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.
Governors across the United States have reacted to the COVID-19 pandemic by implementing state-level executive actions to address a range of issues provoked by the crisis. Although it is too early to gauge the long-term effects of the pandemic and states’ responses to it, this Kenan Insight provides a preliminary analysis of actions governors have taken thus far, to help inform policymaking going forward.
Since January 2020, Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has infected more than 4.5 million Americans, resulting in over 150,000 deaths; reconfigured our domestic lives and the world economy; and overwhelmed the United States’ (U.S.) public health and health care delivery capabilities. As individuals, institutions, and municipalities struggled to quickly integrate public health best practices into economic activities and social priorities, the virus exposed fault lines in our nation’s health care system(s). The government’s initial response was disjointed, which led to critical delays, confusion, and, ultimately, hindered collaboration. As a result, medical institutions and providers were, and still are in some cases, unable to obtain adequate personal protective equipment (PPE), provide and administer sufficient and timely testing to identify and track the disease, and secure sufficient medical equipment to care for infected individuals.
Join our panel of experts who will share their technological, legal and social expertise to answer the questions raised by the real-world performance of risk assessment instruments.
For more than a year, researchers across the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s (UNC) Kenan-Flagler Business School (KFBS) and School of Medicine (SOM) worked with Sharecare, Inc. (Sharecare) to establish a framework for measuring the true value of corporate well-being interventions and develop a measurement tool to quantify their impact over time. The goal of the research was to assess the value of implementing corporate well-being interventions to improve employee health and lower direct medical costs to employers.
COVID-19 brought heightened focus to paid sick leave policies – a benefit to which roughly 25% of civilian workers don’t have access in the U.S. After sick leave mandates were temporarily implemented during the pandemic, UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School researchers found employment increased, particularly among low-skilled workers and in industries that previously had little access to paid sick leave. In this week's Kenan Insight, our experts explore possible drivers behind this finding as well as potential policy and business implications.
While access and quality of healthcare in the U.S. are shaped by several factors—location, work, insurance—a simple change can make a big difference for patients. According to a new study led by the institute-affiliated Center for the Business of Health Faculty Director Brad Staats, delivering mental and physical care at the same location can improve patient experience and care efficiency. This week’s Kenan Insight offers a chance for our experts to explore the findings of this new study.
While the gender pay gap has received significant attention in recent years, little progress has been made to close it; in fact, in 2019, women still earned only 82 cents for every dollar received by their male counterparts for equal work. Policymakers in recent years have developed creative solutions aiming to close the gap, including bans prohibiting employers from asking for a job applicant’s salary history. However, in this week’s Kenan Insight, new research from our experts examines whether such well-intentioned bans are inadvertently lowering wages for all employees.
Rethinc. Labs invites you to the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) Conference on Friday, March 4, 2022. The event will be held in person at the Rizzo Center of the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School in Chapel Hill.
While economists have long theorized that wealthier individuals may purchase less life and property insurance because they can rely on their savings if something unexpected happens, a new study of more than 63,000 people shows that, in practice, quite the opposite is true. This week’s Kenan Insight offers a chance for our experts to explore the findings of their new study, which suggest disparities in insurance coverage could help explain and exacerbate existing financial inequalities.
Could new legislation help drive the development of local tech clusters – and the growth of corresponding economic power and development – beyond Silicon Valley? In this week’s Kenan Insight, our experts explore the gravitational pull of Big Tech along with what it could mean if startups across the U.S. were better able to remain and grow in the communities where they launch.
A large body of social science evidence indicates that objective, reliable and valid risk assessment instruments are more accurate in evaluating risk than professional human judgements alone. In the world of pretrial detention, where more than 10 million people are jailed each year in the United States after arrest, pretrial risk assessment tools may provide a more efficient, transparent and fairer basis for making assessments than having a judge quickly scan documents detailing the defendant’s prior record and current charges and make a decision in mere minutes. However, these assessments will retain any bias present in the data used by criminal justice agencies.
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Research and practice suggest that cofounded ventures outperform solo-founded ventures. Yet, little work has explored the conditions under which solo founding might be preferable to cofounding. Combining an inductive case-oriented analysis with a Qualitative Comparative Analysis of 70 new entrepreneurial ventures, we examine why and how solo founders can be as successful as their peers in cofounded ventures.
Over the last two decades, executive compensation research has focused primarily on equity-based pay and incentives emanating from executives' firm-specific equity portfolios, while generally ignoring cash-based bonus plans as a second order effect. Exploiting access to new data sources, there has been a revival of interest by accounting researchers in more deeply understanding the value adding roles played by bonus plans.
This study contributes to the growing strategic corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature by examining the intersection of acquisition studies and international expansion research and highlighting the unexplored impact of media coverage of CSR and corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) in shaping completion and duration outcomes of cross-border acquisitions.
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.
The high cost of building plants and safety concerns are among the obstacles blocking U.S. nuclear power’s return to relevance as an energy source, but the opportunity is there and government action will play a part.
Retail stores are geographically dispersed as a part of a multiunit organization. In such a setting, store managers play an important role in driving store performance. To motivate them to exert effort, retailers have provided group incentives for store managers. Using data from 75 stores of a U.S.-based retail chain that changed its incentive plan for store managers from being purely dependent on store performance to being dependent upon both store and corporate performance, we investigate the effect of this change on store performance.
“Mega-threats”—negative, identity-relevant societal events that receive significant media attention—are frequent occurrences in society, yet the influence of these events on employees remains unclear. We draw on the theory of racialized organizations to explain the process whereby exposure to mega-threats leads to heightened avoidant work behaviors for racial minority employees.