Publications

December 2012
Background Note

Glossary of Municipal Finance Terms

A note on municipal bond structuring. View Details

Keywords: Local Government; Political Process; Debt Management; Financial Planning; Financial Management; Bonds; Urban Development; Local Range; Government Administration

Educators

24 Sep 2014
Op-Ed

Stop Thinking of Climate Change as a Religious or Political Issue

Now, apparently, we do. The atmosphere's ability to process our exhaust gases, once abundant, is scarce. Scarcity isn't a bad thing. Almost everything is scarce. That's why for almost everything we have systems of property rights to give... View Details

Keywords: by Forest Reinhardt; Energy; Utilities

1989
Chapter

Analytic Themes of the U.S. Program on the Processes of International Negotiation

By: James K. Sebenius and Howard Raiffa

Keywords: Negotiation Process; International Relations; United States

December 2012
Supplement

Jefferson County (C): Subsequent Issuance

By: Daniel Bergstresser and Randolph B. Cohen

Jefferson County, Alabama, faces an EPA mandate requiring sewer system upgrades. How will they finance the upgrades? What consequences will follow? View Details

Keywords: Local Government; Political Process; Bankruptcy; Debt Management; Financial Planning; Urban Development; Environmental Sustainability; Infrastructure; Government and Politics; Borrowing and Debt; Alabama

December 2012
Supplement

Jefferson County (B): Borrowing in March 1997

By: Daniel Bergstresser and Randolph B. Cohen

Jefferson County, Alabama faces an EPA mandate requiring sewer system upgrades. How will they finance the upgrades? What consequences will follow? View Details

Keywords: Local Government; Political Process; Bankruptcy; Debt Management; Financial Planning; Urban Development; Environmental Sustainability; Infrastructure; Government and Politics; Borrowing and Debt; Alabama

1988
Other Unpublished Work

Structure of the U.S. Government Decision Making Process - HBS Technical Note - See professor

By: J. Ronald Fox

Keywords: Decision Making; Government and Politics; United States

1984
Book

Energy Policy in America Since 1945: A Study of Business-Government Relations

By: Richard Vietor

Follows the history of government intervention in U.S. energy markets from 1945 to the present and shows how shifting market conditions of surplus and shortage and above all, price have played a determining role in the political process and U.S. fuel policy... View Details

Keywords: Political Economy; United States; Postwar Policy; Energy; Energy Sources; Policy; United States

2023
Working Paper

Do Third-Party Guarantors Reassure Foot Soldiers?

By: Natalia Garbiras-Díaz, Michael Weintraub, Leopoldo Fergusson, Juana Catalina Garcia Duque and Laia Balcells

Since the end of the Cold War, international third parties such as the United Nations (UN) have become frequent guarantors of peace agreements. Existing studies document that third parties provide assurances that help maintain peace, yet these studies nearly... View Details

Keywords: United Nations; Colombia; Peacemaking; Peace Process; Peace; Civil Unrest; Civil Society; Political Leadership; Policy; Civil Society or Community; Governance; Government and Politics; Economy; Economic Growth; Latin America; South America; Colombia

2013
Working Paper

The Dynamics of Firm Lobbying

By: William R. Kerr, William F. Lincoln and Prachi Mishra

We study the determinants of the dynamics of firm lobbying behavior using a panel data set covering 1998–2006. Our data exhibit three striking facts: (i) few firms lobby, (ii) lobbying status is strongly associated with firm size, and (iii) lobbying status is highly... View Details

Keywords: Lobbying; Political Economy; H-1B; Business Ventures; Policy; Government Legislation; Immigration; Business and Government Relations; Research; Prejudice and Bias

SSRN

November 2014
Article

The Dynamics of Firm Lobbying

By: William R. Kerr, William F. Lincoln and Prachi Mishra

We study the determinants of the dynamics of firm lobbying behavior using a panel data set covering 1998–2006. Our data exhibit three striking facts: (i) few firms lobby, (ii) lobbying status is strongly associated with firm size, and (iii) lobbying status is highly... View Details

Keywords: Lobbying; Political Economy; H-1B; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Policy; Immigration

2016
Article

Academia's Emerging Crisis of Relevance and the Consequent Role of the Engaged Scholar

