Publications

Read Now

02 Aug 2021
Research & Ideas

What If Closing the Wage Gap Means Everyone Earns Less?

It’s a sticky but common dilemma for managers: A valued employee finds out that a coworker earns more, gets upset, and demands a raise. If gender or race figure into the wage gap, tensions can escalate fast.... View Details

Keywords: by Avery Forman

October 2014 (Revised April 2023)
Case

Gilead: Hepatitis C Access Strategy (A)

By: V. Kasturi Rangan, Vikram Rangan and David E. Bloom

Gilead had come up with an innovative drug for Hepatitis C, which affected 180 million people worldwide. The drug was priced at $1,000 a pill for the US market. Gilead had to decide how to price and market the pill in developing countries that bore the brunt of the... View Details

Keywords: Healthcare; Pharmaceuticals; Pricing; Access To Care; Emerging Markets; Health Care and Treatment; Price; Strategy; Ethics; Health Industry; Pharmaceutical Industry

Educators

January 2019
Article

Wage Elasticities in Working and Volunteering: The Role of Reference Points in a Laboratory Study

By: Christine L. Exley and Stephen J. Terry

We experimentally test how effort responds to wages—randomly assigned to accrue to individuals or to a charity—in the presence of expectations-based reference points or targets. When individuals earn money for themselves, higher wages lead to higher effort with... View Details

Keywords: Reference Points; Wage Elasticities; Labor Supply; Effor; Volunteering; Prosocial Behavior; Wages; Motivation and Incentives; Nonprofit Organizations; Behavior

15 Oct 2020
Research & Ideas

IT Job Wages Are No Longer 'Exceptional'

Biochemists earn about the same wage in the Bay Area as in Indianapolis on average. Meanwhile, the ranking of big urban hubs by IT salaries shifts from year to year, although not much at the top. San... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne; Information Technology

28 Jun 2023
News

Brown, Warren Call On 23 Companies to Stop Wage Theft, Pay Workers Overtime They Earn

Article

Earnings and Ratings at Google Answers

By: Benjamin Edelman

I analyze all questions and answers from the inception of the Google Answers service through November 2003, and I find notable trends in answerer behavior: more experienced answerers provide answers with the characteristics askers most value, receiving higher ratings... View Details

Keywords: Service Delivery; Opportunities; Behavior; Value; Jobs and Positions; Wages; Business Earnings

Read Now

04 Apr 2014
News

Increasing Access to Education

Describing HBS as “one of the best experiences in my life,” Melinda J. Mount wanted to help the next generation of leaders transform their lives by earning an MBA from HBS. In honor of her 25th Reunion, she established a fellowship to... View Details

25 Feb 2014
News

Is Gap Inc.'s Minimum Wage Hike Good Retail Politics? Harvard Historian Nancy Koehn Weighs In

2022
Article

Values and Inequality: Prosocial Jobs and the College Wage Premium

By: Nathan Wilmers and Letian Zhang

Employers often recruit workers by invoking corporate social responsibility, organizational purpose, or other claims to a prosocial mission. In an era of substantial labor market inequality, commentators typically dismiss these claims as hypocritical: prosocial... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Equality and Inequality; Wages; Recruitment

08 Oct 2018
Research & Ideas

Knowing What Your Boss Earns Can Make You Work Harder

francescoch Learning that a co-worker earns more than you can decrease your job performance while increasing the likelihood of you searching for a new job, according to a new research study. On the other hand, learning what your manager... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne

Article

How Much (More) Should CEOs Make? A Universal Desire for More Equal Pay

By: Sorapop Kiatpongsan and Michael I. Norton

Do people from different countries and different backgrounds have similar preferences for how much more the rich should earn than the poor? Using survey data from 40 countries (N = 55,238), we compare respondents' estimates of the wages of people in different... View Details

Keywords: Inequality; Justice; Wage; Cross-cultural; Wages; Equality and Inequality; Fairness; Income; Employees; Management Teams; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues

Read Now

02 Nov 2015
News

Making Higher Ed Accessible to Africans

Scott Royster (MBA 1992) believes higher education has the power to transform Africa if only its students have access to it. “Statistics from around the world show that individuals who are able to obtain a university degree View Details

Keywords: Jill Radsken

09 Mar 2021
News

A For-Profit Business That Makes Education Accessible

the growing demand for free online courses. Four million new learners have used the site in the past year, and a million more who earned a score of 80 percent or higher in a course have become Alison graduates. The demand has not been in... View Details

Keywords: April White

07 Feb 2012
Working Paper Summaries

Earnings Management from the Bottom Up: An Analysis of Managerial Incentives Below the CEO

Keywords: by Felix Oberholzer-Gee & Julie Wulf

Article

Credit Access and Social Welfare: The Rise of Consumer Lending in the United States and France

By: Gunnar Trumbull

Research into the causes of the 2008 financial crisis has drawn attention to a link between growing income inequality in the United States and high household indebtedness. Most accounts trace the U.S. idea of credit-as-welfare to the period of wage stagnation and... View Details

Keywords: Household Finance; Welfare State; Credit; Personal Finance; Welfare; Borrowing and Debt; France; United States

08 Aug 2023
Research & Ideas

Black Employees Not Only Earn Less, But Deal with Bad Bosses and Poor Conditions

A racial salary gap has persisted in the US for more than 50 years among minority groups, with Black people currently earning 30 to 35 percent less than Whites. Now new research shows that in addition to receiving smaller paychecks, Black... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

30 Aug 2021
News

One and the Same

Australia’s gender wage gap, which shows that women earn 14.2 percent less than men. COVID, she notes, has highlighted the need for greater flexibility, inclusion, and equality in the workplace. “From a... View Details

Keywords: wage gap; COVID; women; equality; leadership

15 May 2015
Research & Ideas

Kids Benefit From Having a Working Mom

©iStockphoto Here's some heartening news for working mothers worried about the future of their children. Women whose moms worked outside the home are more likely to have jobs themselves, are more likely to hold supervisory responsibility at those jobs, and View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

July 2023 (Revised February 2024)
Case

Clair

By: Lauren Cohen, Grace Headinger and Marcos Quirno

Clair was founded with a simple mission: to expedite America’s workers access to their hard-earned wages. In the headwinds of the COVID-19 pandemic, the startup had successfully raised a seed round of $4.5 million, and within two years the earned wage access (EWA)... View Details

Keywords: Fintech; Ewa; Lending; Technology; Business Startups; Growth and Development Strategy; Social Enterprise; Business Strategy; Business Model; Mission and Purpose; Venture Capital; Profit; Financial Services Industry; United States

Educators