Plants become more efficient, decision-making is centralized, but access to real-time data may “Uberize” workforce according to new research from UNC Tax Center Research Scholar Eva Labro and her colleagues.
COVID-19 brought heightened focus to paid sick leave policies – a benefit to which roughly 25% of civilian workers don’t have access in the U.S. After sick leave mandates were temporarily implemented during the pandemic, UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School researchers found employment increased, particularly among low-skilled workers and in industries that previously had little access to paid sick leave. In this week's Kenan Insight, our experts explore possible drivers behind this finding as well as potential policy and business implications.
Employees often engage in collective grassroot efforts to bring about gender equity in the workplace. Such coalition-based advocacy is largely driven by women, which has led to debate about whether men’s involvement as allies can help. Integrating literatures on signaling and legitimacy, we propose that the demographic composition of a gender equity advocacy coalition matters: Men-only groups lack coalition legitimacy, or the perception that they are the “right” spokespersons for gender equity issues, whereas women-only groups struggle to convey issue legitimacy, or the perception that gender equity is of strategic importance within business organizations.
Universal childcare reform implemented in Quebec, Canada, in the late 1990s boosted the careers and earnings of new mothers and produced positive outcomes for some companies as well.
Financial hardships caused by the COVID-19 pandemic are hitting low-income families in North Carolina especially hard, according to a new report released by the North Carolina Community Action Association (NCCAA). The study was commissioned by NCCAA to gauge how the pandemic was affecting its efforts to combat poverty and facilitate self-sufficiency in low-income communities.
While economists have long theorized that wealthier individuals may purchase less life and property insurance because they can rely on their savings if something unexpected happens, a new study of more than 63,000 people shows that, in practice, quite the opposite is true. This week’s Kenan Insight offers a chance for our experts to explore the findings of their new study, which suggest disparities in insurance coverage could help explain and exacerbate existing financial inequalities.
Co-hosted by the North Carolina Office of the US Economic Development Administration and the North Carolina Outdoor Recreation Industry Office at the Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina, NCGrowth’s Blueway Guide provides communities the tools they need to leverage waterways for economic development and increased quality of life. Speakers will include outdoor industry businesses, economic development professionals and community leaders.
In our previous Kenan Insight, we outlined the major findings in our recent report, Seven Forces Reshaping the Economy. This week, we explore how the COVID-19 pandemic has upended education and childcare, ushering in changes to both that will last far beyond the current crisis.
Many Americans expect newly inaugurated President Joe Biden to achieve progress in improving the quality of the environment. In this Kenan Insight, we explain why we support these expectations, examining what Biden has already done in his brief tenure, the feasibility of the plans he’s outlined thus far, and whether (and how) he can propel the U.S. to a leadership role in sustainability.
Firms continue to strive for greater representation on corporate boards. One California law, attempting to mandate such greater representation, has encountered a recent setback. Two experts discuss obstacles to more diverse corporate leadership and offer approaches for surmounting them.
A look at stakeholder capitalism – the idea that businesses would improve societal outcomes by focusing on a mandate broader than that which benefits shareholders alone – starts with the existing best-practice model: shareholder capitalism. This model, while not perfect, can produce the optimal amount of goods and services at the lowest cost. This week, Kenan Institute experts explore ways to improve it and examine whether stakeholder capitalism is ready to take its place.
As the U.S. economy begins to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and businesses grapple with ongoing labor shortages, the debate around increasing the federal minimum wage – which hasn’t budged in over a decade – has returned to the fore. In this Kenan Insight, we examine whether now is the right time to raise the standard minimum, why these benefits may come at a cost, and what approach might work best given the inevitable tradeoffs.
Chief Economist Gerald Cohen outlines mid-year updates to our 2023 economic forecasts, discussing which EMAs have changed since our January projections.
We use construal level theory to investigate how the way employees construe where work occurs—defined as work context construal—influences perceptions of harm and the ethical framing of risk-mitigating behaviors. We hypothesize that high-level (abstract) work context construals (vs. low-level, concrete ones) reduce perceptions of potential harm which, in turn, leads to framing risk-mitigating behaviors as less of an ethical obligation.
...mixed methods study on the overlap between finance and technology communities in British ecosystems. A quantitative study will examine the backgrounds of the founding and advising teams of fintech startups...
COVID-19 first caused chaos in our labor markets with the lockdowns of 2020, which sent unemployment rates soaring to all-time highs. It has continued to disrupt labor markets into 2022 as worries about health risks have kept workers at home, exasperating labor shortages. Looking forward, as we learn to live with COVID, we will also have to adapt to the effects of long COVID, when symptoms such as fatigue, difficulty breathing and “brain fog” appear after COVID. In this commentary, I attempt to assess the risk to our labor markets from long COVID.
This chapter investigates the pricing of key contract provisions of Puerto Rican debt. In doing so, the chapter contributes to a body of research that asks the questions: do investors price contract provisions? Does the pricing of contract provisions vary with credit risk? To our knowledge, this is the first study to address these questions for the case of Puerto Rico or any municipal issuer. Puerto Rico’s unique status as a U.S. territory implies that its subsidiaries, such as municipalities, cannot file for bankruptcy under Chapter 9 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code.
Soda taxes are an increasingly popular policy tool, used to discourage purchases of sugar-sweetened beverages. This study analyzes how marketing conduct and its effectiveness might change after soda tax introductions. Prior studies on the effect of soda taxes focus on price increases but neglect other, managerially relevant marketing conduct tools, such as promotional frequency, promotional discount depth, and feature promotion frequency. This study documents how the marketing conduct and its effectiveness changed with the introduction of the tax across more than 200 retail stores in five markets.
One of the long-standing damages of institutional racism in the United States has been a bleak economic outlook for African Americans. In this Kenan Insight, we ask whether today’s activism might prove to be a defining moment in turning the tide for Black economic futures, and if so, who will play the key roles in creating lasting change.