This study presents a semi-parametric spatio-temporal regression model to understand how theater level differentiation affects the performance of independent and affiliate movie theaters. Independent movie theaters are privately owned and managed retail establishments, while affiliate theaters are managed by national-level chains such as AMC and Regal.
UNC Kenan-Flagler Assistant Professor Tim Kundro fields questions concerning how managers and firms can best foster a healthy working environment.
We use changes in real estate prices to study the sensitivity of CEO compensation to luck and to responses to luck. Pay for luck can be optimal when CEOs are expected to react to luck.
Using hand-collected data on succession planning disclosures, we study how having a formal succession plan affects the efficiency of CEO turnovers. We find that firms with succession plans have a lower likelihood of forced CEO turnovers and non-CEO executive team resignations.
Many time series are sampled at different frequencies. When we study co-movements between such series we usually analyze the joint process sampled at a common low frequency.
A survey of family business owners conducted a number of years ago by John Ward, co-founder of The Family Business Consulting Group, found that lack of a shared vision for the family business and weak next-generation leadership were two of the top three threats to long-term family firm success. John’s finding was one of the inspirations for my own research on developing next-generation leadership talent in family businesses. In my study of several hundred family firms, it turned out that those two factors were highly related. A shared vision for the family enterprise was strongly predictive of the presence of effective next-generation family leaders.
We study how public and private disclosure requirements interact to influence both tax regulator enforcement and firm disclosure. We find that, following Schedule UTP, firms significantly increased the quantity and altered the content of their tax‐related disclosures, consistent with lower tax‐related proprietary costs of disclosure. Our results suggest that changes in SEC disclosure requirements altered the IRS's behavior with regard to public information acquisition, and, relatedly, changes in IRS private disclosure requirements appear to change firms’ public disclosure behavior.
We study the dynamics of pricing efficiency in the equity REIT market from 1993 to 2014. We measure pricing efficiency at the firm level using variance ratios calculated from quote midpoints in the TAQ database.
Puerto Rico’s unique characteristics as a U.S. territory allow us to examine the channels through which (sub)sovereign default risk can have real effects on the macroeconomy. Post-2012, during the period of increased default probabilities, the cointegrating relationship between real activity in Puerto Rico and the U.S. mainland breaks down and Puerto Rico spirals into a significant decline. We exploit the cross-industry variation in default risk exposure to identify the impact of changes in default risk on employment. The evidence suggests that there are significantly higher employment growth declines in government demand and external finance dependent industries. An additional real effect of default anticipation is that heightened default risk Granger causes Puerto Rico’s austerity measures. An event study analysis using government bond yields and stock returns confirms that news of increased default risk increases the cost of capital for the Puerto Rican government and for publicly traded Puerto Rican firms.
In business-to-business markets, top marketing and sales executives (TMSEs) have considerable influence on their organizations’ customer strategies. When TMSEs switch firms, a pattern of informal organizational connections results; this pattern reflects the flow of information and knowledge among firms and creates managerial social capital in the process. To model this information flow, the current study considers information reach and richness, conceptualized according to the network position (i.e., centrality and brokerage) of the firm in the TMSE mobility network, which can be constructed by tracing executive movements through the work experience records of TMSEs in an industry.
Using a dataset of 3,234 letters sent by 434 hedge funds to their investors during 1995–2011, we study what motivates hedge fund managers to make voluntary disclosures. Contrary to the hedge fund industry's reputation for opacity, we observe that managers provide their investors with an array of quantitative and qualitative information about fund returns, risk exposures, holdings, benchmarks, performance attribution, and future prospects.
This study examines the effect of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (JOBS Act) on information uncertainty in IPO firms. The JOBS Act creates a new category of issuer, the Emerging Growth Company (EGC), and exempts EGCs from several disclosures required for non-EGCs. Our findings are consistent with proprietary cost concerns motivating EGCs to eliminate some of the previously mandatory disclosures, which increases information uncertainty in the IPO market, attracts investors who rely more on private information, and leads EGCs to provide additional post-IPO disclosures to mitigate the increased information uncertainty.
This study shows that initiation of CDS trading for an entity’s debt increases the share of loans retained by loan syndicate lead arrangers and increases loan spread. These findings are consistent with CDS initiation reducing the effectiveness of a lead arranger’s stake in the loan to serve as a mechanism to address the adverse selection and moral hazard problems in the loan syndicate.
Using a nested multiple-case study of participating ventures, directors, and mentors of eight of the original U.S. accelerators, we explore how accelerators’ program designs influence new ventures’ ability to access, interpret, and process the external information needed to survive and grow. Through our inductive process, we illuminate the bounded-rationality challenges that may plague all ventures and entrepreneurs—not just those in accelerators—and identify the particular organizational designs that accelerators use to help address these challenges, which left unabated can result in suboptimal performance or even venture failure.
We present preliminary work to construct a knowledge curation system to advance research in the study of regional economics. The proposed system exploits natural language processing (NLP) techniques to automatically implement business event extraction, provides a user-facing interface to assist human curators, and a feedback loop to improve the performance of the Information Extraction Model for the automated parts of the system.
This study examines whether key characteristics of analysts’ forecasts—timeliness, accuracy, and informativeness—change when investor demand for information is likely to be especially high, i.e., during periods of high uncertainty. Findings reveal that when uncertainty is high, analysts’ forecasts are more timely but less accurate. However, analysts’ forecasts are also more informative to the market, which is consistent with investors’ demand for timely information, even if it is less accurate.
This study addresses whether voluntary IFRS adoption is associated with increased comparability of accounting amounts and capital market benefits. We find that after firms voluntarily adopt IFRS (“adopting” firms), their accounting amounts are more comparable to those of firms that previously adopted IFRS (“adopted” firms) and less comparable to those of firms that apply domestic standards (“non-adopting” firms). Adopting firms exhibit increased liquidity, share turnover, and firm-specific information relative to adopted and non-adopting firms. Neither adopted nor non-adopting firms suffer capital market consequences. Adopting firms with higher comparability with adopted firms have greater capital market benefits after adopting IFRS than adopting firms with lower comparability, and capital market benefits for adopting firms in countries with a relatively high percentage of firms that apply IFRS enjoy greater capital market benefits.