When multinational corporations face foreign marketing crises, the psychic distance between the home and host country represents a distinct challenge. This paper examines the curvilinear relationship between psychic distance and firm performance during marketing crises, and the moderating role of marketing capabilities.
In many service operations, customers have repeated interactions with service providers. This creates two important questions for service design. First, how important is it to maintain the continuity of service for individuals? Second, since maintaining continuity is costly and, at times, operationally impractical for both the organization (due to potentially lower utilization) and providers (due to high effort required), should certain customer types, such as those with complex needs, be prioritized for continuity?
We examine whether changes to corporate governance arising from board reforms affect corporate tax behavior. While the relation between corporate governance and tax behavior has been the subject of intense interest in the literature, prior research has been hampered by a lack of exogenous variation.
We study how the government of a developing country optimizes its local content requirement (LCR) policy to maximize social welfare in a setting where foreign original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) produce and sell multicomponent products in the developing country. The foreign OEMs’ local sourcing of components is more costly than global sourcing because of technology gaps between local and global suppliers.
Cisco Chairman & CEO Chuck Robbins's conversation with UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School Dean Doug Shackelford on April 25 was highlighted in a Triangle Business Journal article. Robbins talked candidly about leadership lessons, geopolitical issues and Triangle accolades.
In a recent paper, “Demystifying Illiquid Assets – Expected Returns for Private Equity,” Ilmanen, Chandra and McQuinn (of AQR) give a perspective on the past, present, and expected future performance of private equity. They conclude that “private equity does not seem to offer as attractive a net-of-fee return edge over public market counterparts as it did 15-20 years ago from either a historical or forward-looking perspective.” This analysis provides our perspective based on more recent and, we think, more reliable data and performance measures – the historical perspective is more positive than Ilmanen et al. portray.
Backhanded compliments seem like praise but can leave a sting. This study explores the psychology of backhanded compliments. Flatterers deploy backhanded compliments to garner liking while conveying social status. Recipients view praise of this kind as strategic put-downs and penalize would-be flatterers even as the backhanded compliment undermines their motivation and perseverance.
A growing body of rigorous academic literature empirically demonstrates that high-skilled immigrants provide a range of long-lasting and material benefits to the U.S. economy through entrepreneurship and innovation. Recent research has quantified the impact of foreign-born founders on key economic indicators such as firm creation, job creation and overall business innovation. Likewise, a growing body of literature documents how skilled immigrants have more broadly facilitated technological innovation.
A recent research brief by Kenan Institute Executive Director Greg Brown, Director of Research Services Ashley Brown and Shai Bernstein of the Stanford Graduate School of Business on the value of immigrant entrepreneurs to the U.S. economy has been featured in a Triangle Business Journal article. The brief cites a growing body of academic literature demonstrating that high-skilled immigrants provide a range of long-lasting and material benefits to the U.S. economy through entrepreneurship and innovation.
This study examines the performance consequences of web personalization (WP), a type of personalization in which web content is personalized and recommendations are offered based on customer preferences. Despite the growing popularity of personalization, there is a dearth of research at the firm level on whether and how web personalization creates shareholder value. We develop and test a conceptual model that proposes that the impact of WP on shareholder value is mediated by (1) cash flow volatility and (2) premium price.
We explore the theoretical relation between earnings and market returns as well as the properties of earnings frequency distributions under the assumption that managers use unbiased accounting information to sequentially decide on real options their firms have and report generated earnings truthfully, with the market pricing the firm based on those reported earnings. We generate benchmarks against which empirically observed earnings‐returns relations and aggregate earnings distributions can be evaluated.
Edward Bernstein Distinguished Professor of Economics and Professor of Finance at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School Eric Ghysels, head of the Kenan Institute’s Rethinc. Labs initiative, has been appointed a member of the North Carolina Blockchain Initiative by Lieutenant Governor Dan Forest. The initiative will study blockchain technology, virtual assets, smart contracts and digital tokens with the goal of developing a series of recommendations to strengthen North Carolina as a leader in technological innovation.
We examine whether the contribution of firm-level accounting earnings to the informativeness of the aggregate is tilted towards earnings with specific financial reporting characteristics. Specifically, we investigate whether considering the smoothness of firm-level earnings increases the informativeness of aggregate earnings for future real GDP, and if so, whether macroeconomic forecasters use this information efficiently. Using recently-developed mixed data sampling methods, we find that the aggregate is tilted towards firms with smoother earnings and that this composition of aggregate earnings outperforms traditional weighting schemes.
We investigate the spatial dependence between commercial and residential mortgage defaults. A new class of observation-driven frailty factor models is introduced to do so. The idea of dynamic parameters embedded in the class of GAS models is utilized to estimate dynamic models of default risk with potentially multiple factors which are driven by stratified grouping of large panels of mortgage loan records. The score dynamics in the models is driven by so-called generalized residuals, and have therefore a fairly intuitive interpretation of ARMA-like dynamics. The proposed models are computationally easy to implement and therefore attractive in big data applications, something that gives them a considerable advantage in comparison to the typical latent factor frailty models proposed in the literature.
A new article in the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond’s quarterly newsletter, Econ Focus, discusses the spillover effects of U.S. monetary policy on the economies of other countries. The article cites research conducted by Kenan Institute Director of Research Christian Lundblad, UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School Professor of Finance and UNC-Chapel Hill Professor of Economics Anusha Chari, and UNC graduate student Karlye Dilts Stedman on the effects of U.S. monetary policy shocks on emerging market countries over a period of 22 years.
Recent health policy efforts have attempted to promote constructive conversations regarding cost-effectiveness by increasing transparency for both patients and physicians. Spurred by access and cost challenges resulting from increasing pharmaceutical prices, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) proposed a rule that would require direct-to-consumer prescription drug advertisements to include the list price for a typical 30-day course of therapy, according to their weighted average cost. This Viewpoint discusses implementing price transparency for health care products and services where physicians spend an increasing proportion of their time—in electronic health records (EHRs).
A detailed treatment of aggregation and capital heterogeneity substantially improves the performance of the investment CAPM. Firm-level predicted returns are constructed from firm-level accounting variables and aggregated to the portfolio level to match with portfolio-level stock returns. Working capital forms a separate productive input besides physical capital. The model fits well the value, momentum, investment, and profitability premiums simultaneously and partially explains positive stock-fundamental return correlations, the procyclical and short-term dynamics of the momentum and profitability premiums, as well as the countercyclical and long-term dynamics of the value and investment premiums. However, the model falls short in explaining momentum crashes.