Worker attrition is a costly and operationally disruptive challenge throughout the world. Although large bodies of research have documented drivers of attrition and its operational consequences, managers still lack an integrated approach to understanding attrition and making decisions to address it on a forward-going basis.
FoodCon is a daylong event focused on the business of sustainable food with a goal of bringing together a diverse audience of students, community members, and business professionals who have a shared interest in the sustainable food industry. UNC Kenan-Flagler MBA Net Impact students (Elisa Elkind and Brianne Abramowicz, both MBA ’15) had an idea in 2014 to host a conference to talk about the business of sustainable food. Since then, their idea has grown to include partner schools, who each take a turn to co-host the event, Duke University and NC State. This event is a collaborative effort between the three schools that surpasses ‘Tobacco Road’ rivalries. The 2017 event came back to UNC Kenan-Flagler with a theme of ‘Good For All: Sustainable. Profitable. Accessible.’
In this paper, we provide a theoretical and empirical framework that allows us to synthesize and assess the burgeoning literature on CEO overconfidence. We also provide novel empirical evidence that overconfidence matters for corporate investment decisions in a framework that explicitly addresses the endogeneity of firms' financing constraints.
DaimlerChrysler’s origins date as far back as 1883, when its predecessor “Benz & Co. Rheinische Gasmotoren-Fabrik, Mannheim” was founded by Karl Benz in Germany. The Chrysler Corporation was founded in the United States in1925 by Walter P. Chrysler. In November 1998 Chrysler and Daimler Benz completed a $36 billion merger, forming DaimlerChrysler, the fifth largest automaker in the world with estimated sales of $160 billion.
“When are you going to change this Children’s Safe Drinking Water program and make money for your company? Surely Procter & Gamble wants you to profit on the water purification technology—you can’t sustain your program as a non-profit!” Greg Allgood sighed internally at this question, as it seemed to surface frequently despite the continued and rapid growth of the Children’s Safe Drinking Water (CSDW) program at P&G. Allgood (Director of the CSDW program) was not actually frustrated with the query, as he had an easy answer ready. Rather, he wished that people could more easily see how his team’s non-profit work was adding greater value to the $80 billion dollar company than a for-profit sales model ever could. Procter & Gamble is a data-driven company, and after 24 years as a “Proctoid” he knew this better than anyone. Greg had significant qualitative and some quantitative information to support the idea that, in some cases, a non-profit business model could do much more for the bottom line than could a for-profit model. However, he knew that he needed to do even more to clarify this point for others.
With every passing generation, a family-run business faces the risk of losing steam due to improper handovers and inadequate talent and leadership development. How, then, can the senior-generation of leaders ensure that all the years of blood and sweat that went into building a business don't go to waste? The third and final installment of our family business series attempts to answer this question.
In this second part of our family business series, we take a look at Vietri, America's largest company selling fine Italian tableware. The metaphor of beautiful, fragile crockery is rather apt in the context of family-owned businesses, which can be destroyed in the blink of an eye unless there is an abiding commitment to handling it with care--across generations. Yes, we are talking succession planning, still the Achilles' heel of several painstakingly built enterprises.
The image of the ‘home’ is central to family businesses, beyond its obvious role as the mooring ground for generations of entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs often find it difficult to keep home and business apart—which is why the story of a home that is itself the business can offer many fascinating lessons. The Biltmore Estate, America’s largest private home and a National Historic Landmark, is today an 8,000-acre, 1,800-employee enterprise, run by a fourth-generation family hand. The estate defies an old myth—that family businesses don’t last beyond three generations. Evolving from just a tourist attraction to a luxury hotel, a winery, a home products line and an equestrian center, Biltmore has been a celebrated model of sustainable growth held together by a strong family anchor over nearly twelve decades. This article explores Biltmore’s mix of family-led and professional management, and how the grand estate is gearing up for the future.
Prior research examines practitioner, investor, and executive perceptions of corporate tax planning. However, little is known about how the typical U.S. consumer views corporate tax planning. We examine consumers’ perceptions of corporate tax planning using both survey and experimental methods.
