This study explores the role of knowledge interdependencies on the termination of patented inventions. Termination refers to the abandonment of inventive efforts that are no longer deemed promising. We argue that high interdependencies between an inventive effort and the other inventions in the same research program will increase the cognitive burden on managers and decrease the likelihood of termination.
Electricity end-users have been increasingly generating their own electricity via rooftop solar panels. We study the impact of such distributed renewable energy (DRE) on utility profits and social welfare under net metering, which is a widespread policy in the United States. Utilities have been lobbying against net-metered distributed solar based on the common belief that it harms utility profits. We find that when wholesale market dynamics are considered, net-metered DRE may be a positive for utilities.
Innovative data sources offer new ways of studying spatial and temporal industrial and regional development. Our approach is to study the development of an entrepreneurial regional economy through a comprehensive analysis of its constituent firms and institutions over time.
The pricing of prescription drugs comes under persistent public scrutiny, yet limited empirical evidence details the determinants of these price levels. This study provides a price function specification for newly launched drugs, with marginal cost and pricing power components.
This study examines the importance of social perception of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and irresponsibility (CSI). Drawing from social psychology literature on stereotypes, we argue that two fundamental dimensions of social perception—warmth and competence—help explain the underlying processes and conditions under which CSR leads to specific outcomes.
Using #BlackLivesMatter as a case study, this research documents the tensions and harms associated with trademarking online social movement hashtags.
As the nature of work has become more service-oriented, knowledge-intensive, and rapidly changing, people—be they workers or customers—have become more central to operational processes and have impacted operational outcomes in novel and perhaps more fundamental ways. Research in people-centric operations (PCO) studies how people affect the performance of operational processes. In this OM Forum, we define PCO as an area of study, offer a categorization scheme to take stock of where the field has allocated its attention to date, and offer our thoughts on promising directions for future research.
We use a search and matching model to study the heterogeneous welfare effects of housing market illiquidity due to mortgage lock-in over the lifecycle. We find that younger home buyers are disproportionately affected by mortgage lock-in, which disrupts their typical pattern of moving to higher-quality neighborhoods.
How does sentiment in a pitch affect an entrepreneur’s fundraising outcomes? Although research suggests that negativity in entrepreneurial “pitches” to investors adversely impacts resource acquisition, there is a lack of empirical research showing whether, and to what extent, this is true. We study over 30,000 entrepreneurial loan requests from one of the largest loan marketplaces to understand how the sentiment in text-only pitches to investors affects fundraising. In contrast to prior literature, we find that negatively-worded pitches are funded faster than positively-worded ones.
Can decision-maker roles—roles with responsibility for allocating resources toward ideas—shape which ideas people in those roles view as creative? Prior theory suggests that expertise should influence creativity assessments, yet examples abound of experts in different roles disagreeing about whether the same idea is creative. We build and test a social context model of creative idea recognition to show how decision-maker roles can shift creativity assessments. In an experimental study, we show that relative to non-decision-making roles, decision-making roles inculcate an economic mindset and so lead to downgrading otherwise creative ideas with cues of low social approval.
How do an organization's task requirements affect the ways in which it reacts to competitors’ strategic investments? This study uses a novel measure of task requirements (Case Mix Index), to test the competitive and spillover effects of prior adoption on a focal organization's timing of adoption, while accounting for the underlying demand-side drivers of adoption.
This study finds that voluntary non-earnings disclosure substitutes for redacted proprietary contract information. When firms redact contract information, they provide more voluntary disclosures and have higher information uncertainty and asymmetry. Although firms provide both voluntary non-earnings and earnings disclosures when they redact contract information, only non-earnings disclosures included in Forms 8-K mitigate the higher information uncertainty and asymmetry associated with redaction. These findings suggest earnings disclosures may not be specific enough to substitute for redacted contract information and contrast with the presumption in related research that firms provide earnings disclosures to substitute for withheld proprietary information.
This study provides evidence that retrospective adoption of an accounting standard improves the ability of investors and other financial statement users to assess a firm’s relative performance in the years surrounding adoption.
Building on the literature in linguistics showing that the manner in which individuals speak provides context incremental to the actual spoken words, we study whether uncertainty expressed via the acoustic features of managerial speech in conference calls impacts analyst behavior. Using a novel measure of managerial acoustic uncertainty, we find that when managers sound more uncertain in their responses to analyst questions, analyst forecast dispersion increases, even after accounting for characteristics of the actual language being used by managers and analysts.
Join us on June 10 as we launch our incubator guide, alongside Hillary Sherman, of EDA, Thom Ruhe, of NC IDEA, and others directly involved in managing existing incubators. We will explore how to assess the feasibility of an incubator, ways to foster strong, resilient small business communities with or without an incubator, and how incubators have been impacted by COVID-19.
Kenan Institute Distinguished Fellow Tara Watson discussed "An Economist’s Guide to Immigration Reform" before an audience of UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School faculty and students on April 11.
Join experts from Wells Fargo, First Citizens Bank, UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School and the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise for a discussion on the North Carolina CEO Forum’s launch of a new framework to aggregate non-standard, real-time data to guide policy and business next steps. Join Tuesday, July 7, at 11 a.m. EDT.
This longitudinal field experiment compares two different for-profit market entry strategies with a philanthropic strategy in terms of how each influences consumer behavior in base-of-the-pyramid communities. We analyze reactions to a water purification product offered at three price points (moderate discount, deep discount, and free) in rural Malawi.
The Kenan Institute’s deep dive into stakeholder capitalism has exposed shortcomings in a key building block: ESG measurement. In this one-hour virtual session, we will convene a cross-sector group of panelists to discuss why ESG measurements matter to businesses large and small. The panelists will offer recommendations on scalable implementation, suggest how best to leverage such measures to meet the needs of different stakeholder groups, and provide tips on how to design reporting that is free from political influence and agendas.
On January 18 and 19, 2018, the Frank H. Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise (Kenan Institute) hosted its Frontiers of Entrepreneurship Research Conference at The Breakers Palm Beach Resort. The conference brought together more than 100 academic research scholars, policy experts and private sector professionals to discuss and debate the most challenging current issues in the field of entrepreneurship in order to set the agenda for future research and policy.