To encourage year-long engagement and invite more people into the conversation, the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise and the Entrepreneurship Center at UNC have produced the first-ever Trends in Entrepreneurship Report. Combining data with expert analysis, the report gives timely insights into the topics that significantly affect entrepreneurs, funders, ecosystem partners, policymakers and others in the innovation economy.
The 2021 report explores the following: Initially, we explore the state of startups, small businesses and investments after a year – and global pandemic – have passed. Then we dive into one of the hottest areas today: health innovation. We highlight trends related to COVID-19, as well as other relevant topics, such as how AI and machine learning are impacting innovations in health. After that deep dive, we zoom out to explore broader trends related to investment structures, the impact of economic recovery funds distributed by the government, and other capital formation specific to entrepreneurs and small businesses.
The Trends in Entrepreneurship Report brings together expertise and data from academia, industry and policy to highlight relevant topics facing entrepreneurs and investors today. For the 2022 annual report, we invited researchers to submit trends based on their own emerging research. We welcomed submissions related to current topics in entrepreneurship, with a particular interest on trends related to funding; ecosystems; teams and talent; emerging technologies; and addressing diversity, equity and inclusion in entrepreneurship and small business. Each trend was reviewed for quality and relevance by our editorial board
Federal, state and local governments acted quickly to assist businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, because the category of “small business” is defined so broadly, stimulus money did not always reach the intended recipients. The government’s definition of small business includes firms with fewer than 500 employees — which, taken together, represent a broad collection of different types of businesses with very different needs.
In financial markets, forward contracts reflect market perception of future price dynamics. Nontransparent markets, like commercial real estate investments, lack such tools. We use a panel of NYC office leases between 2005 and 2016 to estimate a dynamic term structure of forward lease rates (rental revenues), which reflects changing expectations by tenants and landlords about future rental contract conditions.
As of 2019, salary history bans were enacted by 17 states and Puerto Rico with the stated purpose of reducing the gender pay gap. We argue that salary history bans may negatively affect wages as employers lose an informative signal of worker productivity. We empirically evaluate these laws using a large panel dataset of disaggregated wages covering all public-sector employees in 36 states and find, on average, that salary history bans lead to a 3% decrease in new-hire wages.
Financial markets reveal information which firm managers can utilize when making equity value-enhancing investment decisions. However, for firms with risky debt, such investments are not necessarily socially efficient. Despite this friction, we show that learning from prices improves investment efficiency.
Post 2020 Census population estimates covering the first fifteen months of the pandemic are analyzed. The results reveal COVID-19’s impact on the geo-demography of the state, highlight disturbing demographic trends, and raise pressing questions requiring immediate policy attention if North Carolina is to remain attractive as a place to live, work, play, and do business.
Some analysis indicates companies with diverse executive teams drive more revenue and are more likely to experience higher profits relative to their nondiverse peers, yet founding teams for both high-growth startups and the private capital groups that fund them stand in stark contrast to the U.S. working age population. Why? And why should it matter? In this week’s Kenan Insight, Kenan Institute Distinguished Fellow Emmanuel Yimfor unpacks statistics on the composition of both high-growth startups and private capital groups, explores the economic and societal implications of their lack of diversity and provides suggestions to facilitate change.
We study the relation between trade credit, asset prices, and production-network linkages. Empirically, firms extending more trade credit earn 7.6% p.a. lower risk premiums and maintain longer relationships with customers.
The data-generating process of productivity growth includes both trend and business-cycle shocks, generating many counterfactuals for prices under full-information. In practice, agents cannot immediately distinguish between the two shocks, leading to "rational confusion": each shock inherits properties of its counterpart.
As a magnet for both population and employment growth, North Carolina has a propitious opportunity to create an inclusive and equitable entrepreneurial and small business ecosystem to support the state’s newfound prosperity.
COVID hit North Carolina hard, with 3.1 million cases so far and over 26,000 deaths. Low-income communities in North Carolina were especially hard hit, with higher rates of COVID infections and deaths, sudden loss of jobs with little buffer, disruption of families and communities. In this paper, we conduct a quantitative assessment of COVID-19’s impact on low-income North Carolinians and specifically on a subset of lower income North Carolina counties that are served by the North Carolina Community Action Association (NCCAA).
assistance in the immediate aftermath of this extreme weather event, we document the role net migration played in recent population growth—a crucial issue in climate change policy deliberations—and outline creative strategies and investments Florida officials will have to leverage to both rebuild and create resilient communities with reputational equity that remain attractive to newcomers as well as long term residents moving forward.
Hurricane Ian destroyed property and disrupted livelihoods in some of Florida’s largest and most rapidly growing coastal and inland counties.
As major health systems continue to merge, one of the main questions for commentators and researchers concerns the somewhat vague idea of community benefit. The Atrium Health–Advocate merger is set to provide approximately $5 billion in annual community benefit, targeted to aid vulnerable communities and individuals. Community benefit can be understood as any action, investment or program provided by a tax-exempt hospital or health system that promotes the health and wellness of the community they serve. In addition to community benefit, Advocate Health described a $2 billion pledge to disrupt the root causes of health inequities across the rural and urban communities it serves.
A daunting tangle of problems defines the global energy space as 2022 winds down. On the one hand, the war in the Ukraine combined with curtailed Russian oil/gas supplies into Europe has reminded many that unfriendly energy suppliers can also deliver inflation and hardship to their customers. On another side, efforts to increase oil/gas supplies both in Europe and globally, face stout resistance to anything that might further entrench hydrocarbons into national economies. Inflation is prompting monetary policies to tighten even as fiscal indiscipline continues via historically high government deficit spending. Concerns over climate change remain an article of faith among leaders of many countries. Other voices decry the folly of calls to suppress oil/gas production when greener alternatives are not ready to replace them. Electorates seem both confused and restless. The risk that they vote in leaders less insistent on decarbonizing economies is palpable.
This paper examines how US immigration-induced labor mobility frictions affect entrepreneurship and firm monopsony. I exploit a natural experiment in the US immigration system that unexpectedly increased Green Card (GC) related job-switching frictions for Indian and Chinese immigrants in October 2005. Using matched employee-employer data from LinkedIn, I confirm that this shock reduced inter-firm employee mobility for Indian and Chinese employees.
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, two large infrastructure-related bills have been enacted. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), signed into law in November 2021, provides funding for a wide range of activities including roads, rail, transit, broadband, water and electrical infrastructure.
Long depicted as a global melting pot, the United States is home to a collection of sharply divergent geographies, regions and cultures. An overlooked measure of our diversity, however, is economic. While national statistics tell a story of averages, they fail to account for the true drivers of economic expansion and contraction. It is only upon examining America’s microeconomies – our cities, towns, suburbs and rural communities – that we can begin to appreciate the myriad and complex determinants of broader U.S., and sometimes even global, economic trends.