impact in clock and trade time following each trade in all common stocks from 2010 to 2017. The term structure of realized spreads (price impact) is sharply downward (upward) sloping, implying that (a) market maker profitability is sensitive to speed, and (b) the choice of the horizon of measurement is critical when drawing inferences from spread decompositions.
In this paper, we study within firm heterogeneity in the discounts offered to consumers. Utilizing transaction level data from a large home appliance retailer, we quantify the extent of both across and within-salesperson heterogeneity in the discounts they negotiate with consumers.
The Frank H. Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise hosted its inaugural North Carolina Investment Forum (NCIF) November 1, 2017, at the Kenan Center on the campus of the University of...
We propose a new theory of systemic risk based on Knightian uncertainty (“ambiguity”). Because of uncertainty aversion, bad news on one asset class worsens investors’ expectations on other asset classes, so that idiosyncratic risk creates contagion, snowballing into systemic risk.
We find that Credit Rating Agencies (CRAs) see through transitory shocks to credit risk that stem from transitory shocks to equity prices, while market-based measures of credit risk do not. For a given stock return, CRAs are significantly less likely to downgrade firms with transitory shocks than those with permanent shocks. However, credit default swap spreads and model-implied default probabilities do not distinguish between such shocks.
The Kenan Institute's Future of Fintech: Blockchain, Cryptocurrency and the Emerging Ecosystem symposium was featured in a WRAL TechWire story on Jan. 25. In partnership with Ripple, the event brought together business leaders, academic researchers and public sector financial regulators to discuss emerging trends, issues and opportunities in the financial technology sector.
Little is known about how TMT members affect a founder-led firm’s performance later in a firm’s life. Using novel methods and a sample of over 2,000 firms, we find that although team structure has a significant impact on the performance of non-founder-led firms (consistent with past literature), it has little to no effect on the operating performance of founder-led firms, suggesting that founder CEOs may exert too much control.
We examine the implications of less powerful forward guidance for optimal policy using a sticky-price model with an effective lower bound (ELB) on nominal interest rates as well as a discounted Euler equation and Phillips curve. We find that, under a wide range of plausible degrees of discounting, it is optimal for the central bank to compensate for the reduced effect of a future rate cut by keeping the policy rate at the ELB for longer.
Terrorist attacks. Oil spill disasters. Ebola outbreaks. Our world today is defined by what Jim Johnson, director of the Kenan Institute-affiliated Urban Investment Strategies Center, terms an atmosphere of “certain uncertainty.” Johnson spoke on what individuals need to survive this new reality at the Feb. 12 Carolina Conversations event at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Kenan Institute Executive Director Greg Brown, Director of Research Christian Lundblad and Senior Research Associate Philip Howard's research warns of the risks of investing in crowded hedge funds – particularly during periods of market distress. “The crowdedness of an equity position is an important ingredient for characterizing risk,” the trio wrote in their latest paper "Crowded Trades and Tail Risks."
High rates of opioid abuse have had a significant impact on the United States including implications for firms which must now contend with a lower pool of available and productive workers. This paper documents a negative effect of instrumented opioid prescriptions and subsequent individual employment outcomes.
In today’s world of interconnected and "always-on" information, companies that succeed are those that compete by leveraging the advantage of strategic control points. A strategic control point is a part of a market where, if controlled by one party, it can be used to leverage power elsewhere. This can occur throughout the supply chain, in a related business, or even in an unrelated market.
We directly test the reliability and relevance of investee fair values reported by listed private equity funds (LPEs). In our setting, disaggregated fair value measurements are observable for funds’ investees; and investee accounting fundamentals are also publicly disclosed. We find that LPE fair value measurements reflect equity book value and net income in a manner consistent with stock market pricing of listed companies.
The 12th annual Alternative Investments Conference, hosted by the Institute for Private Capital and the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise, was previewed in a WRAL TechWire article on March 27. The conference will cover the latest themes and trends in private equity, hedge funds, real assets, venture capital and other alternative investment types.
We study the foreign externalities of the recent U.S. tax reform, commonly known as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). Specifically, we examine foreign firms’ stock returns around key tax reform events. We find significant heterogeneity in market responses by country, industry, and firm.
This study analyzes whether fair value estimates of fund net asset values (NAVs) produced by private equity managers are accurate and unbiased predictors of future discounted cash flows (DCF). We exploit the fact that private equity funds have finite lives to compare reported NAVs to DCFs based on realized cash flows for 384 venture capital (VC) funds and 195 buyout funds spanning 1988-2016.