Publications

December 2013
Article

Leviathan as a Minority Shareholder: Firm-level Implications of State Equity Purchases

By: Carlos F. K. V. Inoue, Sergio G. Lazzarini and Aldo Musacchio

In many countries, firms face institutional voids that raise the costs of doing business and thwart entrepreneurial activity. We examine a particular mechanism to address those voids: minority state ownership. Due to their minority nature, such stakes are less affected... View Details

Keywords: Business Groups; Development Banks; State Capitalism; Performance; State Ownership; Brazil

What about the race between education and technology in the Global South? Comparing skill premiums in colonial Africa and Asia

Historical research on the race between education and technology has focused on the West but barely touched upon ‘the rest’. A new occupational wage database for 50 African and... View Details

25 Apr 2023
Op-Ed

How SHEIN and Temu Conquered Fast Fashion—and Forged a New Business Model

Two China-based retail platforms, SHEIN and Temu, are getting a huge amount of attention in the fashion industry these days. I believe that the significance of these platforms goes way beyond the ability to give consumers trendy,... View Details

Keywords: by John Deighton; Fashion; Retail; Consumer Products

Article

Don't Let Power Corrupt You

By: Julie Battilana and Tiziana Casciaro

Although power is essential to taking charge and driving change, it makes leaders vulnerable to two traps that can not only erode their own effectiveness but also undermine their teams. Hubris—the excessive pride and self-confidence that can come with power—causes... View Details

Keywords: Humility; Empathy; Hubris; Leadership; Power and Influence; Moral Sensibility; Performance Effectiveness

2014
Article

Why Was Boston Strong?: Law Enforcement Lessons from the Boston Marathon Bombing

By: Dutch Leonard, Christine M. Cole and Arnold M. Howitt

On April 15, 2013, at 2:49 pm, an improvised explosive device (IED) detonated near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Three people died, and more than 260 others needed hospital care, many having lost limbs or suffered horrific wounds. Those explosions began about... View Details

Keywords: Boston Marathon Bombing; Disaster Response; Emergency Management; Crisis Management; Law Enforcement

March 2001 (Revised April 2002)
Case

Ginzel et al v. Kolcraft Enterprises et al (A)

By: Michael A. Wheeler

Examines the wrongful death lawsuit brought by the family of an infant who died after a portable crib collapsed. The manufacturer, Kolcraft, licensed the Playskool brand name from the co-defendant, Hasbro Industries. Raises difficult questions about what the two... View Details

Keywords: Safety; Product; Negotiation; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Lawsuits and Litigation; Legal Liability; Brands and Branding; Consumer Products Industry; United States

Inequality regimes in Africa from pre-colonial times to the present

While current levels of economic inequality in Africa receive ample attention from academics and policymakers, we know little about the long-run evolution of inequality in the region. Even the new and influential ‘global inequality literature’ that is associated... View Details

January 2024
Article

Population Interference in Panel Experiments

By: Kevin Wu Han, Guillaume Basse and Iavor Bojinov

The phenomenon of population interference, where a treatment assigned to one experimental unit affects another experimental unit’s outcome, has received considerable attention in standard randomized experiments. The complications produced by population interference in... View Details

Keywords: Outcome or Result; Research; Situation or Environment

January 2019 (Revised January 2021)
Case

The Louvre

By: Rohit Deshpandé, Francois-Lucien Vulliermet and Daniela Beyersdorfer

Once a royal residence and today one of the most photographed Parisian landmarks, the Louvre, home of iconic masterpieces, was the world’s largest and most visited museum in 2017. Its President Director Jean-Luc Martinez had since 2013 spearheaded its development and... View Details

Keywords: Customer-centricity; Cultural Organizations; Museum; Brand; Customer Focus and Relationships; Mission and Purpose; Culture; Education; Brands and Branding; Marketing; Fine Arts Industry

Article

Learning from Potentially Biased Statistics: Household Inflation Perceptions and Expectations in Argentina

By: Alberto Cavallo, Guillermo Cruces and Ricardo Perez-Truglia

When forming expectations, households may be influenced by perceived bias in the information they receive. In this paper, we study how individuals learn from potentially biased statistics using data from both a natural experiment and a survey experiment during a... View Details

Keywords: Inflation Expectations; Bayesian Estimation; Inflation and Deflation; Information; Household; Behavior; Argentina

June 2012 (Revised March 2014)
Case

I Paid a Bribe (Dot) Com

By: Karthik Ramanna and Rachna Tahilyani

Anti-corruption web platform "ipaidabribe.com" leverages the transparency and anonymity of the Internet to encourage private citizens in India who have been the victims of corruption to self-report details of bribes paid, including the bribe amount, the name of the... View Details

Keywords: Crime and Corruption; Internet and the Web; Ethics; Service Industry; India

July 2019 (Revised November 2019)
Case

Osaro: Picking the Best Path

By: William R. Kerr, James Palano and Bastiane Huang

The founder of Osaro saw the potential of deep reinforcement learning to allow robots to be applied to new applications. Osaro targeted warehousing, already a dynamic industry for robotics and automation, for its initial product—a system which would allow robotic arms... View Details

04 Dec 2024
HBS Seminar

Mert Demirer, MIT Sloan School of Management

2021
Chapter

Renewing the Relevance of IB: Can Some History Help?

By: Geoffrey Jones

International business (IB) as a discipline has given limited attention to contemporary grand challenges of inequality, global warming, aging populations, endemic health crises, and de-globalization, in all of which multinationals are either central to the problem or... View Details

Keywords: International Business; Globalization; History; Multinational Firms and Management

14 Nov 2011
Working Paper Summaries

The Impact of Corporate Sustainability on Organizational Process and Performance

Keywords: by Robert G. Eccles, Ioannis Ioannou & George Serafeim; Accounting

23 Nov 2011
Working Paper Summaries

The Organization of Firms Across Countries

Keywords: by Nicholas Bloom, Rafaella Sadun & John Van Reenen

Research Summary

Research Focus

By: Anita Elberse

My research focuses on "creative industries," defined as industries that supply goods that we commonly associate with artistic, cultural, or entertainment value -- including book and magazine publishing, film, music, television, video games, the performing... View Details

Article

Active World Model Learning with Progress Curiosity

By: Kuno Kim, Megumi Sano, Julian De Freitas, Nick Haber and Daniel Yamins

World models are self-supervised predictive models of how the world evolves. Humans learn world models by curiously exploring their environment, in the process acquiring compact abstractions of high bandwidth sensory inputs, the ability to plan across long temporal... View Details

Keywords: World Models; Mathematical Methods

Winter 2020
Article

The Economics of Maps

By: Abhishek Nagaraj and Scott Stern

For centuries, maps have codified the extent of human geographic knowledge and shaped discovery and economic decision-making. Economists across many fields, including urban economics, public finance, political economy, and economic geography, have long employed maps,... View Details

Keywords: Maps; Economic Geography; Geography; Economics; History