Urban Investment Strategies Center Director Jim Johnson weighed in on the initial surge and subsequent decline in Black bookstore sales during the COVID-19 pandemic in a recent article by CNN Business.
We estimate the causal effects of employee-friendly scheduling practices on store financial performance at the US retailer Gap, Inc. The randomized field experiment evaluated a multi-component intervention designed to improve dimensions of work schedules – inconsistency, unpredictability, inadequacy, and lack-of-employee control – shown to undermine employee well-being and productivity.
The Kenan Institute will host John Allison for an exclusive conversation about leadership with UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School students. Allison is an Executive in Residence at the Wake Forest School of Business, as well as a member of the Cato Institute’s Board of Directors and Chairman of the Executive Advisory Council of the Cato Institute’s Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives.
We explore the impact of Knightian uncertainty on contracting within a multi-layered firm. We study a setting where, absent uncertainty, division managers should be paid based on their division performance, but not other divisions' performance.
European economies are now dominated by services, and virtually all companies view service as critical to retaining their customers today and in the future. This European edition provides students with a complete introduction to the unique marketing challenges that services present. Guiding students to recognize and understand these special characteristics, the text also explores frameworks for developing and implementing service strategies for competitive advantage across a wide array of industries.
We present preliminary work to construct a knowledge curation system to advance research in the study of regional economics. The proposed system exploits natural language processing (NLP) techniques to automatically implement business event extraction, provides a user-facing interface to assist human curators, and a feedback loop to improve the performance of the Information Extraction Model for the automated parts of the system.
Universities have become essential players in the generation of knowledge and innovation. Through the commercialization of technology, they have developed the ability to influence regional economic growth. By examining different commercialization models this book analyses technology transfer at universities as part of a national and regional system.
Past research has shown that founders bring important capabilities and resources from their prior employment into their new firms and that these intergenerational transfers influence the performance of these ventures. However, we know little about whether organizational practices also transfer from parents to spawns, and if so, what types of practices are transferred? Using a combination of survey and registrar data and through a detailed identification strategy, we examine these two previously unaddressed questions.
This article utilizes a unique database (PLACE, the PLatform for Advancing Community Economies) to explore relationships between founders’ prior work experiences and the outcomes of their entrepreneurial firms.
We directly test the reliability and relevance of investee fair values reported by listed private equity funds (LPEs). In our setting, disaggregated fair value measurements are observable for funds’ investees; and investee accounting fundamentals are also publicly disclosed. We find that LPE fair value measurements reflect equity book value and net income in a manner consistent with stock market pricing of listed companies.
On Wednesday, March 3, Ford Foundation President Darren Walker joined UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School Dean Doug Shackelford for an exclusive virtual discussion. Walker discussed leading the $14 billion philanthropy, focusing on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the nation's reckoning around systemic racism and how business plays an essential role in the public good.
We study the microstructure of the U.S. housing market using a novel data set comprising housing search and bargaining behavior for millions of interactions between sellers and buyers. We first establish a number of stylized facts, the most prominent being a nearly 50--50 split between houses that sold below final listing price and those that sold above final listing price. Second, we compare observed behavior with predictions from a large theoretical housing literature.
We examine whether the contribution of firm-level accounting earnings to the informativeness of the aggregate is tilted towards earnings with specific financial reporting characteristics. Specifically, we investigate whether considering the smoothness of firm-level earnings increases the informativeness of aggregate earnings for future real GDP, and if so, whether macroeconomic forecasters use this information efficiently. Using recently-developed mixed data sampling methods, we find that the aggregate is tilted towards firms with smoother earnings and that this composition of aggregate earnings outperforms traditional weighting schemes.
Financial intermediaries often provide guarantees resembling out-of-the-money put options, exposing them to undiversifiable tail risk. We present a model in the context of the U.S. life insurance industry in which the regulatory framework incentivizes value-maximizing insurers to hedge variable annuity (VA) guarantees, though imperfectly, and shift risks into high-risk and illiquid bonds. We calibrate the model to insurer-level data and identify the VA-induced changes in insurers' risk exposures.
For the first time since the tumult of the global financial crisis, the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates by 25 basis points on July 31. The decision was controversial along a multitude of dimensions.
The economy continues to rank as voters’ top issue leading up to the historic 2020 U.S. presidential election – coming as no surprise given the ongoing recession and unprecedented economic turmoil driven by COVID-19. But as we begin to see some indicators rebound and others stagnate, what is the true state of the economy – and what should our elected officials and other leaders be doing to improve it?
This paper characterizes the implications of risk-on/risk-off shocks for emerging market capital flows and returns. We document that these shocks have important implications not only for the median of emerging markets flows and returns but also for the left tail.
Stephen Arbogast, Director of the Energy Center at the Kenan-Flagler Business School, offers an in-depth explanation of supply dynamics in global energy markets--and why oil and gas prices have been so chaotic.
On Monday, Sept. 24, a standing room-only crowd gathered at the Kenan Center in Chapel Hill to participate in a fireside chat with Krishnamurthy Subramanian, the 17th chief economic advisor to the government of India. The program was led by UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School professors Anusha Chari and Christian Lundblad.
The increasingly open flow of goods and services has fundamentally altered the world economy and global power balances. It is also reshaping the American political system and our economic geography, providing clear and lasting benefits for some and negative impacts for others. This Kenan Institute's Global Trade, Global Trade-Offs conference convened thought leaders from the business community, government and academia to explore the core questions of the impact of international trade on society, the changing nature of work and economic productivity.