On Jan. 18, members of the Kenan Scholars program met up on a sunny afternoon to assist in building senior housing with Habitat for Humanity of Orange County. In support of affordable housing, scholars suited up in gloves and goggles to prep and install windows and shower stalls.
From a family business that has grown to provide homecare services in 11 eastern North Carolina counties to a company creating oyster reefs to stop shoreline erosion around the globe, the power of small-business partnerships was on full display at the April 12 NCGrowth Spring Showcase at Rocky Mount Mills in Rocky Mount.
Access challenges associated with high-cost pharmaceuticals have jump started discussion of solutions ranging from state-based boards reviewing drug price increases to harnessing Medicare’s purchasing power for “price negotiation” to old-fashioned price-setting.
Networks of serial entrepreneurs, investors, and their affiliated companies play a critical role in driving entrepreneurial behavior, investor focus, and innovation hot spots within specific industry sectors and are critical for shaping the character of robust regional economies.
From romance to finance and from the media to markets, data can help answer questions faster and provide critical insights to make smarter decisions. Data is power. Knowing how to read data can help identify patterns to end labor trafficking or to provide more affordable housing. Analyzing peaks and troughs can lead to game changing technological breakthroughs and new business opportunities. In the current error of ‘fake news’, how confident are you in your ability to read, work with, analyze and argue with data and assess facts? Join us at this interactive session and learn just how data literate you are.
Out of the rubble of World War II, we collectively and deliberately built an institutional order that established norms of acceptable behavior and placed constraints on powerful nations. While work remains to create broader economic opportunity and some regions have suffered terrible conflict, the economic and financial globalization that this order fostered nevertheless yielded the greatest period of peace and economic prosperity that humanity has ever known. The more than 70 years since the war’s conclusion are, however, very atypical, and we are now returning to a setting far more familiar to any student of history, where strength and power supersede norms and rules. The world is characterized by a renewed struggle between illiberal autocracy and liberal democracy.
The U.S. economy added 528,000 jobs in July, an unexpectedly strong number that Kenan Institute Chief Economist Gerald Cohen discussed during the Kenan Institute’s economic briefing Aug. 5. Cohen also answered questions from the media about the shifting balance of power between employers and employees, the labor force shortage and what the news means for North Carolina businesses.
Last month our home state of North Carolina was named “America’s Top State for Business” by CNBC (see the full ranking here). It wasn’t long after when some commentators pointed out that Oxfam had recently ranked N.C. as the worst state for workers. The extreme juxtaposition of rankings made me wonder if this was a coincidence or if there are systematic factors that make states good for businesses and bad for workers. Perhaps “right-to-work” laws, lax worker protection regulation or regional wage differences attract businesses looking to take advantage of areas with weak labor bargaining power. This in turn leads to business growth and thus job migration to states that are less desirable for individual workers. At the end of the day, economic planning should have the best interest of residents in mind when crafting business policy, so it seems worth unpacking what drives the rankings.
Since 1965, average idiosyncratic risk (IR) has never been lower than in recent years. In contrast to the high IR in the late 1990s that has drawn considerable attention in the literature, average market-model IR is 44% lower in 2013-2017 than in 1996-2000. Macroeconomic variables help explain why IR is lower, but using only macroeconomic variables leads to large prediction errors compared to using only firm-level variables. As a result of the dramatic change in the number and composition of listed firms since the late 1990s, listed firms are larger and older. Larger and older firms have lower idiosyncratic risk. Models that use firm char-acteristics to predict firm-level idiosyncratic risk estimated over 1963-2012 can largely or completely ex-plain why IR is low over 2013-2017. The same changes that bring about historically low IR lead to unusu-ally high market-model R-squareds.
What is the impact of higher technological volatility on asset prices and macroeconomic aggregates? I find the answer hinges on its sectoral origin. Volatility that originates from the consumption (investment) sector drops (raises) macroeconomic growth rates and stock prices.
Emerging artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities are ushering in significant changes in how enterprises operate – and raising a host of questions for organizations. In this Kenan Insight, we explore how changing the organizational mindset to treat AI as an “employee” may pave the way to fully reaping the benefits of AI systems.
This paper examines how US immigration-induced labor mobility frictions affect entrepreneurship and firm monopsony. I exploit a natural experiment in the US immigration system that unexpectedly increased Green Card (GC) related job-switching frictions for Indian and Chinese immigrants in October 2005. Using matched employee-employer data from LinkedIn, I confirm that this shock reduced inter-firm employee mobility for Indian and Chinese employees.
Unemployment insurance has been a lifeline for millions of Americans who have found themselves out of work in the wake of the economic shutdown triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. But with federal, state and local government coffers strained, the time has come for short-time compensation (STC) and partial unemployment insurance programs to receive a closer look. In this Kenan Insight, we explore how these little-known initiatives can benefit both employees and employers and provide relief to an ailing U.S. economy.
As the historic 2020 U.S. presidential election draws nearer, voters are taking stock of the impact the COVID-19 pandemic has had on their lives and livelihoods, and demanding that policymakers present their plans for economic recovery. In this Kenan Insight, we look at the major forces reshaping the U.S. economy and offer suggestions for forging an intentional and equitable path forward.
The COVID-19 pandemic has generated a significant shift in how and where we work, play and live. In this Kenan Insight, we explore which changes will be temporary and which are here to stay.
The widespread adoption of technological advances has made the move to working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic a success. In this Kenan Insight, we look at why the switch was such a win, its impact on worker productivity, and what it means in the long term for workers, office spaces and cities.
Healthcare. While H.B. 149 has gotten significant media coverage related to the Medicaid expansion component, the bill includes several significant changes that will impact state health policy and the business of health in North Carolina. H.B. 149 is composed of five sections: Medicaid expansion, work requirements for certain beneficiaries, certificate of need reform, modernization of nursing regulations, and health insurance reforms.
While policies encouraging diffusion of new technologies provide incentives for adopting the focal good, they typically ignore the ecosystem of complementary goods and services. Based on existing literature on indirect network effects, we argue that when there is less availability of complementary goods, policies have a smaller impact on diffusion.
We clarify differences among moderation, partial mediation, and full mediation and identify methodological problems related to moderation and mediation from a review of articles in Strategic Management Journal and Organization Science published from 2005 to 2014.
The authors study the drivers and performance implications of retailers’ branding strategies for their premium and economy private-label tiers. Retailers can opt for store-banner branding and use their store-banner name and/or logo to reveal their ownership, or they can use stand-alone branding and avoid an explicit link between store brand and retail banner.