Using a novel dataset on global private equity investments in 19 industries across 52 countries, we find that labor productivity, employment, profitability, and capital expenditures increase for publicly-listed companies in the same country and industry as private equity investments. Our results show that positive externalities created by private equity firms are absorbed by other companies within the same industry.
Focusing on the ten countries with the most-traded currencies, we provide novel empirical evidence about the existence of significant heterogenous exposure to global growth news shocks.
Elevated levels of government debt raise concerns about their effects on long-term growth prospects. Using the cross section of US stock returns, we show that (i) high-R&D firms are more exposed to government debt and pay higher expected returns than low-R&D firms; and (ii) higher levels of the debt-to-GDP ratio predict higher risk premia for high-R&D firms.
In times when elevated government debt raises concerns about dimmer global growth prospects, we ask: How can the government provide incentives for innovation in a fiscally sustainable way? We address this question by examining the Ramsey problem of finding optimal tax and subsidy schemes in a model in which growth is endogenously sustained by risky innovation.
How individuals manage, organize, and complete their tasks is central to operations management. Recent research in operations focuses on how under conditions of increasing workload individuals can increase their service time, up to a point, in order to complete work more quickly.
We present preliminary work to construct a knowledge curation system to advance research in the study of regional economics. The proposed system exploits natural language processing (NLP) techniques to automatically implement business event extraction, provides a user-facing interface to assist human curators, and a feedback loop to improve the performance of the Information Extraction Model for the automated parts of the system.
We examine whether changes to corporate governance arising from board reforms affect corporate tax behavior. While the relation between corporate governance and tax behavior has been the subject of intense interest in the literature, prior research has been hampered by a lack of exogenous variation.
Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) are an important mechanism through which new technology is adopted by firms. We document patterns of labor reallocation and wage changes following M&As, consistent with the adoption of technology. Specifically, we show target establishments invest more in technology, become less routine task intensive, employ a greater share of high technology workers, and pay more unequal wages.
Across the globe, every workday people commute an average of 38 minutes each way, yet surprisingly little research has examined the implications of this daily routine for work-related outcomes. Integrating theories of boundary work, self-control, and work-family conflict, we propose that the commute to work serves as a liminal role transition between home and work roles, prompting employees to engage in boundary management strategies.
Using a novel database on venue short sales and market design characteristics, we ask: Where do short sellers exploit their information advantage?
Kenan Institute Executive Director and Institute for Private Capital Research Director Greg Brown breaks down a recent white paper by Antii Ilmanen, Swati Chandra, and Nicholas McQuinn of AQR, which examines expected returns for Private Equity (PE). The paper’s authors claim that, when properly risk-adjusted, the returns on private equity are not attractive relative to public market stocks. The conclusion on lower returns is surprising to many because it’s at odds with what is now the well-documented outperformance of PE over the last few decades.
We compare several approaches for generating a prioritized list of products to be counted in a retail store, with the objective of detecting inventory record inaccuracy and unknown out-of-stocks. We consider both "rule-based" approaches, which sort products based on heuristic indices, and "model-based" approaches, which maintain probability distributions for the true inventory levels updated based on sales and replenishment observations.
We examine the links between human capital and endowment investing. Harnessing detailed information on university endowments, we find that higher asset allocations to alternative assets accompany higher levels of human capital in the endowment’s investment process. Moreover, high levels of human capital are linked to larger returns, even on a risk-adjusted basis.
Firms' payout decisions respond to expected returns: everything else equal, firms invest less and pay out more when their cost of capital increases. Given investors' demand for firm payout, market clearing implies that the dynamics of productivity and payout demand fully determine equilibrium asset prices and returns. We use this logic to propose a payout-based asset pricing framework and we illustrate the analogy between our approach and consumption-based asset pricing in a simple two-period model. Then, we introduce a quantitative payout-based asset pricing model and calibrate the productivity and payout demand processes to match aggregate U.S. corporate output and payout empirical moments. We find that model-implied payout yields and firm returns go a long way in reproducing key attributes of their empirical counterparts.
Using a large sample of nonfinancial firms from 47 countries, we examine the effect of derivative use on firm risk and value. We control for endogeneity by matching users and nonusers on the basis of their propensity to use derivatives. We also use a new technique to estimate the effect of omitted variable bias on our inferences. We find strong evidence that the use of financial derivatives reduces both total risk and systematic risk. The effect of derivative use on firm value is positive but more sensitive to endogeneity and omitted variable concerns. However, using derivatives is associated with significantly higher value, abnormal returns, and larger profits during the economic downturn in 2001–2002, suggesting that firms are hedging downside risk.
We explore the determinants of equity price risk of nonfinancial corporations. Operating and asset characteristics are by far the most important determinants of risk. For the median firm, financial risk accounts for only 15% of observed stock price volatility. Furthermore, financial risk has declined over the last 3 decades, indicating that any upward trend in equity volatility was driven entirely by economic risk factors. This explains why financial distress (as opposed to economic distress) was surprisingly uncommon in the nonfinancial sector during the 2007–2009 crisis even as measures of equity volatility reached unprecedented highs.
The Hawthorne Effect is a prevalent observer effect that causes behavioral changes among participants of epidemiological studies or infection control interventions. The purpose of the review is to describe the origins of the Hawthorne Effect, to understand the term in relation to current scientific literature, to describe characteristics of the Hawthorne effect, and to discuss methods to quantify and overcome limitations associated with the Hawthorne Effect.
Organizational, economic, and technology forces are encouraging organizations to experiment with new ways to develop their strategic priorities (Chesbrough & Appleyard, 2007). One such new approach is Open Strategy (OS), an approach that increasingly relies on the use of online digital platforms. OS refers to the process by which an organization’s strategy for the future is developed in a planned or inadvertent manner with more transparency for all stakeholders and/or inclusion of different stakeholders compared to conventional strategy-making processes (Hautz et al., 2017; Mack & Szulanski, 2017; Whittington et al., 2011).
On Sept. 9-11, 2019, the Kenan Institute and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Institute for African-American Research will co-host the second Black Communities Conference, an international gathering of scholars and community leaders from across the African diaspora. The conference's core mission is to connect academics from a variety of disciplines with black communities, with the goal of enhancing the life of those communities. Hear more from Kenan Institute Managing Director and conference co-chair Mark Little.
The increasingly open flow of goods and services has fundamentally altered the world economy and global power balances. It is also reshaping the American political system and our economic geography, providing clear and lasting benefits for some and negative impacts for others. This Kenan Institute's Global Trade, Global Trade-Offs conference convened thought leaders from the business community, government and academia to explore the core questions of the impact of international trade on society, the changing nature of work and economic productivity.