We model leverage cycles in the natural laboratory of a mature asset class, namely US Commercial Real Estate. In this setting we can observe entrepreneurs' asset values as well as debt balance and thus model capital-market yields, as conditioned by market-wide leverage, which indicates debt availability. Using a VAR framework, we examine variance decompositions and impulse-response functions. We show that leverage constitutes the primary driver of innovations in capital-market yields and vice versa. We further find evidence for flight to quality as well as knock-on effects that affect low-leverage entrepreneurs in the market.
What do accelerators do? Broadly speaking, they help ventures define and build their initial products, identify promising customer segments, and secure resources, including capital and employees. More specifically, accelerator programs are programs of limited-duration—lasting about three months—that help cohorts of startups with the new venture process.
The UNC Energy Center and the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise hosted a conference on "Meeting the Renewables Intermittency Challenge" on April 13-14, 2018. The conference, and resulting white paper, examined the true cost of integrating renewable energy generation into the electric grid and explore ways to address the challenges posed by wind and solar energy intermittency.
We conduct what is, to our knowledge, the first systematic examination of Chinese-based firms that utilize a variable interest entity (VIE) structure to evade Chinese regulation on foreign ownership to list equity in the U.S. The use of the VIE structure is not only questionable under Chinese laws but also exacerbates the agency costs within the firm. We find that Chinese VIE firms have a Tobin’s Q as much as 35% lower than Chinese non-VIE firms, and this discount is concentrated in firms with higher risks of government intervention and managerial expropriation. To remediate these risks, VIE firms are more likely to have a politically connected director on the board, hire a Big N auditor and have higher levels of institutional ownership.
African American older adults face a major retirement crisis (Rhee, 2013; Vinik, 2015)). Owing to a legacy of racial discrimination in education, housing, employment, and wages or salaries, they are less likely than their white counterparts to have accumulated wealth over the course of their lives (Sykes, 2016). In 2013, the median net worth of African American older adult households ($56,700) was roughly one-fifth of the median net worth of white older adult households ($255,000) (Rosnick and Baker, 2014). Not surprising, given these disparities in net worth, African American older adult males (17%) and females (21%) were much more likely than their white male (5%) and female (10%) counterparts to live in poverty (Johnson and Parnell, 2016; U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2013a). They also were more likely to experience disabilities earlier in life and to have shorter life expectancies (Freedman and Spillman, 2016).
In a recent paper, “Demystifying Illiquid Assets – Expected Returns for Private Equity,” Ilmanen, Chandra and McQuinn (of AQR) give a perspective on the past, present, and expected future performance of private equity. They conclude that “private equity does not seem to offer as attractive a net-of-fee return edge over public market counterparts as it did 15-20 years ago from either a historical or forward-looking perspective.” This analysis provides our perspective based on more recent and, we think, more reliable data and performance measures – the historical perspective is more positive than Ilmanen et al. portray.
A growing body of rigorous academic literature empirically demonstrates that high-skilled immigrants provide a range of long-lasting and material benefits to the U.S. economy through entrepreneurship and innovation. Recent research has quantified the impact of foreign-born founders on key economic indicators such as firm creation, job creation and overall business innovation. Likewise, a growing body of literature documents how skilled immigrants have more broadly facilitated technological innovation.
This paper studies the emergence of debt financing by private equity funds. Using confidential data on U.S. buyout funds, we document the increasing use of subscription lines of credit (SLCs) as an additional source of capital.
A roadmap for inclusive and equitable development is proposed which has four core elements that will lead to greater shared prosperity in Durham: a sustainability scorecard; a collective ambition community mobilization strategy; a more inclusive entrepreneurial/business ecosystem; and an equitable community economic development innovations fund. These activities aim to support historically underutilized businesses and invest in workforce development partnerships that support working poor civil servants at-risk of being priced out of and displaced from Durham’s housing market. Utilizing these tools and leveraging the four corners of intellectual assets that exist at Duke University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University, and North Carolina Central University should strategically position Durham to be one of the most inclusive, equitable, and sustainable cities in America.
Gentrifying cities increasingly are adopting inclusive and equitable development policies, strategies, tools, and regulatory practices to minimize, if not altogether eliminate, the demographic and economic dislocations that often accompany their growing attractiveness as ideal places to live, work, and play for a creative class of young people and well-resourced retirees who are predominantly white. Creating greater opportunities for historically under-utilized businesses to grow and prosper through enhanced local government contracting and procurement is one mechanism through which gentrifying cities are trying to generate greater equity and shared prosperity.