Publications

Educators

August 2013
Case

Desi Shack: Location Choice in the Big Apple

By: William R. Kerr and Alexis Brownell

Desi Shack is a “fast casual” restaurant, started by two HBS alumni, that serves Indian and Pakistani cuisine in midtown Manhattan. The founders are looking to expand into a second location and also plan to hire a COO, and there is very little room for error in the... View Details

Keywords: Restaurant; New York City; Location Choice; Entrepreneurship; Food; Geographic Location; Food and Beverage Industry; New York (city, NY)

Educators

2011
Article

How Should the Graduate Economics Core be Changed?

By: Vincent Pons, Jose Miguel Abito, Katarina Borovickova, Hays Golden, Jacob Goldin, Matthew A. Masten, Miguel Morin, Alexander Poirier, Israel Romem, Tyler Williams and Chamna Yoon

The authors present suggestions by graduate students from a range of economics departments for improving the first-year core sequence in economics. The students identified a number of elements that should be added to the core: more training in building microeconomic... View Details

Keywords: Design Of Core; Graduate Economics; Higher Education; Economics; Curriculum and Courses

13 Nov 2012
First Look

First Look: November 13

paid forward in kind, greed was paid forward more than generosity. This asymmetry was driven by negative affect, such that a positive affect intervention disrupted the tendency to pay greed forward. Implications for models of generalized... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

Article

Stability and Competitive Equilibrium in Trading Networks

By: John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers, Alexandru Nichifor, Michael Ostrovsky and Alexander Westkamp

We introduce a model in which agents in a network can trade via bilateral contracts. We find that when continuous transfers are allowed and utilities are quasi-linear, the full substitutability of preferences is sufficient to guarantee the existence of stable outcomes... View Details

Keywords: Balance and Stability; Markets

23 Oct 2018
First Look

New Research and Ideas, October 23, 2018

difficult tasks. Second, overestimation of ability by both men and women varies across categories. To understand these patterns, we develop a model that separates gender stereotypes from misestimation of ability related to the difficulty... View Details

Keywords: Dina Gerdeman

November 1996 (Revised July 1997)
Case

Alexander Plaza

By: Arthur I Segel and William J. Poorvu

In May 1996, Henry Bower, an asset manager for a real estate adviser, Medcem, has to negotiate the details of a lease after signing a letter of intent with a high technology company, Defentek, Inc. Defentek, Inc. is a fast-growing company with limited net worth that is... View Details

Keywords: Negotiation Tactics; Negotiation Preparation; Agreements and Arrangements; Risk and Uncertainty; Real Estate Industry; Financial Services Industry; District of Columbia

Educators

09 Aug 2011
First Look

First Look: August 9

Cases & Course MaterialsLeading by Values: Sam Palmisano and IBM William W. GeorgeHarvard Business School Case 411-097 An abstract is unavailable at this time. Purchase this... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

14 Jan 2014
First Look

First Look: January 14

help-friendly organization has to be actively nurtured, however, because helpfulness among colleagues does not arise automatically: competition, pride, or distrust may get in the way. The trickiness of this management challenge-to increase a discretionary behavior that... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

Teaching Interest

Launching New Ventures—Jump-Starting Innovation for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners (Executive Education)

By: William R. Kerr

Starting up a new venture amid rapid change is fraught with challenges. Whether you are starting a new business, launching a new business line, or building an entrepreneurial culture within a small-to-midsize company, this program provides a new perspective and core... View Details

Article

Consistent Belief in a Good True Self in Misanthropes and Three Interdependent Cultures

By: Julian De Freitas, Hagop Sarkissian, George E. Newman, Igor Grossman, Felipe De Brigard, Andres Luco and Joshua Knobe

People sometimes explain behavior by appealing to an essentialist concept of the self, often referred to as the true self. Existing studies suggest that people tend to believe that the true self is morally virtuous; that is deep inside, every person is motivated to... View Details

Keywords: Concepts; Social Cognition; Moral Reasoning; True Self; Culture; Misanthropy; Behavior; Values and Beliefs; Moral Sensibility

March 2022
Article

Winner Takes All? Tech Clusters, Population Centers, and the Spatial Transformation of U.S. Invention

By: Brad Chattergoon and William R. Kerr

U.S. invention has become increasingly concentrated around major tech centers since the 1970s, with implications for how much cities across the country share in concomitant local benefits. Is invention becoming a winner-takes-all race? We explore the rising spatial... View Details

Keywords: Clusters; Invention; Agglomeration; Artificial Intelligence; Innovation and Invention; Patents; Applications and Software; Industry Clusters; AI and Machine Learning

22 Jun 2010
First Look

First Look: June 22

advertising market—one that suffers quite a different set of problems. Display advertising systems place ads-typically, rectangular "banners"—on the majority of popular web sites. Though display ads are widespread, they are also troubled—ignored View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

14 Jun 2016
First Look

June 14, 2016

patent applications in 1976 to 16% in 2008. This is partly driven by the increase in the prevalence of information and communication technology; however, even for patents unrelated to information and communication technology, we see a... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

2015
Working Paper

Informal Tradables and the Employment Growth of Indian Manufacturing

By: Ejaz Ghani, William R. Kerr and Alexander Segura

India's manufacturing growth from 1989 to 2010 displays two intriguing properties: 1) a substantial fraction of absolute and net employment growth is concentrated in informal tradable industries, and 2) much of this growth is connected to the development of one-person... View Details

Keywords: Manufacturing; India; Informality; Small And Medium-sized Enterprises; Development Economics; Manufacturing Industry; India

December 2012
Article

What Drives Corporate Social Performance? The Role of Nation-level Institutions

By: Ioannis Ioannou and George Serafeim

Based on Whitley's "National Business Systems" (NBS) institutional framework (Whitley 1997, 1999), we theorize about and empirically investigate the impact of nation-level institutions on firms' corporate social performance (CSP). Using a sample of firms from 42... View Details

Keywords: Environment; Environmental Performance; Corporate Social Responsibility; Sustainability; Institutions; Institutional Theory; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Environmental Sustainability; Corporate Governance

Summer 2021
Article

Predictable Country-level Bias in the Reporting of COVID-19 Deaths

By: Botir Kobilov, Ethan Rouen and George Serafeim

We examine whether a country’s management of the COVID-19 pandemic relate to the downward biasing of the number of reported deaths from COVID-19. Using deviations from historical averages of the total number of monthly deaths within a country, we find that the... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19; Deaths; Reporting; Incentives; Government Policy; Health Pandemics; Health Care and Treatment; Country; Crisis Management; Outcome or Result; Reports; Policy

July 2016
Article

Taxation, Corruption, and Growth

By: Philippe Aghion, Ufuk Akcigit, Julia Cagé and William R. Kerr

We build an endogenous growth model to analyze the relationships between taxation, corruption, and economic growth. Entrepreneurs lie at the center of the model and face disincentive effects from taxation but acquire positive benefits from public infrastructure.... View Details

Keywords: Endogenous Growth; Public Goods; Corruption; Crime and Corruption; Entrepreneurship; Taxation; Economic Growth