Publications

Educators

04 Dec 2008
Working Paper Summaries

Local Industrial Conditions and Entrepreneurship: How Much of the Spatial Distribution Can We Explain?

Keywords: by Edward L. Glaeser & William R. Kerr; Manufacturing

April 2023
Article

Inattentive Inference

By: Thomas Graeber

This paper studies how people infer a state of the world from information structures that include additional, payoff-irrelevant states. For example, learning from a customer review about a product’s quality requires accounting for the reviewer’s otherwise irrelevant... View Details

Keywords: Cognition and Thinking; Information Types; Behavior; Knowledge Acquisition

May 2018
Article

Selection and Market Reallocation: Productivity Gains from Multinational Production

By: Laura Alfaro and Maggie X. Chen

Assessing the productivity gains from multinational production has been a vital topic of economic research and policy debate. Positive aggregate productivity gains are often attributed to within-firm productivity improvement; however, an alternative, less emphasized... View Details

Keywords: Productivity Gains; Multinational Production; Selection; Market Reallocation; And Within-firm Productivity; Multinational Firms and Management; Production; Performance Productivity; Competition; Mathematical Methods

Article

How Warm Days Increase Belief in Global Warming

By: Lisa Zaval, Elizabeth A. Keenan, Eric J. Johnson and Elke U. Weber

Climate change judgments can depend on whether today seems warmer or colder than usual, termed the local warming effect. Although previous research has demonstrated that this effect occurs, studies have yet to explain why or how temperature abnormalities influence... View Details

Keywords: Climate Change; Attitudes

July 2013
Article

Voice Pitch and the Labor Market Success of Male Chief Executive Officers

By: Christopher Parsons, W. Mayew and M. Venkatachalam

A deep voice is evolutionarily advantageous for males, but does it confer benefit in competition for leadership positions? We study ecologically valid speech from 792 male public-company Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) and find that CEOs with deeper voices manage... View Details

Keywords: Success; Leadership Style; Personal Characteristics; Management Teams

April 2011
Article

Why Leaders Don't Learn from Success

By: Francesca Gino and Gary P. Pisano

We argue that for a variety of psychological reasons, it is often much harder for leaders and organizations to learn from success than to learn from failure. Success creates three kinds of traps that often impede deep learning. The first is attribution error or the... View Details

Keywords: Learning; Innovation and Management; Leadership; Failure; Success; Performance Evaluation; Prejudice and Bias

August 2007 (Revised September 2008)
Case

Baker & McKenzie (A): A New Framework for Talent Management

By: Boris Groysberg and Eliot Sherman

Describes the process by which the largest law firm in the world developed a unique framework for personnel management. In 2004, John Conroy is about to take the reigns as the leader of Baker and McKenzie, the largest law firm in the world by employees, with offices in... View Details

Keywords: Talent and Talent Management; Framework; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Retention; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Adoption; Legal Services Industry

Educators

07 Nov 2023
Research & Ideas

When Glasses Land the Gig: Employers Still Choose Workers Who 'Look the Part'

study, Troncoso and Luo looked at six months of data collected by Freelancer.com in 2018. It covers more than 160,000 freelancers, over 2 million applications, and 63,014 completed jobs. They found that freelancers with certain attributes... View Details

Keywords: by Scott Van Voorhis

10 Jul 2023
In Practice

The Harvard Business School Faculty Summer Reader 2023

attributes like aesthetics from products that shape consumer-brand interactions. Finally, let me share a book that has touched my soul—The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin. This is a science-fiction masterpiece exploring humanity's quest... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

2013
Article

Multinational Corporations, Global Justice and Corporate Responsibility: A Question of Purpose

By: Nien-he Hsieh

Do multinational corporations (MNCs) have a responsibility to address unjust conditions—not simply by refraining from contributing to injustice, but also by actively working to bring about a just state of affairs? This paper examines whether this question can be... View Details

