Publications

April 2013
Article

Using the Crowd as an Innovation Partner

By: Kevin J. Boudreau and Karim R. Lakhani

More and more organizations are turning to crowds for help in solving their most vexing innovation and research questions, but managers remain understandably cautious. It seems risky and even unnatural to push problems out to vast groups of strangers distributed around... View Details

Keywords: Innovation and Management; Research and Development

October 2011
Article

The Surprising Power of Age-Dependent Taxes

By: Matthew C. Weinzierl

This article provides a new, empirically driven application of the dynamic Mirrleesian framework by studying a feasible and potentially powerful tax reform: age-dependent labor income taxation. I show analytically how age dependence improves policy on both the... View Details

Keywords: Taxation; Policy; Age; Income; Mathematical Methods; Welfare; United States

March 2022 (Revised October 2022)
Case

Transforming Kimball International, Inc. (A)

By: Lynn S. Paine and Will Hurwitz

Kimball International, Inc. (KII), led by CEO Kristie Juster, and its board of directors, chaired by Kim Ryan, faced critical questions about KII’s future in the spring of 2021. Two years earlier, the board had appointed Juster as the new CEO of KII, a publicly traded,... View Details

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29 Jul 2019
Research & Ideas

How Companies Benefit When Employees Work Remotely

Companies that let their workers decide where and when to do their jobs—whether in another city or in the middle of the night—increase employee productivity, reduce turnover, and lower organizational costs, new research suggests. Prithwiraj Choudhury, an associate... View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz

2023
Working Paper

Too Many Managers: The Strategic Use of Titles to Avoid Overtime Payments

By: Lauren Cohen, Umit Gurun and N. Bugra Ozel

We find widespread evidence of firms appearing to avoid paying overtime wages by exploiting a federal law that allows them to do so for employees termed as “managers” and paid a salary above a pre-defined dollar threshold. We show that listings for salaried positions... View Details

Keywords: Wages; Organizational Design; Job Design and Levels; Compensation and Benefits

January–February 2018
Article

More than a Paycheck: How to Create Good Blue-Collar Jobs in the Knowledge Economy

By: Dennis Campbell, John Case and Bill Fotsch

Fifty years ago a good blue-collar job was with a large manufacturer such as General Motors or Goodyear. Often unionized, it paid well, offered benefits, and was secure. But manufacturing employment has steadily declined, from about 25% of the U.S. labor force in 1970... View Details

Keywords: Jobs and Positions; Employee Ownership; Profit Sharing; Organizational Culture

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Article

The Baby Benefits Club

By: Debora L. Spar

This past summer several prominent firms seemed to be competing for the title of America's most family-friendly company. In August, Netflix announced plans to offer new mothers and fathers "unlimited leave". Microsoft countered quickly, promising to increase its own... View Details

Keywords: Parental Leave; Maternity Leave; Employees; Compensation and Benefits; Policy; Gender; Equality and Inequality

May–June 2019
Article

Your Workforce Is More Adaptable Than You Think

By: Joseph B. Fuller, Manjari Raman, Judith K. Wallenstein and Alice de Chalendar

In 2018 the Project on Managing the Future of Work at HBS teamed up with the BCG Henderson Institute to survey 6,500 business leaders and 11,000 workers about the various forces reshaping the nature of work. The responses revealed a surprising gap: While the executives... View Details

Keywords: Management; Employees; Attitudes; Organizational Culture; Organizational Change and Adaptation

2016
Working Paper

Food Stamp Entrepreneurs

By: Gareth Olds

This paper explores how eligibility for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as the Food Stamps Program) affects firm formation. Using a variety of identification strategies, I show that expanded SNAP eligibility in the mid-2000s... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Welfare or Wellbeing

Forthcoming
Chapter

Oil, Macroeconomic Volatility and Crime in the Determination of Beliefs in Venezuela

By: Rafael Di Tella, Javier Donna and Robert MacCulloch

Book Abstract: At the beginning of the twentieth century Venezuela had one of the poorest economies in Latin America, but by 1970 it had become the richest country in the region and one of the twenty richest countries in the world, ahead of countries such as Greece,... View Details

Keywords: Macroeconomics; Volatility; Crime and Corruption; Values and Beliefs; Non-Renewable Energy; Energy Industry; Venezuela

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April 2019 (Revised March 2020)
Case

Handy: The Future of Work? (A)

By: Nien-hê Hsieh and Kieron Stopforth

Witnessing numerous lawsuits alleging that online platform companies misclassified workers as contractors when they were actually employees, Handy’s founders faced a series of decisions. Handy was an online platform business that enabled customers to book appointments... View Details

Keywords: Employment; Working Conditions; Entrepreneurship; Compensation and Benefits; Internet and the Web; Ethics; Fairness; Service Industry; United States

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22 Mar 2024
Research & Ideas

Open Source Software: The $9 Trillion Resource Companies Take for Granted

to replace the free human labor behind open source platforms, the researchers calculated the estimated cost for an individual to recreate the software packages by measuring the number of lines of code. The team calculated how many hours... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne; Computer; Information Technology; Technology

April 2008
Supplement

Chunghwa Telecom Co., Ltd. (B)

By: Paul W. Marshall, Michael Shih-ta Chen and Keith Chi-ho Wong

In late November 2000, Chung Telecom Co., Ltd., the once-monopolized telecom operator owned by the Taiwanese government, was on its way to privatization. Mr. C.K. Mao, Chairman of the company, was headed the job only three months earlier, after its prior chairman... View Details

Keywords: State Ownership; Jobs and Positions; Monopoly; Privatization; Competition; Decisions; Motivation and Incentives; Labor and Management Relations; Resignation and Termination; Compensation and Benefits; Price; Status and Position; Telecommunications Industry; Public Administration Industry; Taiwan

2011
Working Paper

The Institutional Logic of Great Global Firms

By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Theories of the firm have been dominated by a legacy of ideas from early industrialization that pose zero-sum opposition between capital and labor (or capital and nearly everything else), differentiating the economy from society and often posing irreconcilable... View Details

Keywords: Economy; Capital; Globalized Firms and Management; Labor; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Practice; Conflict of Interests; Social Issues; Theory

03 Oct 2022
Research & Ideas

Why a Failed Startup Might Be Good for Your Career After All

over time, while non-founders maxed out around 10. Only 20 percent of workers reached level 20 or greater. Founders’ careers progress faster before founding. Even before founding a start-up, founders tend to attain more senior positions in the View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

Research Summary

Overview

Dr. Sheth's research focuses on Indian political economy and social history from the sixteenth century to the contemporary, concentrating on the relationship between business households, financial capital, landed rights, and the dissolution and formation of states.... View Details

19 May 2015
First Look

First Look: May 19

and bank executives appear to profit from the analysts' bias since the bias is associated with higher levels of insider trading. Our results highlight the bias created by asking analysts to rate their outside opportunities in the labor... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

Research Summary

Optimal Portfolios with Housing Derivatives

Households that contemplate moving to different cities or trading up or down in the fu-ture are exposed to substantial housing risk. In order to mitigate this risk, I derive the op-timal portfolios using housing futures. In addition to the optimum growth portfolio,... View Details

November 2018
Article

Global Evidence on Economic Preferences

By: Armin Falk, Anke Becker, Thomas Dohmen, Benjamin Enke, David Huffman and Uwe Sunde

This article studies the global variation in economic preferences. For this purpose, we present the Global Preference Survey (GPS), an experimentally validated survey data set of time preference, risk preference, positive and negative reciprocity, altruism, and trust... View Details

Keywords: Economic Preferences; Economics; Behavior; Surveys; Analytics and Data Science; Global Range