Publications

2018
Article

The Role of Overbilling in Hospitals' Earnings Management Decisions

By: Jonas Heese

This paper examines the role of overbilling in hospitals’ earnings management choices. Overbilling by hospitals is a form of revenue manipulation that involves misclassifying a patient into a diagnosis-related group that yields higher reimbursement. As overbilling... View Details

Keywords: Overbilling; Accrual-based Earnings Management; Real Activities Manipulation; For-profit Hospitals; Earnings Management; Health Industry

SSRN

26 Feb 2014
Research & Ideas

How Grocery Bags Manipulate Your Mind

There's a classic cartoon plot device that represents a struggle with temptation. A tiny angel pops up on the conflicted character's left shoulder, urging him to follow the path of righteousness. A tiny devil sits on his right shoulder, pressing him to give into his... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Retail

February 2011
Article

Mind Perception: Real but Not Artificial Faces Sustain Neural Activity beyond the N170/VPP

By: Thalia Wheatley, Anna Weinberg, Christine E. Looser, Tim Moran and Greg Hajcak

Faces are visual objects that hold special significance as the icons of other minds. Previous researchers using event-related potentials (ERPs) have found that faces are uniquely associated with an increased N170/vertex positive potential (VPP) and a more sustained... View Details

Keywords: Neuroscience; Mind Perception; Social Psychology; Face Perception; Personal Characteristics; Science; Cognition and Thinking

09 Jan 2006
Research & Ideas

Rebuilding Commercial Real Estate

every major Wall Street firm has become active in real estate private equity. "Morgan Stanley alone has gone from zero dollars under management to almost $40 billion over the past fifteen years,"... View Details

Keywords: by Roger Thompson; Real Estate; Real Estate

December 2022
Article

Does Industry Employment of Active Regulators Weaken Oversight?

By: Jonas Heese

I study whether industry employment of active regulators weakens oversight. To examine this question, I exploit that the Financial Reporting Enforcement Panel (FREP), the German capital-market regulator responsible for enforcing public firms’ compliance with accounting... View Details

Keywords: Conflict-of-interest Policies; Directorships; Enforcement Actions; Industry Employment; Self-regulatory Organizations; Governance Compliance; Governing and Advisory Boards; Policy; Conflict of Interests

01 May 2017
News

An active role for the Divinity School

December 2016
Article

Health Care Needs Real Competition

By: Leemore S. Dafny and Thomas H. Lee

The U.S. health care system is inefficient, unreliable, and crushingly expensive. There is no shortage of proposed solutions, but central to the best of them is the idea that health care needs more competition. In other sectors, competition improves quality and... View Details

Keywords: Competition; Health Care and Treatment; Health Industry; United States

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December 2014
Article

The Real Product Market Impact of Mergers

By: Albert Sheen

I document sources of value creation in mergers by analyzing novel data on the quality and price of goods sold by merging firms. When two competitors in a product market merge, their products converge in quality, and prices fall relative to the competition. These... View Details

Keywords: Value Creation; Quality; Price; Goods and Commodities; Mergers and Acquisitions

Research Summary

Credit Supply Shocks, Network Effects, and the Real Economy

By: Laura Alfaro

We consider the real effects of bank lending shocks and how they permeate the economy through buyer-supplier linkages. We combine administrative data on all firms in Spain with a matched bank-firm-loan dataset with information on the universe of corporate loans for... View Details

Article

Pattern Detection in the Activation Space for Identifying Synthesized Content

By: Celia Cintas, Skyler Speakman, Girmaw Abebe Tadesse, Victor Akinwande, Edward McFowland III and Komminist Weldemariam

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have recently achieved unprecedented success in photo-realistic image synthesis from low-dimensional random noise. The ability to synthesize high-quality content at a large scale brings potential risks as the generated samples may... View Details

Keywords: Subset Scanning; Generative Models; Synthetic Content Detection

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2017
Working Paper

Nowcasting the Local Economy: Using Yelp Data to Measure Economic Activity

By: Edward L. Glaeser, Hyunjin Kim and Michael Luca

Can new data sources from online platforms help to measure local economic activity? Government datasets from agencies such as the U.S. Census Bureau provide the standard measures of economic activity at the local level. However, these statistics typically appear only... View Details

Keywords: Economy; Analytics and Data Science; Local Range; Social and Collaborative Networks

SSRN

19 Sep 2016
News

The Real Meaning of Love

Katie Hood (MBA 2001) is CEO of the One Love Foundation , which is dedicated to bringing an end to relationship violence by educating, empowering, and activating campus communities. In this interview, Hood describes why the organization... View Details

Web

Real Property - Course Catalog

HBS Course Catalog Real Property Course Number 1684 Senior Lecturer John Macomber Lecturer Camille Douglas Fall; Q1Q2; 3.0 credits 28 Sessions Exam Career Focus This course is designed for students interested in managing, developing,... View Details

May 2008
Article

Real and Accrual-Based Earnings Management in the Pre- and Post-Sarbanes Oxley Periods

By: Daniel Cohen, Aiyesha Dey and Thomas Lys

We document that accrual‐based earnings management increased steadily from 1987 until the passage of the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act (SOX) in 2002, followed by a significant decline after the passage of SOX. Conversely, the level of real earnings management activities declined... View Details

Keywords: Earnings Management; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Outcome or Result

Web

Real Estate Investing - Course Catalog

HBS Course Catalog Real Estate Investing Course Number 1475 Lecturer Dwight Angelini Lecturer W. Matt Kelly Spring; Q3; 1.5 credits Exam Career Focus This course provides students with the skills and knowledge essential for a career in... View Details

24 Apr 2014
News

From observers to active participants in the global economy

efforts in Africa in part to the HBS course Written Analysis of Cases. “It combined the need for crisp, cogent analysis, based on the limited evidence available, and coming to a decision within a strictly limited time—just like real... View Details

2018
Working Paper

Bank Risk-Taking and the Real Economy: Evidence from the Housing Boom and Its Aftermath

By: Antonio Falato, Giovanni Favara and David Scharfstein

The short-termism of lenders amplifies boom-bust credit cycles, leading in turn to real costs for the aggregate economy. During the U.S. housing credit boom, publicly-traded banks increased mortgage lending activity and relaxed standards much more than privately-held... View Details

Keywords: Risk and Uncertainty; Financial Markets; Investment; Corporate Finance; Banks and Banking