Immigrants are once again the targets of draconian policymaking. It is during the COVID-19 pandemic this time. Through a series of presidential proclamations and other executive branch maneuvers, the Trump Administration is attempting to leverage a host of so-called migration management tools to ban entry and force some immigrant to leave the country—all under the guise of containing the spread of the coronavirus and protecting American jobs.
The COVID-19 pandemic and the nationwide civil unrest spawned by the recent spate of senseless killings of unarmed African Americans have illuminated what executive development professionals have been telling private and public sector leaders and managers for quite some time. We are living in an era of increasing volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity—a VUCA World. “Certain-uncertainty” is the new normal in today’s society and economy.
We document what fraction of the housing stock in US cities is affordable to different family types. Rather than looking at what fraction of their income people actually pay in rent in each city, which reflects a mix of households’ ability to pay and supply conditions, we look at the extent to which the housing stock is affordable using discrete housing expenditure share cutoffs and the distribution of rents in the American Community Survey from each city.
Knowledge of our changing demography can serve as both foundation and frame for how to achieve greater social, economic, environmental, and health equity in North Carolina. After describing how disruptive demographics are transforming the our state, this essay highlights a set of equity issues undergirding our shifting demography and concludes with a set of tools and strategies to make North Carolina a place where equity, inclusion, and belonging is the new normal.
In a recent episode of his award-winning show, “United Shades of America,” W. Kamau Bell interviews a Black man about systemic racism in America who said, “This country is not designed for us and, in fact, is designed against us.” As an African American, this observation triggered three critical questions.
Climatologists project that global temperatures may rise by up to four degrees Celsius over the next century. This projection raises a natural question: “Can we assess the impact that this temperature increase will have on the U.S. economy?” UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School Professor of Finance Ric Colacito discusses his co-authored paper “Temperature and Growth: A Panel Analysis of the United States.”
For hospitals, a corollary to the popular adage “what gets measured gets managed” could be “measure more accurately to manage costs better.” That seems to be true even in industries like healthcare, where corporations and the government have been struggling for years to control hydra-like costs. UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School accounting professor Eva Labro and Lorien Stice-Lawrence (PhD ’17) found one way to significantly cut hospital costs is to upgrade accounting systems in their forthcoming paper in Management Science.
Many people dream of starting their own business. But before they can make their dream a reality, one of the first and most important decisions they must make is whether to go it alone or partner with someone they may, or may not, already know. Which approach is better? Kenan Institute Grant Recipient Travis Howell, previews his findings in a soon-to-be-published working paper.
In the past decade, coworking spaces have emerged as a new and promising phenomenon within entrepreneurship. Due to its prevalence, popularity and potential for disruptive change, coworking is increasingly relevant to theory, practice and policy in entrepreneurship, yet its implications are largely unstudied given its rapid rise. Overall, more data and analysis is needed to inform owners, policy makers and entrepreneurs about the effects of coworking. This paper, by UNC Kenan-Flagler Ph.D. candidate Travis Howell and Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship Chris Bingham, is meant to increase understanding about the nature and value of this new phenomenon. In other words, it attempts to address the question: Does coworking work?
Cities increasingly will have to demonstrate a strong commitment to reputational equity to remain attractive places to live, work, play, and do business given the racially and ethnically disparate impacts of Covid-19 pandemic and recent senseless killings of unarmed African Americans that spawned a nationwide protest movement. We leverage evidence-based best practices of inclusive and equitable development from the research literature to devise a reputational equity checklist—a portfolio of strategies, policies, tactics, procedures and practices cities will need to embrace to dismantle all forms of “Isms” and “Phobias” that are principally responsible for the major divisions that exist in American society today.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed flaws in the global supply chain that have existed for years, with disruptions that have led to a scarcity of goods as diverse as PPE, food and toilet paper. In this Kenan Insight, we examine how threats to supply chains are forcing companies to rethink how they can position themselves to mitigate future risk.
Public opinion polls reveal Americans are turning to companies with purpose and ethics to lead us through the profound anxiety and crises we are currently experiencing as a nation. We developed a corporate reputational equity checklist that will enable firms to brand or rebrand themselves as inclusive and equitable places to work, as well as position their companies as a collective of civically engaged corporate citizens poised and willing to address society’s most pressing ills, including systemic racism.
We use detailed establishment-level data to understand whether and how the composition of the US stock market differs from the composition of US firms as a whole. Although the locational composition of employment in public firms is similar to that of all US firms, we find certain industries significantly overrepresented. Further, the gap between the industrial composition of publicly traded firms and all US firms has grown over the last thirty years.
As the nature of work has become more service-oriented, knowledge-intensive, and rapidly changing, people—be they workers or customers—have become more central to operational processes and have impacted operational outcomes in novel and perhaps more fundamental ways. Research in people-centric operations (PCO) studies how people affect the performance of operational processes. In this OM Forum, we define PCO as an area of study, offer a categorization scheme to take stock of where the field has allocated its attention to date, and offer our thoughts on promising directions for future research.
Private equity performance, both for buyouts and venture capital, has been highly cyclical: periods of high fundraising have been followed by periods of low performance. Despite this seemingly predictable variation, we find modest gains, at best, to pursuing realistic, investable strategies that time capital commitments to private equity. This occurs, in part, because investors can only time their commitments to funds; they cannot time when commitments are called or when investments are exited. There is a high degree of time-series correlation in net cash flows even across commitment strategies that allocate capital in a very different manner over time.
In stark contrast with liquid asset returns, I find that commercial real estate idiosyncratic return means and variances do not scale with the holding period, even after accounting for all cash flow relevant events. This puzzling phenomenon survives controlling for vintage effects, systematic risk heterogeneity, and a host of other explanations. To explain the findings, I derive an equilibrium search-based asset-pricing model which, when calibrated, provides an excellent fit to transactions data.
We model the threat of such liquidation through the intermediation of an activist shareholder. Among other things, our model predicts that MDPs are more likely to be adopted by funds that appear to be less effective in providing portfolio services to their investors and that are relatively easy to liquidate or ‘attack’. We test the model on a panel of 236 CEFs and find good agreement with our model.
Using the approach of Ghysels, Santa-Clara, and Valkanov (2005), after correcting a coding error pointed out to us, we find that the Merton model holds over samples that exclude financial crises, in particular the Great Depression and/or the subprime mortgage financial crisis and the resulting Great Recession. We find that a simple flight to safety indicator separates the traditional risk-return relationship from financial crises which amount to fundamental changes in that relationship.
We study the interaction of flexible capital utilization and depreciation for expected returns and investment of firms. Empirically, an investment strategy that buys (sells) equities with low (high) utilization rates earns 5% p.a.
When policymakers implement a disinflation program directed at high inflation, the real dollar value of their country’s stock market index experiences a cumulative abnormal 12-month return of 48 percent in anticipation of the event. In contrast, the average cumulative abnormal 12-month return associated with disinflations directed at moderate inflation is negative 18 percent. The 66-percentage point difference between cumulative abnormal returns, along with descriptive evidence and case studies, suggests that unlike the swift eradication of past high inflations documented by Sargent (1982), the US will not experience a quick, low-cost transition from moderate inflation to the Fed’s two-percent target.