The Black Communities Conference, a.k.a. #BlackCom2019, is a vibrant and uniquely important gathering featuring panel discussions, local tours, film screenings, workshops, keynotes 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. Black Communities: A Conference for Collaboration is co-hosted by the Institute of African American Research and the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise.
Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, institutions of higher education were under immense pressure to live up to their value propositions, with underlying tensions that have been developing for years posing an existential threat to their financial viability. As colleges and universities move classes and operations online in response to the pandemic, questions arise as to what such changes hold not just for now, but for the long-term success of higher education. Can ed tech provide a way forward? This briefing features North Carolina Area Health Education Centers Liason and UNC School of Nursing Professor Mary Schuler, UNC College of Arts and Sciences Associate Dean of Instructional Innovation Professor Kelly Hogan, UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School Dean Doug Shackelford and Association of College and University Educators CEO Susan Cates.
Over spring break, while many students were lounging on the beach, 19 of Dr. Deborah Stroman’s students were touring universities, sports clubs and arenas in Dublin and Cologne. This semester, Dr. Stroman teaches a global sport business course about the 500-billion-dollar sports business industry.
For athletes, building wealth, securing a future after a playing career, and developing the ability to give back start with early and strategic planning. Those were just three of the big takeaways from a panel of authors, academics, former athletes and financial professionals at the Center for Sport Business at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Kenan Institute Executive Director and Institute for Private Capital Research Director Greg Brown breaks down a recent white paper by Antii Ilmanen, Swati Chandra, and Nicholas McQuinn of AQR, which examines expected returns for Private Equity (PE). The paper’s authors claim that, when properly risk-adjusted, the returns on private equity are not attractive relative to public market stocks. The conclusion on lower returns is surprising to many because it’s at odds with what is now the well-documented outperformance of PE over the last few decades.
Most organizational leaders have come to recognize that hiring and retaining a diverse workforce is a business imperative. But many struggle to achieve their diversity goals. In this Kenan Insight, we explore how organizations can measure their “organizational equity” — that is, their internal distribution of power and resources — and build a diverse workforce that leads to greater organizational success.
There is a growing interest in the industry around 3D printing. A related phenomenon is personal fabrication (PF) in which a firm sells products' design and lets the customers personalize and manufacture the product using 3D printing services. In this paper, we characterize the market and operational conditions that make PF an attractive operational strategy.
A daunting tangle of problems defines the global energy space as 2022 winds down. On the one hand, the war in the Ukraine combined with curtailed Russian oil/gas supplies into Europe has reminded many that unfriendly energy suppliers can also deliver inflation and hardship to their customers. On another side, efforts to increase oil/gas supplies both in Europe and globally, face stout resistance to anything that might further entrench hydrocarbons into national economies. Inflation is prompting monetary policies to tighten even as fiscal indiscipline continues via historically high government deficit spending. Concerns over climate change remain an article of faith among leaders of many countries. Other voices decry the folly of calls to suppress oil/gas production when greener alternatives are not ready to replace them. Electorates seem both confused and restless. The risk that they vote in leaders less insistent on decarbonizing economies is palpable.
Given that mask-wearing proved to be an important tool to slow the spread of infection during the COVID-19 pandemic, investigating the psychological and cultural factors that influence norms for mask wearing across cultures is exceptionally important. One factor that may influence mask wearing behavior is the degree to which people believe masks potentially impair emotion recognition.
Physicians spend more than 5 hours a day working on Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems and more than an hour doing EHR tasks after the end of the workday. In this paper, we investigate how physicians' workflow decisions on when to perform EHR tasks affect: (1) total time on EHR and (2) time spent after work.
Sports organizations typically sell tickets for popular elimination style tournaments (e.g., NFL Super Bowl) well in advance of the final games. Fans hesitate to buy these tickets because they are unsure about whether their favorite team will play in those games. As the result the tickets are cornered by agents and scalpers and resold at exorbitant prices once the playing teams are clarified. We demonstrate how consumer forwards and options buffer consumers from uncertainty, enhance league and team profits, and help control scalping.
This study documents that big bath accounting following CEO turnovers is pervasive worldwide and shows that the extent to which CEOs engage in big bath accounting is associated with the degree of discretion they have available in their respective countries. Our analysis is based on a new country-level measure for managerial discretion derived from a questionnaire survey with more than 500 strategy consultants from 35 countries.
This paper investigates how bank supervisors’ enforcement decisions and orders (EDOs) influence the allocation of mortgage lending across demographic groups underlying a banks’ borrower base. Specifically, we investigate how banks’ mortgage lending to minority borrowers relative to white borrowers changes following the resolution of severe EDOs.
We study price optimization under the mixture of boundary logit (MBL) model, which was recently introduced in Jagabathula et al. (2020) and Jagabathula and Venkataraman (2022). We show that the pricing problem under the MBL model is hard to solve in the most general case. However, we prove structural results for the general pricing problem and characterize the optimal solution for several special cases, including a setting in which all products are charged the same price, and a setting with two products.
Despite encouraging signs, India’s retail market remains largely off-limits to large international retailers like Wal-Mart and Carrefour. Opposition to liberalizing FDI in this sector raises concerns about employment losses, unfair competition resulting in the large-scale exit of incumbent domestic retailers, and infant industry arguments to protect the organized domestic retail sector that is at a nascent stage. Based on international evidence, we suggest that allowing entry by large international retailers into the Indian market may help tackle inflation, especially in food prices.
Food ordering and delivery platforms generate online demand for restaurants and deliver food to customers. In return, restaurants pay platforms a commission, typically a percentage of the order amount. Platforms offer partner restaurants the choice of a range of commission rates, rewarding higher commission payments with featured display slots and discounted delivery fees, both of which stimulate demand. Unfortunately, the current environment is grim: platforms scurry to cover delivery costs while restaurants gripe about excessive commissions.
Inspired by a data set from the Chinese retailer JD.com, we study the click and purchase behavior of customers in an online retail setting by employing a structural estimation approach.
We quantify the immediate net effect of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) on the tax burden of corporate profits for public US corporations.
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, two large infrastructure-related bills have been enacted. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), signed into law in November 2021, provides funding for a wide range of activities including roads, rail, transit, broadband, water and electrical infrastructure.
Acquisitions are notoriously difficult to execute successfully. Poor implementation of the post-acquisition integration process is a major source of acquisition value destruction. To surface new solutions for this vexing problem, we leverage the emerging triadic view of M&A activities, which emphasizes the interconnectedness between sellers, acquirers, and the units that are transferred between them.