Watts Endowed Professor of Public Affairs, Arizona State University School of Public Affairs
Assistant Professor of Finance, University of Michigan Ross School of Business and 2022 Kenan Institute Distinguished Fellow
Dudley and Louisa Dillard Professor of Economics, University of Maryland, and 2023 Kenan Institute Distinguished Fellow
Prior work on supervisor bottom-line mentality (SBLM) has suggested it represents a static, unbending focus, with supervisors so focused on the bottom line that they discount ethical considerations. We propose that SBLM varies, within-person, given various factors in a supervisor's work life that pull and push their attention to and away from the bottom line across their workweeks. We theorize that the varying nature of SBLM elicits anxiety in employees that is exhausting because, on the days supervisors give greater emphasis to the bottom line, employees must abandon the comfort of their routines to produce bottom-line results. Ultimately, this experience motivates employee unethical behavior (i.e., coworker undermining). We also predict that, by providing employees support and guidance, supervisors’ steadfast commitment to ethics (i.e., between-person ethical leadership perceptions) influences the degree to which exhausted employees undermine their coworkers.
Small businesses are an undeniable engine of growth for the United States, comprising 99 percent of all U.S. firms and driving nearly half our total economic activity. Yet small business owners across the country lack sufficient capital to succeed, grow and scale. The Kenan Institute has conducted a new analysis on the role of the Small Business Administration’s SBIC program in providing capital to the often-overlooked small businesses operating outside of metropolitan centers, as well as those owned by women and underrepresented minorities. You can access an overview of our findings, as well as key takeaways for business and policy leaders, by clicking below.
Abby Staker (BSBA '20) reflects on her journey writing a senior thesis as part of the Kenan Scholars program.
Commercial real estate (CRE) is real estate held to generate income or used as an input into production by firms. It is notably different from other asset classes of a similar magnitude in that CRE is traded in private, illiquid markets. CRE is a hugely important asset class that has received less attention from the academic literature than asset classes that rival CRE in terms of sheer value. Yet pension funds, life insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds and other institutional investors seek the diversification benefits provided by CRE’s unusually steady income flow. The paper, “Commercial Real Estate as an Asset Class,” by Andra Ghent of UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, Walter Torous of the MIT Center for Real Estate and Rossen Valkanov of UCSD’s Rady School of Management provides a much-needed overview of the CRE literature thus far, focusing on its attributes as an asset class.
Please join us for an exclusive conversation with LabCorp Executive Vice President & President of Diagnostics Brian Caveney on Friday, Nov. 13. This virtual fireside chat is part of the Dean’s Speaker Series, hosted by Kenan-Flagler Business School Dean Doug Shackelford. The discussion will be led by Brad Staats, Associate Dean of MBA Programs, Professor of Operations, Sarah Graham Kenan Scholar & Faculty Director of the Center for the Business of Health.
UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School Professor Jim Johnson, director of the Urban Investment Strategies Center, defines three groups facing challenges as companies return to the office and updates his forecast of demographic gale force winds.
Some are worrying about the future of commercial real estate because of recent falls in valuations. Our expert discusses the challenges facing CRE and how to disentangle the trends that are shaking up the sector.
In addition to academic presentations, the Conference on Market-Based Solutions for Reducing Wealth Inequality took participants out of the classroom and into the community for a walking tour and on-site discussions in nearby Durham, N.C.
African American older adults face a major retirement crisis (Rhee, 2013; Vinik, 2015)). Owing to a legacy of racial discrimination in education, housing, employment, and wages or salaries, they are less likely than their white counterparts to have accumulated wealth over the course of their lives (Sykes, 2016). In 2013, the median net worth of African American older adult households ($56,700) was roughly one-fifth of the median net worth of white older adult households ($255,000) (Rosnick and Baker, 2014). Not surprising, given these disparities in net worth, African American older adult males (17%) and females (21%) were much more likely than their white male (5%) and female (10%) counterparts to live in poverty (Johnson and Parnell, 2016; U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2013a). They also were more likely to experience disabilities earlier in life and to have shorter life expectancies (Freedman and Spillman, 2016).