Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, institutions of higher education were under immense pressure to live up to their value propositions, with underlying tensions that have been developing for years posing an existential threat to their financial viability. As colleges and universities move classes and operations online in response to the pandemic, questions arise as to what such changes hold not just for now, but for the long-term success of higher education. Can ed tech provide a way forward? This briefing features North Carolina Area Health Education Centers Liason and UNC School of Nursing Professor Mary Schuler, UNC College of Arts and Sciences Associate Dean of Instructional Innovation Professor Kelly Hogan, UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School Dean Doug Shackelford and Association of College and University Educators CEO Susan Cates.
With the upcoming November election and calls by President Trump for 1 or more vaccines for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) to be ready before the end of the year, if not by the election, many have started to wonder whether the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) can withstand this type of political pressure.
Amid a chaotic year both nationally and globally due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and follow-on effects, private equity deals in healthcare have shown impressive resilience. According to recent research and analysis, healthcare PE deals continue to outpace all other deals – both in volume and value – with the majority of activity focused on the healthcare provider space and biopharmaceutical companies. As total healthcare deal value continues to grow, this panel paused to explore critical questions about how the growth in PE-backed healthcare companies affects patients – including their health outcomes, their medical bills and their access to important health services.
Economic recoveries can be slow, fast, or involve double dips. This paper provides an explanation based on the dynamic interactions between bank lending standards and firm entry selection. In the model, bank lending standards refer to both how banks screen borrowers with unknown quality and whether well-qualified borrowers are credit rationed, and firm entry selection refers to the mechanism through which financing conditions select firms of different quality to enter the lending market.
Despite extensive empirical evidence of the economic and financial benefits of green buildings, energy retrofit investments in existing buildings have not reached widespread adoption.This paper empirically estimate returns to energy retrofit investments for multifamily and commercial buildings in New York City, using a novel database of actual audit report recommendations and permitted renovation work extracted using natural language processing.
The authors find that hedge funds during the 2008 financial crisis did not systematically benefit from opportunistic trading, which could have generated systemic risks in financial markets. Although some funds that used leverage actually performed worse than expected given ex ante risk-factor loadings, this result was most likely caused by meeting redemptions rather than by forced selling during the crisis.
This paper examines the internal anatomy of regional social capital and develops a role for dealmakers – individuals who provide active regional stewardship. An empirical analysis of twelve US regions finds great variation in the presence of dealmakers. The strong local presence of dealmakers is correlated with high start-up rates. The empirical results suggest that the local presence of dealmakers is more important for successful entrepreneurship than aggregate measures of regional entrepreneurial and investors network. Moreover, it is found that the presence of dealmakers is a better predictor of the status of the regional entrepreneurial economy.
North Carolina was one of the nation’s most rapidly growing states during the first decade of the new millennium. Most of the growth came from migration—movers from other states and abroad. Combined with a more general aging in place of the resident population, newcomers are dramatically changing the state’s demography. But undergirding this demographic dynamism are major geographical, socio-economic, and racial/ethnic disparities in the human condition in our state, which require immediate attention if we are to thrive and prosper in the years ahead.
We identify a new channel for the transmission of shocks across international markets. Investor flows to funds domiciled in developed markets force significant changes in these funds' emerging market portfolio allocations. These forced trades or “fire sales” affect emerging market equity prices, correlations, and betas, and are related to but distinct from effects arising purely from fund holdings or from overlapping ownership of emerging markets in fund portfolios. A simple model and calibration exercise highlight the importance to these findings of “push” effects from funds' domicile countries and “co-ownership spillover” between markets with overlapping fund ownership.
Few papers in the literature on inequality measurement deal with uncertainty, particularly when the ranking of cohorts may not be fixed. We present a set of axioms implying such a class of inequality measures under uncertainty that is a one-parameter extension of the generalized Gini mean over the distribution of average allocations. The extension consists of a quadratic term accounting for inter-personal correlations. In particular, our measure can simultaneously accommodate a preference for “shared destiny”, a preference for probabilistic mixtures over unfair allocations, and a preference for fairness “for sure” over fairness in expectation.
We show that in the years following a large broad-based employee stock option (BBSO) grant, employee turnover falls at the granting firm. We find evidence consistent with a causal relation by exploiting unexpected changes in the value of unvested options. A large fraction of the reduction in turnover appears to be temporary with turnover increasing in the third year following the year of the adoption of the BBSO plan. The increase three years post-grant is equal in magnitude to the cumulative decrease in turnover over the three prior years, suggesting that long-vesting BBSO plans delay, instead of prevent, turnover.
Focusing on data from the United States and the United Kingdom, we document that both the anomaly identified by Backus and Smith, which concerns the low correlation between consumption differentials and exchange rates, and the forward premium anomaly, which concerns the tendency of high interest rate currencies to appreciate, have become more severe over time.
We show that equity volatility serves as a determinant of future Treasury term-structure volatility over the recent October 1997 to June 2013 period. We find that equity volatility contains incrementally reliable information for the subsequent volatility of: (1) 10-year and 30-year bond futures returns, (2) the term-structure's level, and (3) the term-structure's slope.
A research paper co-authored by Kenan Institute Director Greg Brown is cited in a recent Bloomberg View post by columnist Matt Levine. The post, “Are Banks Worthless?,” looks at passive investing, the performance of banks’ investment products, and other current financial topics. Brown’s paper, co-authored with Söhnke Bartram and René Stultz, explores the reasons for historically low idiosyncratic risk in recent years.
We study a multi-product firm with limited capacity where the products are vertically (quality) differentiated and the customer base is heterogeneous in their valuation of quality. While the demand structure creates opportunities through proliferation, the firm should avoid cannibalization between its own products.
We use the 2008 short selling regulations to test whether short sale restrictions can increase informed short selling. For the preborrow requirement, we find more negative price reactions to short interest announcements though no reliable increase in the price impact of short sales volume.
In this paper, we compute conditional measures of lead-lag relationships between GDP growth and industry-level cash-flow growth in the US. Our results show that firms in leading industries pay an average annualized return 4% higher than that of firms in lagging industries.
No. In the presence of speculative opportunities, investors can learn about both asset fundamentals and the beliefs of other traders. We show that this learning exhibits complementarity: learning more along one dimension increases the value of learning about the other. As a result, regulatory changes may be counterproductive.
Because current earnings predict future financial performance, the stock market reacts strongly to earnings announcements. How rapidly and in what manner information about marketing actions and strategies is accounted for in the stock valuation is less clear.