Pless, a Kenan Institute Distinguished Fellow, will discuss the degree to which divestment versus continued investment in polluting industries might help drive the transition to a cleaner economy.
The makers of a synthetic fiber made from recycled plastic bottles and the co-founder of a venture capital firm that focuses on green sectors are the recipients of the 2018 UNC Sustainability Awards, presented on May 10 at The Carolina Club in Chapel Hill.
As a destination for both migration and business growth, North Carolina must reassess the capabilities of local entrepreneurial and small-business ecosystems to ensure that its diverse population of aspiring entrepreneurs and small-business owners has equitable access to opportunities.
During this webinar, Mr. Allen will give a 30-minute presentation sharing his expert insights on U.S.-China relations and what it means for U.S. firms.
The availability of high quality and “clean” data documenting historical individual stock performance has had a profound impact on financial economics and the financial‐services industry.
Private equity firms now manage commitments of nearly US$3.4t globally, up from less than US$500b in 2000, and in a significant shift new capital from private markets has surpassed for capital raised in public markets for the first time ever.
As of 2019, salary history bans were enacted by 17 states and Puerto Rico with the stated purpose of reducing the gender pay gap. We argue that salary history bans may negatively affect wages as employers lose an informative signal of worker productivity. We empirically evaluate these laws using a large panel dataset of disaggregated wages covering all public-sector employees in 36 states and find, on average, that salary history bans lead to a 3% decrease in new-hire wages.
Employee spinouts, defined as startups founded by prior employees of an industry firm, play a critical role in firm creation and knowledge transfer. Their superior performance often arises from resources and knowledge accrued during employment in parent firms. An understudied question is whether prior employment in parent firms impacts an employee
There is growing evidence that many multinational corporations are lowering their tax obligations by engaging in income shifting—moving income from high-tax countries to low-tax countries or tax havens, and shifting deductions from low-tax countries to high-tax countries. By at least one estimate, the result is loss of nearly $100 to $240 billion annually in global tax revenues. In this Kenan Insight, we explore the extent of the problem and what might be done to address it.
Many Americans expect newly inaugurated President Joe Biden to achieve progress in improving the quality of the environment. In this Kenan Insight, we explain why we support these expectations, examining what Biden has already done in his brief tenure, the feasibility of the plans he’s outlined thus far, and whether (and how) he can propel the U.S. to a leadership role in sustainability.
Five of the top 10 skills identified for business success are entrepreneurial skills, making entrepreneurship education relevant not just for would-be startup owners, but for general business students as well. In this video, Vickie Gibbs, executive director of the UNC Entrepreneurship Center, reveals what UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School is doing to teach these critical skills and address current and future trends in the evolving field of entrepreneurship.
Speed is often critical for successful commercialization of a new technology, and patents help entrepreneurs secure funding, enter the market, and avoid expropriation of their ideas. In this article, we employ a recent change to U.S. patent law—the introduction of an elective program accelerating patent examination—to investigate the role of patent examination speed in strategic entrepreneurship.
As Global Entrepreneurship Week begins, Professor Ted Zoller, faculty director of the Kenan Institute-affiliated UNC Entrepreneurship Center, discusses what UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School is doing to drive innovation in entrepreneurship education and prepare the next generation of entrepreneurs for success.
Federal, state and local governments acted quickly to assist businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, because the category of “small business” is defined so broadly, stimulus money did not always reach the intended recipients. The government’s definition of small business includes firms with fewer than 500 employees — which, taken together, represent a broad collection of different types of businesses with very different needs.
Brands and branding are key to achieving competitive advantage in global markets. Yet, brands and their managers are facing new challenges and opportunities in light of numerous trends and disruptions that are changing the landscape of marketing in an international context. The climate crisis, a pandemic, and deglobalization winds—marked by China–West trade tensions, wars, and other trade-related disruptions, to name a few—are challenging branding around the world.
Research on resource dependence typically takes a static view in which actions and outcomes are determined structurally, but not as responses to the actions of the counterparty in an exchange relation. By contrast, this study addresses a question of power dynamics by examining whether mergers of organizations trigger responses from their common exchange partners. We predict that common exchange partners respond by withdrawing from the relationship and that their responses vary with the availability of alternatives, the value of the relationship, and the relationship history. Using data on advertising agencies, we show that mergers of agencies do trigger reactions from their common clients, and the reactions differ with agency and client characteristics. Extending existing theory and evidence, our results suggest that firms respond to the dynamics of exchange relationships and not only to their structure.
In this paper, we seek to better understand how executives can intelligently combine modular and integrated problem solving processes to form the best possible strategy in entrepreneurial environments. To do so, we compare the efficacy of strategies formed via different processes under various market conditions, exploring the sources of significant performance differences. We address this question using NK simulation methods.
Research exploring investor reactions to sustainability has substantial empirical limitations, which we address with a large‐scale longitudinal financial event study of the first global sustainability index, DJSI World. The study highlights the importance of careful analysis and longitudinal global samples in making inferences about the financial effects of social performance.
On Jan. 30, 2020, the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise and UNC Entrepreneurship Center released the inaugural Frontiers of Entrepreneurship Trends Report. The report features timely insights into topics that affect founders, funders and the broader entrepreneurial ecosystem. Combining expert analysis, this report translates rigorous academic research to ensure findings are actionable for the broader entrepreneurial community, aiming to inform practitioners’ decisions and encourage further exploration of research topics by scholars. Download the full report at https://frontiers.unc.edu/.
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.