Publications

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2021
Working Paper

The Effects of Temporal Distance on Intra-Firm Communication: Evidence from Daylight Savings Time

By: Jasmina Chauvin, Prithwiraj Choudhury and Tommy Pan Fang

Cross-border communication costs have plummeted and enabled the global distribution of work, but frictions attributable to distance persist. We estimate the causal effects of temporal distance, i.e., time zone separation between employees, on intra-firm communication,... View Details

Keywords: Communication Patterns; Time Zones; Geographic Frictions; Knowledge Workers; Multinational Companies; Communication; Multinational Firms and Management; Geographic Location

2018
Chapter

Transportation Cost and the Geography of Foreign Investment

By: Laura Alfaro and Maggie Chen

Falling transportation costs and rapid technological progress in recent decades have precipitated an explosion of cross-border flows in goods, services, investments, and ideas led by multinational firms. Extensive research has sought to understand the geographic... View Details

Keywords: Foreign Direct Investment; Cost; Transportation; Geographic Scope; Geographic Location

July–August 2020
Article

Make the Most of Your Relocation

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury

Although the COVID-19 crisis has halted travel in recent months, geographic mobility has become critical for managers and knowledge workers hoping to advance in today’s globalized economy, and that trend is unlikely to reverse. Geographic mobility can pay off... View Details

Keywords: Relocation; Mobility; Personal Development and Career; Geographic Location; Work-Life Balance

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March 2021
Article

International Trade and Social Connectedness

By: Michael Bailey, Abhinav Gupta, Sebastian Hillenbrand, Theresa Kuchler, Robert J. Richmond and Johannes Stroebel

We use de-identified data from Facebook to construct a new and publicly available measure of the pairwise social connectedness between 170 countries and 332 European regions. We find that two countries trade more when they are more socially connected, especially for... View Details

Keywords: Social Connections; International Trade; Trade; Social Media

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2025
Working Paper

New Product Diffusion Within Retailers: The Effect of Managerial Quality on Rollout

By: Tomomichi Amano and Jorge Tamayo

Retailers are key intermediaries through which consumers encounter innovation in the form of new products. How are these products rolled out within retailers? We observe significant variation in the availability of new products across stores in a large retail chain in... View Details

Keywords: Managerial Quality; Firm Performance; Diffusion Of Innovation; New Product Rollout; Retailing; Distribution Channels; Product Launch; Management Skills; Retail Industry; Colombia

05 Oct 2011
Working Paper Summaries

Doing What the Parents Want? The Effect of the Local Information Environment on the Investment Decisions of Multinational Corporations

Keywords: by Nemit O. Shroff, Rodrigo S. Verdi & Gwen Yu

2020
Working Paper

Costly External Financing and Monetary Policy Transmission: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

By: Emily Williams

I provide new evidence that large and small banks have different external financing costs, which generates cross sectional variation in a deposits market pricing power channel of monetary policy transmission. I do so by exploiting a natural experiment using anti-trust... View Details

Keywords: External Financing; Monetary Policy Transmission; Experiment; Banks and Banking; Financing and Loans; Interest Rates

20 Oct 2015
Working Paper Summaries

Internalizing Global Value Chains: A Firm-Level Analysis

Keywords: by Laura Alfaro, Pol Antras, Davin Chor & Paola Conconi

20 Feb 2018
First Look

First Look at New Research and Ideas, February 20, 2018

advancing her enterprise's goals and objectives through a faster and ever-larger-reaching set of media. Publisher's link: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=54007 Winter 2018 Journal of Economic Perspectives Frictions or... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

2020
Working Paper

Food Security and Human Mobility During the COVID-19 Lockdown

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Wesley W. Koo, Xina Li, Nishant Kishore, Satchit Balsari and Tarun Khanna

During the COVID-19 crisis, millions of migrants around the world face food insecurity. This could force migrants to travel during the pandemic, exposing them to health risks and accelerating the spread of the virus. Anecdotal evidence demonstrates the importance of... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19; Migrants; Food Security; Mobility; Health Pandemics; Food; Distribution; Policy; Global Range