Addressing the call for a deeper understanding of ambidexterity at the individual level, we propose that managers’ networks are an important yet understudied factor in the ability to balance the trade-off between exploring for new business and exploiting existing business.
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.
This session delves into three critical aspects of smaller/regional funds. First, is their role in increasing diversity among both capital allocators and entrepreneurs who receive funding. Second, is how pooling capital in diversified vehicles that can invest locally can promote investment by larger VCs/investors. Third, is how regional funds can bridge the divides in communities that lack robust VC ecosystems.
Across the globe, the average commute is 38 minutes each way, and it is well known that lengthy commutes negatively affect employees’ well-being and job-related outcomes leading to decreased job satisfaction and increased turnover. Despite the importance of commuting in employees’ everyday life, little is known about how negative effects of lengthy commutes could be attenuated.
In this study, we conducted a meta-analysis to examine the moderating role of national culture on the relationship between perceptions of organizational politics and individual attitudes and behaviors.
We examine the effect of pay transparency on gender pay gap and firm outcomes. This paper exploits a 2006 legislation change in Denmark that requires firms to provide gender disaggregated wage statistics. Using detailed employee-employer administrative data and a difference-in-differences and difference-in-discontinuities designs, we find the law reduces the gender pay gap, primarily by slowing the wage growth for male employees.
A BloombergView article on the negative economic effects of the growing number of mega companies dominating American markets features the latest research co-authored by Kenan Institute Director Greg Brown. The research looks at how the dramatic change in the number and composition of firms listed on major U.S. exchanges over the past two decades – namely, more larger, older companies and fewer companies overall – has resulted in historically low levels of idiosyncratic risk.
We find that equity loan fees are the best predictor of cross-sectional returns. When compared to 102 other anomalies, the loan fee anomaly has the highest monthly long-short return (1.17%), has the highest monthly Sharpe Ratio (0.40), and unlike other anomalies, exhibits strong persistence throughout the sample.
We compare several approaches for generating a prioritized list of products to be counted in a retail store, with the objective of detecting inventory record inaccuracy and unknown out-of-stocks. We consider both "rule-based" approaches, which sort products based on heuristic indices, and "model-based" approaches, which maintain probability distributions for the true inventory levels updated based on sales and replenishment observations.
On Wednesday, April 4, the Frank Hawkins Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise and UNC-Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School will present a lecture by private equity guru and philanthropist Steve Schwarzman. The event, which is part of the 2017-18 Dean’s Speaker Series, will take place at 2:30 p.m. at the Kenan Center in Chapel Hill.
We examine the links between human capital and endowment investing. Harnessing detailed information on university endowments, we find that higher asset allocations to alternative assets accompany higher levels of human capital in the endowment’s investment process. Moreover, high levels of human capital are linked to larger returns, even on a risk-adjusted basis.
Faced with demand uncertainty and heterogeneity in a nascent industry, entrants often consider how many customer segments to serve by tailoring the usage breadth of their product portfolios. Portfolio usage breadth is the extent to which products in a portfolio collectively span distinct customer segments. We suggest that when entrants have use experience in contexts that are potential users of the new product, their portfolios exhibit low usage breadth, due to demand-oriented cognition and knowledge.
How long do nascent industries take to become commercially viable? This paper applies historical methods to the two contemporaneous cases of emergence of the airlines and insulin industry in the early 1900s.
Innovation has long been seen as the engine of economic growth. But as barriers to innovation such as patent thickets and patent litigation have risen dramatically in recent years, firms are beginning to examine the role that patents play in driving innovation. We examine how shifts in a firm’s intellectual property (IP) strategy can affect future innovation.
Whether fair value accounting should be used in financial reporting has been the subject of debate for many years. A key dimension to this debate is whether fair value earnings can provide information to financial statement users that is helpful in making their economic decisions.
Kenan Institute Distinguished Fellow John Haltiwanger of the University of Maryland talks about why the Hollywood story of rising from the mailroom to the boardroom is less likely to happen now.
From April 23 through April 25, 2018, the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise was proud to co-host the Black Communities Conference: A Conference for Collaboration at the Carolina Theatre of Durham, N.C. The event was put on by the institute’s affiliated center, NCGrowth, the Institute for African-American Research, the Southern Historical Collection and the Center for the Study of the American South.
Ruben Carbonell, Frank Hawkins Kenan Distinguished Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at NC State University and a board member at the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise, was presented with the O. Max Gardner Award on May 24. The award is the most significant honor given to faculty by the UNC System Board. Carbonell was recognized for his contributions in engineering, healthcare, education and public policy.
A survey of family business owners conducted a number of years ago by John Ward, co-founder of The Family Business Consulting Group, found that lack of a shared vision for the family business and weak next-generation leadership were two of the top three threats to long-term family firm success. John’s finding was one of the inspirations for my own research on developing next-generation leadership talent in family businesses. In my study of several hundred family firms, it turned out that those two factors were highly related. A shared vision for the family enterprise was strongly predictive of the presence of effective next-generation family leaders.
We study the impact of widespread adoption of work-at-home technology using an equilibrium model where people choose where to live, how to allocate their time between working at home and at the office, and how much space to use in production. A key parameter is the elasticity of substitution between working at home and in the office that we estimate using cross-sectional time-use data.