On April 1-2, 2016, the Energy Center at the Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill convened a conference on “Global Frac’ing, What has to Change for it to be a Game Changer?” It was an invitation only event with attendance limited to industry experts, leading consultants and responsible government officials. Attendees and speakers came from the U.S., UK, Poland, Mexico and Canada. This report summarizes the main points which emerged from the speaker presentations and subsequent discussion. It does not attempt to be a comprehensive treatment of Global Frac’ing. Rather, it raises four sets of questions and presents the conclusions which developed. The Executive Summary provides an overview of these conclusions. The appendices share details on two matters much discussed – what would be a model regulatory regime for unconventional development, and what would constitute a model fiscal regime?
Energy Geopolitics: The policies and interaction of nation states focused on their development, sale & acquisition of essential Energy supplies. It is focused on behavior of nation states, and concerned with vital role of energy in national economic life & security. This becomes clearer when we list the issues: Physical shortage, due to supply interruption or boycott; political blackmail, under the threat of interrupted supply; price spikes, due to tight market conditions or supply curtailment; economic development, fostering wealth creation & jobs; and environmental consequences, including Climate change.
Various areas are examined in regards to current energy policies in the new administration.
Jim Johnson presented at the North Carolina Local Government Budget Association's 2017 Summer Conference in Wilmington about signs of global aging, key drivers, and opportunities for economic development.
Like anyone trying to get something done with limited time and resources, economic developers have a lot of options to weigh when formulating a strategy to attract and retain businesses in their local economy. Over the years, economic development researchers have espoused a succession of theories as they’ve learned more about the many factors that influence economic growth. Historically, practitioners have tended to respond by focusing their efforts around what they perceive as the latest and greatest thinking, often at the expense of previously favored approaches. In practice, this has led to waves in which economic developers have focused on recruiting large, established companies or on fostering home-grown start-ups—but rarely both.
Using a large database of U.S. equity position-level holdings for hedge funds, we measure the degree of securitylevel crowdedness. The crowdedness factor is related to downside “tail risk" as stocks with higher exposure to crowdedness experience relatively larger drawdowns during periods of market distress. This tail risk extends to hedge fund portfolio returns as the crowdedness factor explains why some funds experience relatively large drawdowns.
We model a dynamic economy with strategic complementarity among investors and government interventions that mitigate coordination failures. We establish equilibrium existence and uniqueness, and show that one intervention can affect subsequent interventions through altering public information structures. Our results suggest that optimal policy should emphasize initial interventions because coordination outcomes tend to correlate. Neglecting informational externalities of initial interventions results in over- or under-interventions.
Our briefing paper offers a perspective that centers on what we can reliably learn from the general direction of AI impacts on business change, rather than just speculate about. Only then can executives assess what AI points to for their firm’s development in its current and potential competitive ecosystem, leveraging its organization, technology and financial capabilities.
The autonomous car began as an opportunity that required breaking all kinds of limits: engineering, navigation, adjusting to traffic conditions, distinguishing objects, predicting what those objects might do, reacting in time, calculating quickly and juggling a vast number of ever-changing variables. The developers used more and more computer power to address these needs. But the initial bounding limit turned out to be very fundamental; rule-based computers don’t have pattern power.
AI has become close to bewildering in its promises, met and unmet, its terms and tools, acronyms, “use” case examples of wild successes countered by duds and disappointments. There’s an overall lack of clear pointers for business leaders to shape the direction, priorities and pace of their organization’s AI activities. Over the past two years, we have explored the widening AI space; what stood out in our reviews is that there is today a lack of management perspective on AI.
In the run up to the financial crisis, the essential functions financial intermediaries played seemed to become less important. Commercial and industrial loans, as well as residential mortgages, the quintessential banking products, were securitized and sold.
We analyze the contribution of returns around earnings announcements to typical estimates of the “prices lead earnings” relation. We find that prior returns' ability to explain earnings is concentrated disproportionally in returns on earnings announcement dates, suggesting that a substantial portion of the estimated timeliness of returns in previous studies is empirically indistinguishable from the information content of earnings.
Private labels (PLs) represent a major opportunity for retailers, and a severe threat to brand manufacturers. However, considerable heterogeneity can be observed in PL growth rates across markets, creating ambiguity about their future growth potential. This poses a formidable challenge to both brands and retailers on how to allocate resources across different markets to prepare for the future.
On average, competing retailers near Lidl stores set their prices approximately 9.3% lower than in markets where Lidl is not present, which is more than three times as much as was typically reported in other academic work on Walmart’s entry in a new market. This price reaction results, on average, in substantial dollar savings for customers.
Much has been said (and rightly so) about the catastrophic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. But there is another side to the crisis. It’s a story of hope, based on collaboration and innovation. As healthcare needs and economic hardships intensify, entrepreneurs around the globe are stepping up to create solutions that will not only address immediate needs, but also effect long-lasting change. A panel of Kenan Institute-convened experts discussed this surge of innovation in response to COVID-19 on April 7, 2020. The full recording of this press briefing–-along with a deeper-dive analysis on the drivers of innovation amid the crisis by UNC Kenan-Flagler Professors Mahka Moeen and Chris Bingham-–is available in this week’s Kenan Insight.
Chris Peronto is the Vice President and Head of Enterprise Strategy & Innovation at Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina. The MBA Healthcare Club sat down with the UNC ’91 Alum to discuss all things COVID-19.
The MBA Healthcare Club sat down with the KFBS ’98 Alum to talk about the impact of COVID-19 and the current uncertain economic climate, as well as how the investment banking industry continues to respond.
Governors across the United States have reacted to the COVID-19 pandemic by implementing state-level executive actions to address a range of issues provoked by the crisis. Although it is too early to gauge the long-term effects of the pandemic and states’ responses to it, this Kenan Insight provides a preliminary analysis of actions governors have taken thus far, to help inform policymaking going forward.
As federal, state and local governments struggle to reopen the economy as the COVID-19 pandemic surges onward, efforts to ensure people’s health and safety are seemingly at odds with attempts to spur economic activity. In this Kenan Insight, we explore how a data-driven approach to reopening North Carolina (and the U.S. as a whole) can help preserve both lives and livelihoods.
In recent months, mechanisms that have allowed for high-skilled foreign nationals to study and work in the U.S. have been put on the policy chopping block. In this Kenan Insight, we discuss why high-skilled foreign workers are critical to America's economic health, and why policies must continue to support their entry into the U.S.