Keywords: Multinational Corporations; Global Justice; Corporate Purpose; Corporate Responsibility; Human Needs; Multinational Firms and Management; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact

September–October 2012
Article

One-Switch Conditions for Multiattribute Utility Functions

By: Ali E. Abbas and David E. Bell

We introduce a variety of new independence conditions for multiattribute utility functions that permit preference dependencies among the attributes of a decision problem. The hierarchy of new conditions varies in the degree to which it specifies the functional form,... View Details

Keywords: One-switch; Utility Independence; Risk Aversion; Multiattribute Utility; Decision Making

Article

Moving Beyond Schumpeter: Management Research on the Determinants of Technological Innovation

By: Gautam Ahuja, Curba Morris Lampert and Vivek Tandon

Schumpeter's conjecture that large monopolistic firms were the key source of innovation in modern industrial economies has been the underpinning for much work on the topic of innovation. In this review paper we consciously move beyond the Schumpeterian tradition of... View Details

Keywords: Technological Innovation; Management; Strategy

Research Summary

Selection and Market Reallocation: Productivity Gains from Multinational Production

By: Laura Alfaro

Assessing the productivity gains from multinational production has been a vital topic of economic research and policy debate. Positive aggregate productivity gains are often attributed to within-firm productivity improvement; however, an alternative, less emphasized... View Details

Article

A Cost Comparison of Cataract Surgeries in Three Countries—United States, India, and Nepal

By: Jiayin Xue, John Hinkle, Mary-Grace Reeves, Luo Luo Zheng, Vengadesan Natarajan, Shyam Vyas, Radhika Upreti Oli, Matt Oliva, Robert S. Kaplan, Arnold Milstein, Geoff Tabin, Jeffrey L. Goldberg and Kevin Schulman

U.S.-based cataract surgeries are costly compared with those performed in high-quality Indian and Nepalese eye centers. The authors used time-driven activity-based costing to evaluate phacoemulsification surgery across four sites: a U.S.-based academic hospital... View Details

Keywords: Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing; Cost Accounting; Health Care and Treatment; Health Industry; India; Nepal; United States

Register to Read

2017
Working Paper

Economic Uncertainty and Earnings Management

By: Luke C.D. Stein and Charles C.Y. Wang

In the presence of managerial short-termism and asymmetric information about skill and effort provision, firms may opportunistically shift earnings from uncertain to more certain times. We document empirically that when financial markets are less certain about a firm's... View Details

Keywords: Discretionary Accruals; Uncertainty; Implied Volatility; Earnings Response Coefficient; Risk and Uncertainty; Earnings Management; Financial Markets

SSRN

Fall 2013
Article

Engaging Supply Chains in Climate Change

By: Chonnikarn Fern Jira and Michael W. Toffel

Suppliers are increasingly being asked to share information about their vulnerability to climate change and their strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Their responses vary widely. We theorize and empirically identify several factors associated with suppliers... View Details

Keywords: Knowledge Sharing; Motivation and Incentives; Risk Management; Climate Change; Supply Chain Management; Environmental Sustainability

2012
Chapter

Environmental Federalism in the European Union and the United States

By: David Vogel, Michael W. Toffel, Diahanna Post and Nazli Z. Uludere Aragon

The United States (US) and the European Union (EU) are federal systems in which the responsibility for environmental policy-making is divided or shared between the central government and the (member) states. The attribution of decision-making power has important policy... View Details

Keywords: Natural Environment; Policy; Government and Politics; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; European Union; United States

2007
Working Paper

What Causes Industry Agglomeration? Evidence from Coagglomeration Patterns

By: Glenn Ellison, Edward Glaeser and William R. Kerr

Many industries are geographically concentrated. Many mechanisms that could account for such agglomeration have been proposed. We note that these theories make different predictions about which pairs of industries should be coagglomerated. We discuss the measurement of... View Details

Keywords: Geographic Location; Labor; Industry Clusters; Transportation; Manufacturing Industry; United States