...in the Workforce: Why They Matter for Economies 2022 Research The Power of Productivity: 2022’s Winning Cities and Top Gainers, Ranked Research 2022’s Fastest-Growing U.S. Cities, Ranked Kenan Insight The...
We have little knowledge about the prevalence of irreproducibility in the accounting literature. To narrow this gap, we conducted a survey among the participants of the 2019 JAR Conference on their perceptions of the frequency, causes, and consequences of irreproducible research published in accounting journals.
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.
Despite strong economic indicators—2.5% GDP growth, unemployment under 4%, and easing inflation—American consumer sentiment remains low. Kenan Institute experts explore why the public's mood doesn’t match the upbeat data, highlighting deeper sources of economic unease.
Purpose is the corporate buzzword of today, with politicians, the public and even shareholders calling on businesses to serve wider society. But purpose is also controversial, because companies have a responsibility to deliver returns to investors. Is there a trade-off between purpose and profit, or is it possible for companies to achieve both? The Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise hosted a virtual talk featuring London Business School Finance Professor Alex Edmans, who critically examined the case for purposeful business using rigorous evidence and real-life examples to show what works – and, importantly, what doesn’t. He discussed practical ways for businesses of all sizes to put purpose into practice, how investors and citizens can play their part, and how we can distinguish businesses that are truly purposeful from those that are greenwashing.
With growing prominence of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) issues, we witness enhanced scrutiny of the public stance and statements of organizational actors. For example, two such statements by Tucker Carlson, known for his primetime show on Fox News, one on immigration (2018) and the other on the Black Lives Matter (2020) movement, pushed nongovernmental organizations, such as Media Matters, to sociopolitical activism by putting pressures on advertisers to boycott the show. This mingling of DEI, sociopolitical activism, and associated economic effects raises a critical research question: what is the economic consequence of DEI stances that arouse sociopolitical activism and what are the underlying mechanisms for the economic consequences?
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.
Co-brands are strategically advantageous partnerships which can also involve risk. For example, Papa John’s gained access to the largest television audience in the US by sponsoring the National Football League (NFL), but later blamed stagnant sales on how the NFL’s handled players’ well-publicized protests of inequitable policing. What implications did Papa John’s prioritization of sales over fairness have for NFL consumption? To answer this question, the current research tests for changes in Sunday watch party rituals (SWPR), when U.S. consumers gather to socialize while watching live NFL games.
Intersectionality has emerged as an important theoretical concept for examining intersecting social hierarchies and has garnered varying interpretations and applications in scholarly discourse. To help organize varied definitions of intersectionality that are commonly used in the social sciences, we propose a typology that distinguishes between primary, pragmatic, and pluralistic intersectionality.
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.
A recent research brief by Kenan Institute Executive Director Greg Brown, Director of Research Services Ashley Brown and Shai Bernstein of the Stanford Graduate School of Business on the value of immigrant entrepreneurs to the U.S. economy has been featured in a Triangle Business Journal article. The brief cites a growing body of academic literature demonstrating that high-skilled immigrants provide a range of long-lasting and material benefits to the U.S. economy through entrepreneurship and innovation.
This paper provides a first look at newly available data on the holdings of private equity (PE) funds. Because research has been hampered by the lack of comprehensive, high-quality data on portfolio companies, this new source offers the potential for a wide range of research.
We are now in the age of Big, and, seemingly, ever Bigger Data. The current public discussion focuses on the avalanche of data, due to fact that nearly all written (and other) materials are now available in a digital format, which simplifies their accessibility, extraction, classification, and analysis. Even more so, the adoptions of online digital platforms create new and ever-larger data quantities every day. While created for other purposes the potential for scientific socio-economic research appears simultaneously extremely promising and extremely uncertain – very much like answers in search of good questions.
UNC Professor of Economics, UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School Professor and Kenan Institute Senior Faulty Fellow Anusha Chari's latest research was featured in a recent National Bureau of Economic Research article. Chari's co-authored paper with Kenan Institute Director of Research Christian Lundblad and Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City Economist Karlye Dilts-Stedman, is cited in the article that looks at capital market risks in emerging markets.
The study of congruence is central to organizational research. Congruence refers to the fit, match, similarity, or agreement between two constructs and is typically framed as a predictor of outcomes relevant to individuals and organizations. Previous studies often operationalized congruence as the algebraic, absolute, or squared difference between two component variables.
Venture philanthropy presents a new model of research funding that is particularly helpful to those fighting orphan diseases, which actively manages the commercialization process to accelerate scientific progress and material outcomes. This paper begins by documenting the growing importance of foundations as a source of funding academic research as traditional funding from industry and government sources decline.
Heuristics play an important role in organizational decision-making. Although management and organizational scholars have contributed significantly to our understanding of heuristics in organizations over the past seven decades, the literature has become fragmented over time. Three parallel streams of research—(1) heuristics and biases, (2) fast-and-frugal heuristics, and (3) simple rule heuristics—have emerged with somewhat conflicting views on the origins, use, and implications of heuristics.
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 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?
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.
This paper conceptualises the array of social practices as a continuum of social innovation and empirically demonstrates variation not captured by legal designation. Using a survey from the US state of North Carolina, this paper examines how organisations across the continuum responded to the 2008 economic recession.