On June 6, 2018, representatives from academia, the private sector and government convened at the Urban Institute in Washington D.C. to examine the effect of the recently enacted federal tax reform on financial reporting and investment incentives. The UNC Tax Center, an affiliated of the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise, co-hosted the event with the D.C.-based Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution.
Kenan Institute Senior Faculty Fellow Maryann Feldman has been chosen as the 2018 Wiley TIM Distinguished Scholar by the Technology and Innovation Management Division (TIM) of the Academy of Management (AoM). The award will be presented to Feldman during a luncheon at the annual TIM conference in Chicago in August.
The fall 2018 issue of The Journal of Alternative Investments features invited editorial content by Greg Brown. Brown’s editorial explores the proliferation of alternative investment strategies over the past 25 years and the trends and developments on the horizon as part of a special journal issue on the new frontiers of alternative investments.
“A storm is threat’ning….Gimme, gimme shelter.” The words of Mick Jagger were probably on the minds of many at the 2018 UNC Real Estate Research Symposium on October 11-12. As the remnants of Hurricane Michael came crashing through the Raleigh-Durham area, participants battled flight delays, cancellations and power outages to get to the Rizzo Center in Chapel Hill.
Eminent economist Arvind Panigariya has appointed UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School Adjunct Professor of Finance Anusha Chari and 2018 Weatherspoon Lecturer Jagdish Bhagwati to a new initiative which brings together policy experts and academicians from distinguished universities to contribute to substantive economic policy analyses on issues confronting the Indian economy. These analyses can further help develop a reform agenda for the government to be elected in the 2019 national polls. The news of the appointments was featured in the Economic Times.
The Blockchain Club at the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School was proud to host the Power of AI and Blockchain conference on Friday, Nov. 16, 2018. The goal of the conference was to expand student and community understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain topics with a focus on application.
On the afternoon of Thursday, April 25, an at-capacity crowd gathered at the Kenan Center in Chapel Hill for a fireside chat with Chuck Robbins, chairman and CEO of networking giant Cisco. The event was a fitting wrap-up to the 2018-19 Dean Speaker’s Series hosted by the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise.
After years of decline, increases in American youth tobacco usage have pushed the tobacco control debate back into the forefront of the public health conversation. Youth tobacco use increased from 2011 to 2018, largely driven by e-cigarette usage, which grew from 1.5% to 20.8% of American high school students, representing an increase of 2.83 million adolescents. Despite extensive evidence that e-cigarette chemicals cause morbidity including immediate, harmful changes in endothelial function in healthy nonsmokers, 72% of teenage e-cigarettes users believe e-cigarettes cause some, little, or no harm.
China’s venture capital funding has contracted significantly since mid-2018. According to Christian Lundblad, director of research at the Kenan Institute, this is a byproduct of U.S. trade policy, some domestic Chinese investment policy and the usual ups and downs in a developing market.
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.
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) allowed for the creation of Opportunity Zones (OZs) — specially designated census tracts encompassing low-income neighborhoods meant to stimulate investment through large tax incentives. But critics say the program has not spurred additional investment as much as rewarded politically connected investors. In this Kenan Insight, we investigate what role, if any, bias and political party affiliation plays in the selection of OZs.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the FDIC and the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond – in partnership with the USDA and the SBA – held a workshop for Rural Business Investment Companies (RBICs), Small Business Investment Companies (SBICs) and banks at the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School on Oct. 17, 2018.
In October 2018, the Institute for Private Capital and Commercial Real Estate Data Alliance (CREDA) hosted the Real Estate Research Symposium in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Real estate investments continue to rise in importance in the alternative asset space. This symposium presented innovative and leading research on real estate investments.
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).
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.
Goals and the performance feedback on those goals are fundamental to organizational learning and adaptation. However, most research has focused on single overall, high-level organizational goals, while ignoring important operational goals farther down in the goal hierarchy.
This paper examines private equity (both buyout and venture funds) performance around the globe using four data sets from leading commercial sources. For North American funds, our results echo recent research findings: buyout funds have outperformed public equities over long periods of time; in contrast, venture funds saw performance fall after spectacular results for vintages in the 1990s. For funds outside North America, buyout funds show performance similar to those in North America while venture fund performance is weaker than in North America. Venture samples outside North America are, however, relatively small and strong conclusions await further research. The similarity of performance estimates across the data sets strengthens confidence in conclusions about the results of private equity investing.
Hydrocarbon derived from fast pyrolysis of plantation wood is a potential feedstock for the production of transportation fuels. Unfortunately, the cost to produce and upgrade this feedstock is highly uncertain, and its current technological state is not competitive with crude oil. Additional R&D will be needed to achieve the significant cost reductions required for competitiveness. Significant technical hurdles must be overcome to achieve a commercially ready, cost competitive technology. This paper identifies the most promising areas for the needed future research.