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- Fall 2024
- Article
The Problem of Good Conduct Among Financial Advisers
By: Mark Egan, Gregor Matvos and Amit Seru
Households in the United States often rely on financial advisers for investment and savings decisions, yet there is a widespread perception that many advisers are dishonest. This distrust is not unwarranted: approximately one in fifteen advisers has a history of... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Public Sector SME Grading System in Emerging Markets: A Focus on Nigeria
By: Saveshen Pillay, Anywhere Sikochi, Charles Odii, Zaakirah Ismail, Regina Bamaiyi and Denise Mubaiwa
In this paper, we explore the impact of creating a public sector nano, micro, small and medium
enterprise (nMSME) grading system in Nigeria. Using insights from work with the Nigerian
government, the first country in Africa to attempt to establish a public sector SME... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
The Wade Test: Generative AI and CEO Communication
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Bart S. Vanneste and Amirhossein Zohrehvand
Can generative artificial intelligence (AI) transform the role of the CEO by effectively automating CEO
communication? This study investigates whether AI can mimic a human CEO and whether employees’
perception of the communication’s source matter. In a field... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Smaller than We Thought? The Effect of Automatic Savings Policies
By: James J. Choi, David Laibson, Jordan Cammarota, Richard Lombardo and John Beshears
Medium- and long-run dynamics undermine the effect of automatic enrollment and default savings-rate auto-escalation on retirement savings. Our analysis of nine 401(k) plans incorporates the facts that employees frequently leave firms (often before matching... View Details
- July 2024
- Article
Whether to Apply
By: Katherine B. Coffman, Manuela Collis and Leena Kulkarni
Labor market outcomes depend, in part, upon an individual’s willingness to put herself forward for different opportunities. We use a series of experiments to explore gender differences in willingness to apply for higher return, more challenging work. We find that, in... View Details
- June 2024
- Article
Real Growth in Space Manufacturing Output Substantially Exceeds Growth in the Overall Space Economy
By: Tina Highfill and Matthew Weinzierl
Accurately measuring real economic output in the space economy is made difficult by the rapid increase in capabilities and decrease in prices of launch and satellite technologies achieved over the past two decades. Nominal measures of output in space will tend to... View Details
- March 2024
- Case
Hippo: Weathering the Storm of the Home Insurance Crisis
By: Lauren Cohen, Grace Headinger and Sophia Pan
Rick McCathron, CEO of Hippo, considered how the firm’s underwriting model could account for the effects of climate change. Along with providing smart home packages, targeting risk-friendly customers, and using data-driven pricing, the Insurtech used technologically... View Details
Keywords: Fintech; Underwriters; Big Data; Insurance Companies; Business Model Design; Weather Insurance; Business Model; Forecasting and Prediction; Climate Change; Environmental Sustainability; Green Technology; Technological Innovation; Natural Environment; Natural Disasters; Weather; Business Strategy; Competitive Advantage; Business Earnings; Insurance; Social Issues; Insurance Industry; United States; California
- 2024
- Report
The Economic Benefits of a Public Sector Nano, Micro, Small and Medium Enterprise (nMSME) Grading Agency: Evidence from Nigeria
By: Saveshen Pillay, Zaakirah Ismail, Anywhere Sikochi and Charles Odii
This is a summary of our working paper exploring the possibility of creating a public sector small and medium enterprise (SME) grading system in Emerging Markets. Using research and insights from ongoing work with the Nigerian government, the first country in Africa to... View Details
- February 2024
- Article
Representation and Extrapolation: Evidence from Clinical Trials
By: Marcella Alsan, Maya Durvasula, Harsh Gupta, Joshua Schwartzstein and Heidi L. Williams
This article examines the consequences and causes of low enrollment of Black patients in clinical
trials. We develop a simple model of similarity-based extrapolation that predicts that evidence is
more relevant for decision-making by physicians and patients when it... View Details
- 2024
- Article
Technological Adoption and Taxation: The Case of China's Golden Tax Reform
By: Haichao Fan, Yu Liu, Nancy Qian and Jaya Y. Wen
