Much has been written about the disproportionate number of women who have suffered pandemic-related job losses during COVID-19, but a related consequence has not been as well explored: the serious disruption of women’s careers, particularly in fields in which “path dependence” matters for success. In this Kenan Insight, we examine this more subtle asymmetry in the pandemic’s impact as indicative of far broader issues for women’s advancement in the workplace.
In recent months, mechanisms that have allowed for high-skilled foreign nationals to study and work in the U.S. have been put on the policy chopping block. In this Kenan Insight, we discuss why high-skilled foreign workers are critical to America's economic health, and why policies must continue to support their entry into the U.S.
As firms use advertising to gain product market advantages and increase their valuation in financial markets, disclosures of their advertising spending are influential — whether they erode organizational competitive advantages in product markets or signal quality in financial markets.
One of the most significant empirical findings of the behavioral finance literature is that investor sentiment affects asset prices. Baker and Wurgler (2006) finds that shares of certain firms — those that are difficult to value — are more affected by shifts in investor sentiment. We examine whether the accounting information of firms that are inherently difficult to value can mitigate sentiment-related mispricing. Our findings indicate that sentiment-related mispricing is in fact diminished in the subset of firms with high-quality accounting information.
We investigate the effect of cross-border regulatory cooperation on global mutual fund portfolio allocations, focusing on the Multilateral Memorandum of Understanding (MMoU), a non-binding information sharing arrangement between global securities regulators. Connections between the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and other foreign regulators increase the SEC’s ability to pursue US cross-listed firms. We find that foreign investment in US-cross- listed firms domiciled in the signatory country increases significantly relative to non-cross-listed firms from that country.
Over the last two decades, public and private equity markets have changed dramatically. For instance, the total number of publicly listed firms decreased from more than 7500 in 1997 to approximately 3500 in 2018. This precipitous decline can be attributed to a corresponding sharp drop in the number of IPOs.
Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, Phillip Hettleman Distinguished Scholar and Area Chair of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School
Adjunct Professor - MBA@UNC | PhD Candidate in Strategy & Entrepreneurship, UNC-Chapel Hill
The Institute for Private Capital’s newly-released interactive model that aims to help private equity leaders assess diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) goals was featured in a report by Ernst & Young.
We show that firms’ ability to avoid taxes is affected by the quality of their internal information environment, with lower effective tax rates (ETRs) for firms that have high internal information quality. The effect of internal information quality on tax avoidance is stronger for firms in which information is likely to play a more important role.
We prove that in equilibrium, imposing or increasing a market-based undersupply penalty rate in a period can result in a strictly larger renewable energy commitment at all prices in the associated day-ahead market, and can lead to lower equilibrium reliability in all periods with probability 1. We also show in an extension that firms with diversified technologies result in lower equilibrium reliability than single-technology firms in all periods with probability 1.
With a growing emphasis on prioritizing user privacy and data protection, says UNC Kenan-Flagler’s Longxiu Tian, information collected directly from customers becomes the key to solving the puzzle of personalization and accurate targeting for marketers.
Although the power held by the marketing department can determine key organizational outcomes, including firm performance, this power seemingly has been decreasing. To address this apparent disconnect, the authors propose that the board of directors is a critical but overlooked antecedent of marketing department power (MDP).
Attributing greater value to missing earnings estimates than to beating them signals a trend toward short-term demands and rewards. But what if a firm wishes to make costly investments that could yield long-term business resilience?
The enactment of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) on Dec. 22, 2017 dropped the U.S. corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, creating the prospect of substantially improved cash flows for many U.S. companies. While the effects of this tax cut are still working their way through the economy, it’s not too early to ask an important question: where did (or will) the money go?
We conduct what is, to our knowledge, the first systematic examination of Chinese-based firms that utilize a variable interest entity (VIE) structure to evade Chinese regulation on foreign ownership to list equity in the U.S. The use of the VIE structure is not only questionable under Chinese laws but also exacerbates the agency costs within the firm. We find that Chinese VIE firms have a Tobin’s Q as much as 35% lower than Chinese non-VIE firms, and this discount is concentrated in firms with higher risks of government intervention and managerial expropriation. To remediate these risks, VIE firms are more likely to have a politically connected director on the board, hire a Big N auditor and have higher levels of institutional ownership.
We examine the effect of MiFID II, which mandated the unbundling and separate pricing of analyst research in Europe beginning in 2018. We find that the requirements of MiFID II were associated with a reduction in analyst following for European firms relative to US firms, with decreases in coverage greatest for firms that were larger, older and less volatile, and had greater coverage and more accurate consensus forecasts. Remaining analysts follow fewer firms and issue fewer forecasts, consistent with increased focus, and appear to increase their efforts on the firms they continue to cover.
Workplaces are under pressure to be more inclusive due to public demands and rapidly changing demographics in the U.S. workforce. These commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) aren't just moral, they're crucial to business prosperity. In this Kenan Insight, we explore strategies for startups to employ and explain why starting early is key to success.