Publications

December 2018
Article

Reserve Design: Unintended Consequences and the Demise of Boston's Walk Zones

By: Umut Dur, Scott Duke Kominers, Parag A. Pathak and Tayfun Sönmez

Admissions policies often use reserves to grant certain applicants higher priority for some (but not all) available seats. Boston’s school choice system, for example, reserved half of each school’s seats for local neighborhood applicants while leaving the other half... View Details

Keywords: Neighborhoods; Equal Access; School Choice; Affirmative Action; Desegregation; Marketplace Matching; Fairness; Local Range; Education; Policy

February 2010
Article

The Optimal Taxation of Height: A Case Study of Utilitarian Income Redistribution

By: N. Gregory Mankiw and Matthew C. Weinzierl

Should the income tax include a credit for short taxpayers and a surcharge for tall ones? The standard Utilitarian framework for tax analysis answers this question in the affirmative. Moreover, a plausible parameterization using data on height and wages implies a... View Details

Keywords: Taxation; Wages; Personal Characteristics

February 2004
Case

Bradman and Tendulkar, LLC

By: Ananth Raman and Vishal Gaur

An investment firm is trying to project inventory turns for Radio Shack, a chain of consumer electronics stores. The investment firm has access to public financial data but not to internal operational metrics. It needs to project inventory turns because inventory... View Details

Keywords: Forecasting and Prediction; Cash Flow; Demand and Consumers; Distribution Channels; Mathematical Methods; Valuation

April 1999 (Revised June 1999)
Case

1-800 Buy Ireland

By: Willis M. Emmons III, Adele S. Cooper and J. Richard Lenane

After decades of poor economic performance, the Irish government adopted major changes in economic policy in 1987. By the end of the 1990s, Ireland's real GDP growth rate of almost 10% per year exceeds that of all member nations of the European Union (EU). A key... View Details

Keywords: Integration; Development Economics; Supply and Industry; Policy; Foreign Direct Investment; Growth and Development Strategy; Macroeconomics; Republic of Ireland

29 Aug 2014
Working Paper Summaries

Patent Trolls

Keywords: by Lauren Cohen, Umit G. Gurun & Scott Duke Kominers

August 1993 (Revised April 1994)
Case

Flanders of Springfield

By: Arthur Schleifer Jr.

Flanders is a catalog merchandiser. Various decisions on catalog distribution policy, ordering and inventory policy, and catalog format design are considered. This was a final examination, and serves as a review for a number of topics in the course. View Details

Keywords: Decisions; Policy; Distribution; Product Design; Supply Chain; Mathematical Methods; Consumer Products Industry

February 2023 (Revised February 2024)
Case

Chari: Exploring Fintech in Morocco

By: Karen G. Mills and Ahmed Dahawy

This case examines the challenges and opportunities of doing business in Morocco. It highlights Morocco’s unique economy where cash remains a dominant player in the market despite global advancements in digitalization. The case also explores the various cultural and... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Cultural Entrepreneurship; Social Entrepreneurship; Business History; Business and Government Relations; Technological Innovation; Distribution Industry; Distribution Industry; Morocco

March 2014
Background Note

Setting Price Effectively

By: Nava Ashraf and Kristin Johnson

Price is one of the most powerful instruments a manager can use to influence the take-up of her product, especially in a subsidized and noncompetitive market as is common for global health products. However, the question of whether and how to price has been the subject... View Details

12 Aug 2014
First Look

First Look: August 12

http://hbr.org/product/aspada-in-search-of-the-right-structure-for-impact-investing/an/314099-PDF-ENG Harvard Business School Case 214-085 Financial Policy at Apple, 2013 (A) By the end of 2013, Apple had $137 billion in View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

March 2011
Article

What Do Dividends Tell Us About Earnings Quality

By: Douglas Skinner and Eugene F. Soltes

Over the past 30 years, there have been significant changes in the distribution of earnings (cross-sectional variation has increased, with increasing left skewness) as well as in corporate payout policy, with many fewer firms paying dividends and the emergence of stock... View Details

Keywords: Distribution; Business Earnings; Change; Policy; Stocks; Investment Return; Performance Consistency; Quality

26 Jul 2006
Research & Ideas

The Strategic Way to Go to Market

Is there any distribution system more poorly conceived than the one used by most U.S. car manufacturers and dealers? In the prevailing system, car prices are initially jacked up by locked-in labor concessions. Manufacturers pit dealers... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

Research Summary

Overview

By: Ethan C. Rouen

Relying on empirical archival methodologies—as well as techniques in data science—to develop and structure new sources of data by which to approach questions of looming disclosure changes, Professor Rouen has focused on one of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s... View Details

Spring 2016
Article

Net Neutrality: A Fast Lane to Understanding the Tradeoffs

By: Shane Greenstein, Martin Peitz and Tommaso Valletti

The last decade has seen a strident public debate about the principle of "net neutrality." The economic literature has focused on two definitions of net neutrality. The most basic definition of net neutrality is to prohibit payments from content providers to internet... View Details

Keywords: Internet and the Web; Policy

12 Jun 2006
Research & Ideas

The Promise of Channel Stewardship

hand. You cannot resolve design issues—such as whether to adopt a direct or an indirect channel or, if indirect, how many levels are appropriate—without a sense of how distribution policies and practices are... View Details

Keywords: by V. Kasturi Rangan & Marie Bell; Consumer Products

2014
Working Paper

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

Keywords: Spending; Policy; Taxation; Theory; United States

SSRN

July 2021
Article

Invisible Inequality Leads to Punishing the Poor and Rewarding the Rich

By: Oliver P. Hauser, Gordon T. Kraft-Todd, David Rand, Martin A. Nowak and Michael I. Norton

Four experiments examine how the lack of awareness of inequality affects behaviour towards the rich and poor. In Experiment 1, participants who became aware that wealthy individuals donated a smaller percentage of their income switched from rewarding the wealthy to... View Details

Keywords: Income Transparency; Income; Wealth; Equality and Inequality; Knowledge; Behavior; Outcome or Result; Society; Policy

2008
Working Paper

Investable Tax Credits: The Case of the Low Income Housing Tax Credit

By: Mihir A. Desai, Dhammika Dharmapala and Monica Singhal

The Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) represents a novel tax expenditure program that employs "investable" tax credits to spur production of low-income rental housing. While it has grown into the largest source of new affordable housing in the U.S. and its... View Details

Keywords: Investment; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Taxation; Housing; Renting or Rental; United States

January 2008
Article

Innovation Killers: How Financial Tools Destroy Your Capacity to Do New Things

By: Clayton M. Christensen, Stephen P. Kaufman and Willy C. Shih

Most companies aren't half as innovative as their senior executives want them to be (or as their marketing claims suggest they are). What's stifling innovation? There are plenty of usual suspects, but the authors finger three financial tools as key accomplices.... View Details

Keywords: Investment; Innovation and Management; Growth and Development Strategy; Business and Shareholder Relations; Prejudice and Bias; Value Creation