This paper investigates the effect of Phase 2 of the Golden Tax Project on VAT in China. The reform introduced computer-generated invoices and electronic transaction linking. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we show that the reform increased VAT by reducing... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
The Impact of Unionization on Consumer Perceptions of Service Quality: Evidence from Starbucks
By: Isamar Troncoso, Minkyung Kim, Ishita Chakraborty and SooHyun Kim
The US has seen a rise in union movements, but their effects on service industry marketing outcomes like customer satisfaction and perceptions of service quality remain understudied. In this paper, we empirically study the impact on customer satisfaction and... View Details
- November 2023
- Article
Open Source Software and Global Entrepreneurship
By: Nataliya Langburd Wright, Frank Nagle and Shane Greenstein
This is the first study to consider the relationship between open source software (OSS) and
entrepreneurship around the globe. This study measures whether country-level participation on
the GitHub OSS platform affects the founding of innovative ventures, and where it... View Details
- October 2023
- Teaching Note
Timnit Gebru: 'SILENCED No More' on AI Bias and The Harms of Large Language Models
By: Tsedal Neeley and Tim Englehart
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 422-085. Dr. Timnit Gebru—a leading artificial intelligence (AI) computer scientist and co-lead of Google’s Ethical AI team—was messaging with one of her colleagues when she saw the words: “Did you resign?? Megan sent an email saying that... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Are Hospital Quality Indicators Causal?
By: Amitabh Chandra, Maurice Dalton and Douglas O. Staiger
Hospitals play a key role in patient outcomes and spending, but efforts to improve their quality are hindered because we do not know whether hospital quality indicators are causal or biased. We evaluate the validity of commonly used quality indicators, such as... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Targeting, Personalization, and Engagement in an Agricultural Advisory Service
By: Susan Athey, Shawn Cole, Shanjukta Nath and Jessica Zhu
ICT is increasingly used to deliver customized information in developing countries. We
examine whether individually targeting the timing of automated voice calls meaningfully
increases engagement in an agricultural advisory service. We define, estimate, and... View Details
- July 2023
- Article
So, Who Likes You? Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment
By: Ravi Bapna, Edward McFowland III, Probal Mojumder, Jui Ramaprasad and Akhmed Umyarov
With one-third of marriages in the United States beginning online, online dating platforms have become important curators of the modern social fabric. Prior work on online dating has elicited two critical frictions in the heterosexual dating market. Women, governed by... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
The Complexity of Economic Decisions
By: Xavier Gabaix and Thomas Graeber
We propose a theory of the complexity of economic decisions. Leveraging a macroeconomic framework of production functions, we conceptualize the mind as a cognitive economy, where a task’s complexity is determined by its composition of cognitive operations. Complexity... View Details
- 2023
- Article
Probabilistically Robust Recourse: Navigating the Trade-offs between Costs and Robustness in Algorithmic Recourse
By: Martin Pawelczyk, Teresa Datta, Johannes van-den-Heuvel, Gjergji Kasneci and Himabindu Lakkaraju
As machine learning models are increasingly being employed to make consequential decisions in real-world settings, it becomes critical to ensure that individuals who are adversely impacted (e.g., loan denied) by the predictions of these models are provided with a means... View Details
- 2023
- Article
Estimating Causal Peer Influence in Homophilous Social Networks by Inferring Latent Locations.
By: Edward McFowland III and Cosma Rohilla Shalizi
Social influence cannot be identified from purely observational data on social networks, because such influence is generically confounded with latent homophily, that is, with a node’s network partners being informative about the node’s attributes and therefore its... View Details
- April 2023
- Article
The Real Exchange Rate, Innovation and Productivity
By: Laura Alfaro, Alejandro Cuñat, Harald Fadinger and Yanping Liu
We evaluate manufacturing firms' responses to changes in the real exchange rate (RER) using detailed firm-level data for a large set of countries for the period 2001-2010. We uncover the following stylized facts about regional variation of manufacturing firms'... View Details