While technological advances have traditionally been a boon to the U.S. economy, the rapid rise of new platforms and the increased financialization of the economy in recent years have encouraged the growth of monopolies—driving an ever-widening geographic gap in the distribution of income across the country. New research from the Kenan Institute’s Professor Maryann Feldman explores the ramifications of this growing divide.
Issues constricting the supply of workers, the sector-by-sector employment effects of a potential recession, the emergence of new technologies – these are the primary labor demand themes we’ll focus on in our 2023 grand challenge.
On Thursday, April 20, the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise hosted Ricardo Perez-Truglia, associate professor of economic analysis and policy at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, for a hourlong chat on “Untangling Pay Transparency Laws". Perez-Truglia is a member of the 2023 class of Kenan Institute Distinguished Fellows. Together they comprise an exemplary set of global scholars committed to leveraging their individual expertise, thought leadership, research and networks to further the institute’s efforts to examine and drive solutions to issues facing business and the economy today. This year’s class will support the institute’s 2023 grand challenge: “Workforce Disrupted: Seeking the Labor Market’s Next Equilibrium.”
We examine the link between endowment investment performance and the expertise of university board members. Harnessing detailed information on 11,019 members for 579 universities, we find that expertise in alternatives and larger professional networks are associated with higher allocations to alternatives and better investment results.
We develop a multi-period theoretical model to characterize the relationship between a publication that ranks universities and prospective attendees -- high school students -- who might view the ranking and use it to help decide which university to attend.
Except for relatively short but intense episodes of high market risk, average idiosyncratic risk (IR) falls steadily after 2000 until almost the end of our sample period in 2017. The decrease has been such that from 2012 to 2017 average IR was lower than any time since 1965.
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.
This study analyzes whether fair value estimates of fund net asset values (NAVs) produced by private equity managers are accurate and unbiased predictors of future discounted cash flows (DCF). We exploit the fact that private equity funds have finite lives to compare reported NAVs to DCFs based on realized cash flows for 384 venture capital (VC) funds and 195 buyout funds spanning 1988-2016.
We undertake the first large-sample analysis of foreign tax holiday participation by U.S. firms.
Reliably detecting insider trading is a major impediment to both research and regulatory practice. Using account-level transaction data, we propose a novel approach. Specifically, after extracting several key empirical features of typical insider trading cases from existing regulatory actions, we then employ a machine learning methodology to identify suspicious insiders across our full sample.
In December 2019, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) Center for the Business of Health (CBOH) began a research partnership with Sharecare, a leading digital health company founded by technology entrepreneur, Jeff Arnold, to assess the economic value of changing various health behaviors via mobile health (mHealth) interventions.
Both the increased transparency and the institutionalization of the municipal bond market have led to dramatic declines in the profits of underwriters, especially so for those whose underwriting activity is national in scope. Using comprehensive data on all trades, all bonds, and all underwriting spreads available between 2005 and 2023, we show that underwriters facing increasingly informed investors in the primary market are unable to capture high markups from investors but are also unable to raise costs to issuers.
We use industry valuation differentials across European countries to study the impact of membership in the European Union as well as the Eurozone on both economic and financial integration. In integrated markets, discount rates and expected growth opportunities should be similar within one industry, irrespective of the country, implying narrowing valuation differentials as countries become more integrated. Our analysis of the 1990–2007 period shows that membership in the EU significantly lowered discount rate and expected earnings growth differentials across countries. In contrast, the adoption of the Euro was not associated with increased integration. Our results do not change when the sample is extended to include the recent crisis period.
We investigate whether firms and their top executives bear reputational costs from engaging in aggressive tax avoidance activities. Prior literature has posited that reputational costs partially explain why so many firms apparently forgo the benefits of tax avoidance, the so-called “under-sheltering puzzle.” We employ a database of 118 firms that were subject to public scrutiny for having engaged in tax shelters, representing the largest sample of publicly identified corporate tax shelters analyzed to date.
Generative AI such as ChatGPT holds the potential to alter many kinds of work, but analysis of a new report shows the occupations most likely to be affected are populated by more women than men.
Angelica Leigh, assistant professor of management and organizations at Duke University Fuqua School of Business and 2023 Kenan Institute Distinguished Fellow, defines the characteristics of mega-threats and their potential effects on the workplace.
A recent TechCrunch article describes the new collaboration between the Kenan Institute-affiliated Entrepreneurship Center, Duke University, Stanford University and others to grow and support founder diversity in the tech industry.
The Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will host a virtual conference on machine learning in finance on March 5, 2021. The conference is co-sponsored by the Journal of Financial Econometrics (JFEC) and the International Center for Finance (ICF) at Yale University.
Schemas are a central concept in strategy and organization theory. Yet, despite the importance of schemas, little is known about how they emerge. Our in-depth historical analysis of how groups in the life insurance industry developed their schema for the computer from 1945-1975 addresses this gap. We identify three key processes--assimilation, deconstruction, and unitization--that collectively explain and resolve an inherent tension related to schema emergence: how to make the unfamiliar familiar but conceptually distinct. We also find that each process relates to analogical transfer, but in a more pluralistic and dynamic way than the existing literature describes. Broadly, these findings have important implications for organizational change and managerial cognition.
The Kenan Institute's projected 2025 GDP growth rates for 150 Extended Metropolitan Areas across the United States anticipate a slowdown, but our data indicate that all of those areas will see GDP growth this year.