This monograph provides a structured overview of costing system research that can explain the variation in the characteristics and properties of costing systems found in practice based on firms’ source(s) of their demand for cost information. Costing systems are not developed in a vacuum but are designed to fulfill a purpose. In order to have a meaningful decision on the various demands for cost information, I start in Part 1 by exploring the different techniques firms can use to supply cost information to its managers and employees.
This paper documents a set of stylized facts about leverage and financial fragility in the non-financial corporate sector in emerging markets since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Corporate debt vulnerability indicators prior to the Asian Financial Crisis (AFC) attributed to corporate financial roots provide a benchmark for comparison. The firm-level data suggest that emerging markets post-GFC have lower leverage ratios than the five Asian crisis countries (Asian Five) in the run-up to the AFC.
Our 2025 Grand Challenge examines the skills gap – the difference between the skills that employers seek and those that workers possess – which is being driven by technological breakthroughs, demographic changes and cultural shifts in the workplace.
Kenan Scholar JoLynn Smith reflects on the KIFE 2020 keynote address from Backstage Capital Founder Arlan Hamilton and argues that the venture capital space needs to adopt more of Hamilton's "disruptive" strategies.
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.
The Biden administration's $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan comes with a hefty price tag, which the president hopes to pay in part by introducing a 15% minimum tax on corporate book income. Predictably, policymakers from both sides of the aisle are sounding off, but the argument is more complicated and nuanced than partisan rhetoric. In this Kenan Insight, we outline the intricacies and implications of taxing book income.
The Biden administration's $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan comes with a hefty price tag, which the president hopes to pay in part by introducing a 15% minimum tax on corporate book income. Predictably, policymakers from both sides of the aisle are sounding off, but the argument is more complicated and nuanced than partisan rhetoric. In this Kenan Insight, we outline the intricacies and implications of taxing book income.
Issues constricting the supply of workers, the sector-by-sector employment effects of a potential recession, the emergence of new technologies – these are the primary labor demand themes we’ll focus on in our 2023 grand challenge.
A UNC Kenan-Flagler professor doesn’t foresee long-term effects from the failure of Silicon Valley Bank, given that other banks and financing companies can step in to replace SVB as an issuer of venture debt.
Despite the central role played by human capital in entrepreneurship, little is known about how employees in entrepreneurial firms are compensated and incentivized. We address this gap in the literature by studying 18,935 non-CEO compensation contracts across 1,809 privately held venture-backed companies.
Associate Professor of Operations and Associate Dean of the Evening Executive MBA, Weekend Executive MBA and Charlotte Executive MBA Programs
We empirically investigate the effect of uncertainty on corporate hiring. Using novel data from the labor market for MBA graduates, we show that uncertainty regarding how well job candidates fit with a firm’s industry hinders hiring and that firms value probationary work arrangements that provide the option to learn more about potential full-time employees.
Using firm-level administrative tax data, we document dramatic reductions in private leverage since the Global Financial Crisis, while leverage among public firms rose during this period. Our findings suggest that banks' credit supply plays a prominent role in explaining the leverage pattern of private firms.
We examine the effect of higher wages on firm performance during the 2008 financial crisis. To identify variation in wages, we rely on heterogeneity in the timing of long-term wage agreements for a sample of UK firms. We instrument for firms signing long-term agreements overlapping with the crisis by the presence of a contract signed in 2006 or earlier and expiring before September 2008.
A project funded by the Institute for the Study of Business Markets to develop an understanding of the current state of business-to-business marketing and a research agenda for the field identified a lack of understanding of how the marketing function can or should best contribute to firms' innovation efforts as the top priority.
We analyze why firms use non-intermediated short-term debt by studying the commercial paper (CP) market. Using a comprehensive database of CP issuers and issuance activity, we show that firms use CP to provide start-up financing for capital investment.
Successful initial public offerings (IPOs) provide firms with access to valuable resources, but also put pressure on firms to impress potential investors with evidence of their current well-being and prospects for future growth.
We hypothesize that after a relaxation of short selling constraints, an escalation in short selling activity will heighten incentives for short sellers to accelerate price discovery by revealing their negative information. Consistent with this conjecture, we find that the overall sentiment of media coverage tilts significantly more negative for pilot relative to control firms following exogenous relief of short sale constraints.
In business-to-business markets, top marketing and sales executives (TMSEs) have considerable influence on their organizations’ customer strategies. When TMSEs switch firms, a pattern of informal organizational connections results; this pattern reflects the flow of information and knowledge among firms and creates managerial social capital in the process. To model this information flow, the current study considers information reach and richness, conceptualized according to the network position (i.e., centrality and brokerage) of the firm in the TMSE mobility network, which can be constructed by tracing executive movements through the work experience records of TMSEs in an industry.
We investigate systematic changes in corporate effective tax rates over the past 25 years and find that effective tax rates have decreased significantly. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the decline in effective tax rates is not concentrated in multinational firms; effective tax rates have declined at approximately the same rate for both multinational and domestic firms. Moreover, within multinational firms, both foreign and domestic effective rates have decreased. Finally, changes in firm characteristics and declining foreign statutory tax rates explain little of the overall decrease in effective rates.