How do an organization's task requirements affect the ways in which it reacts to competitors’ strategic investments? This study uses a novel measure of task requirements (Case Mix Index), to test the competitive and spillover effects of prior adoption on a focal organization's timing of adoption, while accounting for the underlying demand-side drivers of adoption.
Customer reviews are essential to online marketplaces. However, reviews typically vary; ratings of a product or service are rarely the same. In many service marketplaces, including the ones for solar panel installations, supply-side participants are active. That is, a seller must make a proposal to serve each customer. In such marketplaces, it is not clear how (or if) the dispersion in customer reviews affects the seller activity level and number of matches in the marketplace. Our paper examines this by considering both ratings and text reviews.
CEO pay is the latest point of contention in the political fight over ESG, but the arguments have become oversimplified. When we think about good corporate governance, what does the evidence say about CEO pay? The results may surprise you.
Recent research has documented that industry concentration has increased significantly over the past 25 years, with potentially negative consequences for competition, productivity, and social welfare. Some have suggested that greater corporate tax planning by industry leaders, which can provide them with a cost advantage over their competitors, has contributed to this trend. As a result, policymakers are targeting such tax planning to reduce industry concentration.
Using confidential offer-level data on the US housing market, this paper examines the rounding-off heuristics in the bilateral bargaining process. We demonstrate that home sellers and home buyers follow different rounding-off heuristics. While sellers' list prices cluster more frequently around charm numbers (e.g. 349,999), buyers' offer prices and negotiated final sales prices cluster at salient round numbers.
Entrepreneurs making decisions under uncertainty are encouraged to evaluate their initial ideas through hypothesis testing, but entrepreneurial approaches vary in their emphasis on ex-ante theory development prior to collecting evidence. In this paper, we examine whether and how entrepreneurs benefit from adopting an evidence-based approach or a theory-and-evidence-based approach to decision-making.
Rodney E. Hood, National Credit Union Administration board member, discusses recent ESG-related legislation and the role governments can play during a panel at the February 2023 Frontiers of Business Conference.
When policymakers implement a disinflation program directed at high inflation, the real dollar value of their country’s stock market index experiences a cumulative abnormal 12-month return of 48 percent in anticipation of the event. In contrast, the average cumulative abnormal 12-month return associated with disinflations directed at moderate inflation is negative 18 percent. The 66-percentage point difference between cumulative abnormal returns, along with descriptive evidence and case studies, suggests that unlike the swift eradication of past high inflations documented by Sargent (1982), the US will not experience a quick, low-cost transition from moderate inflation to the Fed’s two-percent target.
Theories of crowdsourced search suggest that firms should limit the search space from which solutions to the problem may be drawn by constraining the problem definition. In turn, problems that are not or cannot be constrained should be tackled through other means of innovation. We propose that unconstrained problems can be crowdsourced, but firms need to govern the crowds differently.
Crowdsourcing as a mechanism of open innovation is a popular way for organizations to solicit ideas from external agents. Our research focuses on the relationship between examples in problem statements provided to a crowd and the subsequent number of ideas submitted by the crowd.
We hypothesize that after a relaxation of short selling constraints, an escalation in short selling activity will heighten incentives for short sellers to accelerate price discovery by revealing their negative information. Consistent with this conjecture, we find that the overall sentiment of media coverage tilts significantly more negative for pilot relative to control firms following exogenous relief of short sale constraints.
We use textual analysis of mandatory accounting filings to develop firm-level, time-varying measures of exposure to individual government agencies. The measures vary predictably across industries and with broad regulatory interventions that expanded the scope and power of different government agencies, but also include substantial firm-specific, time-varying components.
UNC Kenan-Flagler Assistant Professor Tim Kundro fields questions concerning how managers and firms can best foster a healthy working environment.
This study examines the spillover effect of environmental enforcement through private lending networks. Financial lending institutions face growing public and regulatory pressures to manage and reduce environmental risks relating to their lending activities and therefore are motivated to monitor corporate borrowers’ environmental practices.
Academics and innovators recently convened at the institute's wealth inequality conference to discuss the effects of income disparity and how education and research can create opportunities for more equitable access.
Companies face increasing pressure from different stakeholders to address various environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues. In their efforts to engage with these issues, they might pursue symbolic or substantive actions, either pre-emptively (proactive actions) or in response to specific targeted threats (reactive actions). Yet we know relatively little about how different stakeholders react to this repertoire of corporate actions and importantly, whether they are aligned in their reaction. We ask this question in the context of gender inequality, an issue that has become salient due to heightened societal attention thanks to the #MeToo movement.
We investigate the role of information dissemination about cyberattacks through major newswires on municipal finance. Employing a difference-in-differences approach to identify causal effects, we find that county-level cyberattacks covered by the media cause increases in new offer yields and reduce bond issuance.
When a business model innovation (BMI) appears, incumbent firms experience great uncertainty about its potential ramifications and their capacity to assimilate the new business model. To resolve such uncertainty, incumbents seek to learn from industry peers, which can spark organizational herding. Organizational herding in BMI contexts is distinct, relative to product/technology adoption contexts, because in addition to peer behaviors, incumbents actively attempt to evaluate peer outcomes, and the importance of peer behaviors and outcomes likely vary, both over time and across types of peers.
Throughout 2022, the Kenan Institute at UNC-Chapel Hill explored how ESG factors enter into and play a role in the decisions of corporate managers and investors. We have framed this analysis within the broader notion of “stakeholder capitalism,” a model in which business decisions reflect explicit consideration of their expected impact on a broader set of corporate stakeholders.
Punishments are not always administered immediately after a crime is committed. Although scholars and researchers claim that third parties should normatively enact punishments proportionate to a given crime, we contend that third parties punish transgressors more severely when there is a time delay between a transgressor’s crime and when they face punishment for it. We theorize that this occurs because of a perception of unfairness, whereby third parties view the process that led to time delays as unfair.