By: Andrew J. Hoffman

Universities are facing a crisis of relevance. While there are multiple reasons for this to be happening, one that deserves particular attention is the extent to which academic scholars do not see it as their role to engage in public and political discourse. However,... View Details

Keywords: Political Discourse; Public Engagement; Higher Education; Social Media

2023
Book

Suharto's Cold War: Indonesia, Southeast Asia, and the World

By: Mattias Fibiger

After the murder of senior generals in the Indonesian army by elements of the country's communist party in 1965, General Suharto orchestrated the mass killing of some half a million leftists and fellow travelers. But his ambitions spanned far beyond perpetrating a... View Details

Keywords: Indonesia; Cold War; Political Economy; Foreign Aid; International Investment; International Relations; International Finance; History; War; Economic Systems; Government and Politics; Indonesia; Southeast Asia

Web

Road to the White House 2024, a Private Sector Perspective on Presidential Politics - Course Catalog

HBS Course Catalog Road to the White House 2024, a Private Sector Perspective on Presidential Politics Course Number 1705 Senior Lecturer Robert F. White Fall; Q1; 1.5 credits 14 Sessions Paper Overview The majority of Americans are... View Details

December 2012
Article

Estimating the Value of Connections to Vice-President Cheney

By: Rakesh Khurana, Raymond Fisman, Julia Galef and Yongxiang Wang

We estimate the market valuation of personal ties to Richard Cheney. Our proxies for personal ties are based on corporate board linkages that are prevalent in the network sociology literature. We consider a number of distinct political and personal events that either... View Details

Keywords: Event Analysis; Political Economy; Corruption; Networks; United States

Find at Harvard

2022
Chapter

State-Formation, Statist Islam, and Regime Instability: Evidence from Turkey

By: Kristin Fabbe

Religion, and particularly the forces of political Islam and state secularism, have been central to discussions of regime stability in the Turkish case. Intense polarization, political instability, and military interventions have propelled Turkey into crisis about once... View Details

Keywords: Ottoman Empire; Regime; State Secularism; Political Islam; Democracy; Autocracy; Religion; Government and Politics; Turkey

Register to Read

Article

Do Citizens’ Preferences Matter? Shaping Legislator Attitudes Towards Peace Agreements

By: Miguel García-Sánchez, Aila M. Matanock and Natalia Garbiras-Díaz

To what extent are legislators, responsible for the implementation of many peace agreements, responsive to citizens’ preferences? Examining the 2016 Colombian peace agreement, we embed an experiment in the 2019 wave of a survey of all the members of Congress. We inform... View Details

Keywords: Legislation; Legislators; Peace Process; Agreements; Govenment; Voters' Interests; Governance; Government and Politics; Voting; Policy; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Latin America; Colombia

February 26, 2024
Article

Making Workplaces Safer Through Machine Learning

By: Matthew S. Johnson, David I. Levine and Michael W. Toffel

Machine learning algorithms can dramatically improve regulatory effectiveness. This short article describes the authors' scholarly work that shows how the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) could have reduced nearly twice as many occupational... View Details

Keywords: Government Experimentation; Auditing; Inspection; Evaluation; Process Improvement; Government Administration; AI and Machine Learning; Safety; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms

August 2022
Case

Negotiating Peace in Colombia

By: Deepak Malhotra and Cody Smith

This case follows the protracted armed conflict between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), tracing it from its origins over 50 years ago, through the private and public negotiations that ultimately resulted in the 2016... View Details

Keywords: Conflict; Peace Process; Dispute Resolution; Protracted Conflicts; Peacemaking; Civil War; Negotiation; Leadership; Conflict and Resolution; Government Administration; Colombia

Educators

January–February 2023
Article

Triadic Advocacy Work

By: Summer R. Jackson and Katherine C. Kellogg

Scholars of street-level bureaucracy and institutional research focus primarily on the relationships between advocates and their larger bureaucratic and social systems, assuming that advocates have little need to satisfy their beneficiaries. We find otherwise in our... View Details

Keywords: Occupations And Professions; Ethnography; Power And Politics; Work And Organizations; Advocacy; Public Management; Justice