Markets today are flooded with an increasing number of products and brands, making it difficult for companies to track how their products compete in the market. In this article, the authors describe how they used clickstream data to visualize competition in product categories containing more than 1,000 products.
Do founder-CEOs have an expiration date? In the wake of Jack Dorsey’s resignation from Twitter, some have begun asking whether the move could herald a new era, in which founders voluntarily step aside rather than sticking around for decades or waiting to be ousted. To explore the value added by a founder-CEO, the authors analyzed stock price and financial performance data from more than 2,000 publicly traded companies.
Our Stakeholder Capitalism Grand Challenge Final Report, written by Executive Director Greg Brown and Chief Economist Gerald Cohen, has been published in the Spring 2023 issue of the Journal of Applied Corporate Finance.
In a series of very influential studies, McKinsey (2015; 2018; 2020; 2023) reports finding statistically significant positive relations between the industry-adjusted earnings before interest and taxes margins of global McKinsey-chosen sets of large public firms and the racial/ethnic diversity of their executives. However, when we revisit McKinsey’s tests using data for firms in the publicly observable S&P 500® as of 12/31/2019, we do not find statistically significant relations between McKinsey’s inverse normalized Herfindahl-Hirschman measures of executive racial/ethnic diversity at mid-2020 and either industry-adjusted earnings before interest and taxes margin or industry-adjusted sales growth, gross margin, return on assets, return on equity, and total shareholder return over the prior five years 2015–2019.
Both the increased transparency and the institutionalization of the municipal bond market have led to dramatic declines in the profits of underwriters, especially so for those whose underwriting activity is national in scope. Using comprehensive data on all trades, all bonds, and all underwriting spreads available between 2005 and 2023, we show that underwriters facing increasingly informed investors in the primary market are unable to capture high markups from investors but are also unable to raise costs to issuers.
Schemas are a central concept in strategy and organization theory. Yet, despite the importance of schemas, little is known about how they emerge. Our in-depth historical analysis of how groups in the life insurance industry developed their schema for the computer from 1945-1975 addresses this gap. We identify three key processes--assimilation, deconstruction, and unitization--that collectively explain and resolve an inherent tension related to schema emergence: how to make the unfamiliar familiar but conceptually distinct. We also find that each process relates to analogical transfer, but in a more pluralistic and dynamic way than the existing literature describes. Broadly, these findings have important implications for organizational change and managerial cognition.
We construct a comprehensive panel of trading venue-level short sales and examine where short sellers exploit their information advantage. We examine the tradeoff that informed traders weigh between transaction costs and execution probability posited by Hendershott and Mendelson (2000), Ye (2011), and Zhu (2014), and find that short sales comprise a greater proportion of exchange trading than of dark pool trading. Furthermore, exchange short sales are more informative than dark pool short sales about future price moves. We find evidence of increased exchange short sales and exchange short sale informativeness prior to corporate news events. Finally, we examine the relationship between several market design characteristics and informed trade. The results provide direct evidence that dark pools attract less informed trade than exchanges do, particularly when information is short lived.
Except for relatively short but intense episodes of high market risk, average idiosyncratic risk (IR) falls steadily after 2000 until almost the end of our sample period in 2017. The decrease has been such that from 2012 to 2017 average IR was lower than any time since 1965.
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.
ABN AMRO’s origins date as far back as 1824, when its predecessor Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij was founded in the Netherlands. More recently the Dutch-based international bank is the result of the 1991 merger of ABN bank and AMRO bank. Today, ABN AMRO ranks 10th in Europe and 22nd in the world based on tier 1 capital. It has over 3,000 branches in more than 60 countries, a staff of over1105,000 full-time equivalents and total assets of EUR 560 billion (as per end 2003). The firm is listed on several exchanges, including the Amsterdam, London and New York Stock Exchanges.
Mark Little, executive director of CREATE, a Kenan Institute-affiliated center, has been named to the inaugural North Carolina Black Entrepreneurship Council (NC BEC). The council was founded by NC IDEA, a private foundation committed to supporting entrepreneurial ambition and economic empowerment in North Carolina.
In December 2019, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) Center for the Business of Health (CBOH) began a research partnership with Sharecare, a leading digital health company founded by technology entrepreneur, Jeff Arnold, to assess the economic value of changing various health behaviors via mobile health (mHealth) interventions.
Pete Stavros of KKR & Co. founded Ownership Works, a new initiative backed by 19 private equity firms, with the objective of reducing income inequality by increasing employee share ownership. The group has prominent backers and a lofty goal of creating $20 billion in wealth in 10 years. As a researcher who has worked on employee share ownership and the benefits it can create, I was encouraged by the news. But while I broadly support employee ownership, such initiatives also can raise red flags because of the risk they impose on employees. As such, it is worthwhile to think carefully through what we know and don’t know about such programs.
For more than 50 years, historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have been serving the African American community, providing a firm grounding not only in education, but also in black history and culture. Jim Johnson, Director of Education, Aging and Economic Development Initiatives for the Kenan Institute, spoke with Frank Stasio of The State of Things on the relevance and challenges of HBCUs today.
A panel of experts convened by UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School and its affiliated Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise will be offering a press briefing via webinar examining the technological, operational and financial challenges colleges and universities face amidst the COVID-19 crisis. Join Tuesday, April 21, at 11 a.m. EDT.
Black Communities Conference 2021 will be a vibrant, virtual gathering featuring roundtable discussions, collaborative sessions, films, book talks and more. Our core mission is to foster collaboration among Black communities and universities for the purpose of enhancing Black community life and furthering the understanding of Black communities.
We measure the racial/ethnic densities (RAEDs) of executives in a random sample of 523 US publicly traded companies and the S&P 500®. When we calibrate the RAEDs of executives as a whole against the RAEDs of the 2019 US population, we find that American Indians/Alaska Natives, Blacks and Hispanics are underrepresented and Whites are overrepresented. However, when we calibrate executive RAEDs against a benchmark that seeks to take into account key features of the demand for and supply of proto-executive talent, namely the RAEDs of the cohorts of students graduating with a bachelor’s degree from the broad New York Times 2017 list of the top 100 US four-year colleges and universities, matched to executives’ BA/BS graduation years, mostly different and at times opposite findings obtain.
Times are tough for universities. Leaders on campus are facing more pressure than ever – strategic, operational, and financial. How do we manage our administrative functions efficiently to free up resources for our core dual mission of teaching and research?
CREATE Faculty Director and UNC Public Policy Professor Maryann Feldman recently served as a panelist examining conditions for technology-based economic development. While speaking to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology Sept. 29, Feldman cautioned against treating universities as lynchpins in the effort to drive regional innovation—noting reforms are needed to help university technology transfer offices recoup operating costs—and strongly advocated for new financing models to spur economic development in areas lacking venture capital support.
The 2017 Workshop on North Carolina Manufacturing Data Science targets a critical gap in the emerging digital manufacturing ecosystem – achieving data-driven improvements in manufacturing processes to realize broader benefits across the factory and enterprise. It will bring together personnel from North Carolina industry, state government, University of North Carolina (UNC) General Administration, and UNC system universities to discuss current capabilities and future needs for widespread implementation.