Publications
Publications
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- Faculty Publications (462)
Optimism
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- 2015
- Chapter
The Optimal Maturity of Government Debt
By: Robin Greenwood, Samuel Gregory Hanson, Joshua S. Rudolph and Lawrence Summers
- Article
Financing Innovation
By: William R. Kerr and Ramana Nanda
We review the recent literature on the financing of innovation, inclusive of large companies and new startups. This research strand has been very active over the past five years, generating important new findings, questioning some long-held beliefs, and creating its... View Details
- October 2015
- Article
Managing the Performance Tradeoffs from Partner Integration: Implications of Contract Choice in R&D Projects
By: Alan MacCormack and Anant Mishra
Formal contracts represent an important governance instrument with which firms exercise control of and compensate partners in R&D projects. The specific type of contract used, however, can vary significantly across projects. In some, firms govern partnering... View Details
- October 2015 (Revised October 2016)
- Case
Building Watson: Not So Elementary, My Dear! (Abridged)
By: Willy C. Shih
This case is set inside IBM Research's efforts to build a computer that can successfully take on human challengers playing the game show Jeopardy! It opens with the machine named Watson offering the incorrect answer "Toronto" to a seemingly simple question during the... View Details
- October 2015
- Case
Transpower New Zealand: Evaluating Board Performance
By: Boris Groysberg, Paul M. Healy and Sarah L. Abbott
Mark Verbiest, Chairman of Transpower New Zealand, initiated a performance review of Transpower's board of directors. The review, which took four months to complete, provided board members with individualized feedback on their performance, as well as information on how... View Details
- Article
Behavioral Hazard in Health Insurance
By: Katherine Baicker, Sendhil Mullainathan and Joshua Schwartzstein
A fundamental implication of standard moral hazard models is overuse of low-value medical care because copays are lower than costs. In these models, the demand curve alone can be used to make welfare statements, a fact relied on by much empirical work. There is ample... View Details
- September 2015 (Revised March 2017)
- Case
Château Margaux (Abridged)
By: Elie Ofek, Eric E. Vogt and Robert J. Dolan
Château Margaux, one of only five prestigious estates in the Bordeaux Medoc wine region to have been classified as a "first-growth", is facing a host of strategic decisions in early 2013. Up until this point the estate had been selling two red wines, a first wine whose... View Details
- August 2015
- Article
A Comparative-Advantage Approach to Government Debt Maturity
By: Robin Greenwood, Samuel G. Hanson and Jeremy C. Stein
We study optimal government debt maturity in a model where investors derive monetary services from holding riskless short-term securities. In a setting where the government is the only issuer of such riskless paper, it trades off the monetary premium associated with... View Details
- 2015
- Chapter
Reliable Sustainability Ratings: The Influence of Business Models on Information Intermediaries
By: Robert G. Eccles, Jock Herron and George Serafeim
A new generation of corporate reporting—integrated reporting—is emerging that will help investors and other key stakeholders such as employees, customers, suppliers, and NGOs develop a deeper and more comprehensive appreciation of corporate performance than what is... View Details
- 2015
- Working Paper
Customers and Investors: A Framework for Understanding Financial Institutions
By: Robert C. Merton and Robert T. Thakor
Financial institutions have both investors and customers. Investors, such as those who invest in stocks and bonds or private/public-sector guarantors of institutions, expect an appropriate risk-adjusted return in exchange for the financing and risk-bearing that they... View Details
Keywords: Financial Institutions
- May 2015
- Case
Pricing in a Digital World (2015)
By: John Gourville
Dynamic pricing, especially as practiced by Uber and Lift, seems to be all the rage. In this case, we look at five interesting applications of dynamic price and price customization, each made possible by advances in digital technology. These range from the online... View Details
- 2015
- Working Paper
What Do Private Equity Firms Say They Do?
By: Paul A. Gompers, Steven N. Kaplan and Vladimir Mukharlyamov
We survey 79 private equity investors with combined assets under management (AUM) of over $750 billion about their practices in firm valuation, capital structure, governance, and value creation. Investors rely primarily on internal rate of return (IRR) and multiples to... View Details
- Article
De Gustibus non est Taxandum: Heterogeneity in Preferences and Optimal Redistribution
By: Benjamin B Lockwood and Matthew Weinzierl
The prominent but unproven intuition that preference heterogeneity reduces redistribution in a standard optimal tax model is shown to hold under the plausible condition that the distribution of preferences for consumption relative to leisure rises, in terms of... View Details
- March 2015 (Revised March 2023)
- Case
Immigration Policy in Germany (A)
By: Matthew Weinzierl, Katrina Flanagan and Alastair Su
Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel faced economic and moral pressure to encourage greater immigration from struggling European, and especially Eurozone, countries after the economic downturn that began in 2008. In fact, it was possible that both the Euro currency union... View Details
- January 2015
- Case
Chevron Under Fire
By: George Serafeim, Rebecca Henderson and Christine Snively
Oil giant, Chevron, faced numerous challenges on environmental, social and governance (ESG) grounds in the first decade of the 21st century, including some major lawsuits and actions by NGOs. The case describes those challenges and raises questions about what is the... View Details
- 2015
- Chapter
Optimal Process Control of Symbolic Transfer Functions
By: Christopher Griffin and Elisabeth Paulson
Transfer function modeling is a standard technique in classical Linear Time Invariant and Statistical Process Control. The work of Box and Jenkins was seminal in developing methods for identifying parameters associated with classical (r, s, k) transfer functions.... View Details
- 2014
- Working Paper
The Rise and Fall of Demand for Securitizations
By: Sergey Chernenko, Samuel G. Hanson and Adi Sunderam
Collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and private-label mortgage-backed securities (MBS) backed by nonprime loans played a central role in the recent financial crisis. Little is known, however, about the underlying forces that drove investor demand for these... View Details
- Article
How Not to Cut Health Care Costs
By: Robert S. Kaplan and Derek A. Haas
Health care providers in much of the world are trying to respond to the tremendous pressure to reduce costs—but evidence suggests that many of their attempts are counterproductive, raising costs and sometimes decreasing the quality of care. Using evidence from field... View Details
- October 2014
- Article
The Promise of Positive Optimal Taxation: Normative Diversity and a Role for Equal Sacrifice
A prominent assumption in modern optimal tax research is that the objective of taxation is Utilitarian. I present new survey evidence that most people disagree with this assumption, preferring tax policies based at least in part on a classic alternative objective: the... View Details
- Article
Learning Through Noticing: Theory and Evidence from a Field Experiment
By: Rema Hanna, Sendhil Mullainathan and Joshua Schwartzstein
We consider a model of technological learning under which people "learn through noticing": they choose which input dimensions to attend to and subsequently learn about from available data. Using this model, we show how people with a great deal of experience may... View Details