The North Carolina Community Action Association (NCCAA) commissioned a study to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on its efforts to combat poverty and facilitate self-sufficiency in low-income communities throughout the state. We conducted focus groups with individuals served by Community Action Agencies (CAAs) and conducted a corresponding set of key informant interviews with identified leaders in five communities across the state. The research focused on five themes. We generated eight key takeaways from our content analysis of the focus group transcripts and nine key takeaways from our content analysis of the transcripts emanating from our Zoom sessions with community key informants.
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.
While recent literature has depicted status as an intangible asset that is firm‐specific and mobile, we have a limited understanding of whether status confers advantage in a way similar to other intangible assets. This study examines the macro‐structural contingencies that influence the marginal value of firm status as firms expand to new markets. Building on the literatures on status and social approval assets, as well as globalization and international management, we hypothesize that two conditions influence how valuable home‐country status will be in a given host country: the interconnectedness of the home and host countries, and their relative position in the global network. We test our hypotheses in a study of 187 venture capital (VC)‐backed biotechnology ventures in 19 countries between 1990 and 2006.
Research exploring investor reactions to sustainability has substantial empirical limitations, which we address with a large‐scale longitudinal financial event study of the first global sustainability index, DJSI World. The study highlights the importance of careful analysis and longitudinal global samples in making inferences about the financial effects of social performance.
In this study, we ask if it is desirable to give greater freedom to firms in their choices of class shares. Making use of the 2011 Commercial Act amendment that significantly relaxed the regulation on class shares in Korea, we study the motivation and the effect of adopting two newly emerged class shares.
We integrated theories of social exchange and emotional ambivalence to explain how ambivalent relationships influence interpersonally directed helping and harming behaviors. Using multiple methodologies, including a study of student teams, an experiment, and a quasifield study of retail employees, we compared ambivalent relationships with positive and negative relationships. Our three studies provide convergent evidence that ambivalent relationships with coworkers are positively related to both helping and harming behaviors.
Voting outcomes can differ from underlying preferences due to strategic selection into voting. One explanation for such selection effects is lower participation of shareholders with popular preferences (free-rider effect) relative to those with unpopular preferences (underdog effect). We illustrate these effects in a rational choice model in which the voting participation decision depends on the probability of being pivotal and the costs and benefits of voting.
The COVID-19 pandemic has put 18 million jobs at small businesses in the U.S. at risk – which could as much as quadruple the nation’s total unemployment rate. The effects of both the coronavirus and recent government relief programs were explored by a panel of Kenan Institute-convened experts during a press briefing held yesterday. The full recording of this briefing—along with a deeper-dive analysis on the specific implications of the financial downturn on small business employment by Kenan Institute Research Director Professor Christian Lundblad and UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School Professor Paige Ouimet—is available in this week’s Kenan Insight.
The study of congruence is central to organizational research. Congruence refers to the fit, match, similarity, or agreement between two constructs and is typically framed as a predictor of outcomes relevant to individuals and organizations. Previous studies often operationalized congruence as the algebraic, absolute, or squared difference between two component variables.
Using a convolutional neural networks approach to process the images, this study reviews Airbnb listings in two cities and derives a descriptive model of image technical features, content, and other property attributes (e.g., price, textual information, characteristics) to predict demand at the property level.
The disproportionate emphasis on firm closures during crises, such as the recent pandemic, may overlook potential variations in firm exit rates across markets. Ignoring that variation likely hinders accurate insights though, as are required by both practitioners and policy makers. To investigate variable firm closure rates across markets, this study proposes a firm closure model that integrates the unique roles of the market structure (number of firms and firm type), firm responsiveness, pandemic intensity, and their interactions.
In 2008, the majority of U.S. airlines began charging for the second checked bag, and then for the first checked bag. One of the often cited reasons for this action by the airlines’ executives was that this would influence customers to travel with less baggage and thus improve cost and operational performance.
Negotiation role-playing simulations are among the most effective and widely used methods for teaching and conducting research on negotiations. Teachers and researchers can either license a published, “off-the-shelf” simulation or write their own custom “bespoke” simulation.
On January 31 and February 1, 2019, the Frank H. Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise (Kenan Institute) hosted its Frontiers of Entrepreneurship Conference at The Breakers Palm Beach Resort. The conference brought together more than 150 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.
A replication study assesses whether the results of a particular prior study can be reproduced, including in new contexts with different data. Replication studies are critical for building a cumulative body of research knowledge.
Modeling consumer heterogeneity helps practitioners understand market structures and devise effective marketing strategies. In this research we study finite mixture specifications for modeling consumer heterogeneity where each regression coefficient has its own finite mixture, that is, an attribute finite mixture model.
In this paper, we study the problem of allocating inventory procured using donor funding to patients in different health states over a finite horizon with the objective of minimizing the number of disease‐adjusted life periods lost.
State and local economic development is often conceptualized as a series of successive waves, with each wave representing distinct policy priorities. In this study, we rework the standard wave metaphor to recognize the gains for regional economies when practitioners reach across established boundaries to work together to create a strategy mix.
Crowdsourcing has been used to spur innovation and increase community engagement in public health programmes. Crowdsourcing is the process of giving individual tasks to a large group, often involving open contests and enabled through multisectoral partnerships. Here we describe one crowdsourced video intervention in which a video promoting condom use is produced through an open contest. The aim of this study is to determine whether a crowdsourced intervention is as effective as a social marketing intervention in promoting condom use among high-risk men who have sex with men (MSM) and transgender male-to-female (TG) in China.