This April, the UNC Tax Center once again welcomed guests from across the country and around the world to Chapel Hill for our 20th Annual UNC Tax Symposium. The event was a great success, with participants ranging from academic researchers in accounting, finance, law and economics to policymakers and practitioners with an interest in evidence-based tax research.
This study examines the economic impact of continuing care retirement communities on North Carolina and the potential they have for creating jobs and expanding the state's tax base. The report suggests that with North Carolina’s older adult population set to explode by nearly 70% in the next twenty years (an additional one million seniors), the impact of CCRCs on our state’s economic health will be staggering.
Our goal in this report is to assess the demographic and economic impacts of immigrants or the foreign-born on North Carolina regions, counties, and communities as well as The State as a whole.
We see six clear trends that Census 2010 will likely confirm with hard and reliable data. In this report, we describe these emergent trends and discuss their implications for business, consumer markets, and the nation’s competitiveness in the global marketplace via analyses of intercensal statistics and reviews of scholarly demographic research. Because the specific population shifts discussed here will dramatically transform all of the nation’s social, economic, and political institutions, we refer to them collectively as disruptive demographic trends—borrowing and broadening the application of a term coined by Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Joseph Coughlin.
The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI), mainly descendants of those who managed to avoid being forced on the Trail of Tears evacuation to Oklahoma in the 1830s, is based within the 56,000 acre Qualla Boundary, located in Jackson, Swain, and Haywood Counties. According to tribal estimates, the EBCI has approximately 14,500 members. Approximately 60 percent of those live within the Boundary. Directly and indirectly, the EBCI is dependent upon Harrah’s Cherokee Casino, located in Jackson County near Cherokee, for much of its income. The casino has an important economic impact upon the region which extends beyond the Qualla Boundary and beyond the enrolled members of the tribe. This report describes the impact of the casino on the region and analyzes the routes of its economic impact.
North Carolina was one of the nation’s most rapidly growing states during the first decade of the new millennium. Most of the growth came from migration—movers from other states and abroad. Combined with a more general aging in place of the resident population, newcomers are dramatically changing the state’s demography. But undergirding this demographic dynamism are major geographical, socio-economic, and racial/ethnic disparities in the human condition in our state, which require immediate attention if we are to thrive and prosper in the years ahead.
This white paper develops a demographic profile of the elderly population in the Carolinas1 and presents the results of a literature search which identified both promising initiatives and programmatic gaps where new and innovative efforts are needed to foster and facilitate successful aging in place for seniors. As a launch pad for future discussion around defining The Duke Endowment’s (TDE) role in this space moving forward, a concluding section highlights strategies worthy of consideration for promoting successful aging in the Carolinas.
Older adults prefer to age in their homes rather than in an institution. However, in order to successfully age in place, age-friendly modifications are usually necessary to prevent life-threatening accidental falls and exposure to other environmental risks or hazards that unfortunately are all too common among older adults living in their own homes today.
Since 1965, average idiosyncratic risk (IR) has never been lower than in recent years. In contrast to the high IR in the late 1990s that has drawn considerable attention in the literature, average market-model IR is 44% lower in 2013-2017 than in 1996-2000. Macroeconomic variables help explain why IR is lower, but using only macroeconomic variables leads to large prediction errors compared to using only firm-level variables. As a result of the dramatic change in the number and composition of listed firms since the late 1990s, listed firms are larger and older. Larger and older firms have lower idiosyncratic risk. Models that use firm char-acteristics to predict firm-level idiosyncratic risk estimated over 1963-2012 can largely or completely ex-plain why IR is low over 2013-2017. The same changes that bring about historically low IR lead to unusu-ally high market-model R-squareds.
The behavioral response to public disclosure of income tax returns figures prominently in policy debates about its advisability. Although supporters stress that disclosure encourages tax compliance, policy debates proceed in the absence of empirical evidence about this, and any other, claimed behavioral impact.
We undertake the first large-sample analysis of foreign tax holiday participation by U.S. firms.
We empirically investigate the effect of uncertainty on corporate hiring. Using novel data from the labor market for MBA graduates, we show that uncertainty regarding how well job candidates fit with a firm’s industry hinders hiring and that firms value probationary work arrangements that provide the option to learn more about potential full-time employees.
We document that prior portfolio choices influence investors’ expectations about asset values, and their future choices. We find that people update more from information consistent with their prior choices, leading to sticky portfolios over time.
Millions of employees face work schedules and wages that change frequently as firms try to match labor to demand. Here, we use personnel records from the retail industry to examine whether workers’ income precariousness impacts firm performance.
This paper examines how the international demand for luxury consumption affects the real estate market in global hotspots.
A risk-averse agent can sell claims to an asset of uncertain value to investors who have private information. When investors can choose how much information to acquire, the agent optimally issues information-sensitive securities in each market (e.g., debt and equity).
While call centers have recently invested in callback technology, the impact of this innovation on callers’ behavior and call center performance has been less clearly understood. Using call center data from a US commercial bank, we perform an empirical study of callers’ decisionmaking process in the presence of a callback option.
Queues are an inherent outcome of many service systems. Because waiting in queue is typically perceived as negative, customers may choose either to not enter a queue if the length is too long (balk) or exit a queue prior to receiving service (renege).
Does macroeconomic uncertainty increase or decrease aggregate growth and asset prices? To address this question, we decompose aggregate uncertainty into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ volatility components, associated with positive and negative innovations to macroeconomic growth.
We examine empirically and theoretically the relation between firms’ risk and distance to consumers in a production network. We document two novel facts: firms farther away from consumers have higher risk premiums and higher exposure to aggregate productivity. We quantitatively explain these findings using a general equilibrium model featuring a multilayer production process.