Publications

SSRN

Article

Landing the First Job: The Value of Intermediaries in Online Hiring

By: Christopher Stanton and Catherine Thomas

Online markets for remote labor services allow workers and firms to contract with each other directly. Despite this, intermediaries—called outsourcing agencies—have emerged in these markets. This paper shows that agencies signal to employers that inexperienced workers... View Details

Keywords: Marketplace Matching; Agency Theory

June 18, 2020
Article

What CEOs Still Haven't Said about Race and Policing

By: Aaron K. Chatterji and Michael W. Toffel

While many CEOs have spoken out to share their thoughts on race and police misconduct in America, they have yet to advocate for policy solutions for police reform, focusing instead on their own corporate and personal values. But lasting change must also involve ... View Details

Keywords: Activism; CEO; Political Issues; Political Leadership; Racial Tensions; Racism; Leadership; Race; Communication; Government and Politics; Law; Organizational Culture; United States

Article

A Field Experiment on Search Costs and the Formation of Scientific Collaborations

By: Kevin Boudreau, Tom Brady, Ina Ganguli, Patrick Gaule, Eva C. Guinan, Anthony Hollenberg and Karim R. Lakhani

We present the results of a field experiment conducted at Harvard Medical School to understand the extent to which search costs affect matching among scientific collaborators. We generated exogenous variation in search costs for pairs of potential collaborators by... View Details

Keywords: Search Costs; Cost; Marketplace Matching; Groups and Teams; Science; Collaborative Innovation and Invention

March 2016
Article

The Cost of Friendship

By: Paul A. Gompers, Vladimir Mukharlyamov and Yuhai Xuan

We investigate how personal characteristics affect people's desire to collaborate and whether this attraction enhances or detracts from performance in venture capital. We find that venture capitalists who share the same ethnic, educational, or career background are... View Details

Keywords: Venture Capital; Partners and Partnerships; Entrepreneurship; Personal Characteristics

2010
Working Paper

Valuation When Cash Flow Forecasts Are Biased

By: Richard S. Ruback

This paper focuses adaptations to the discount cash flow (DCF) method when valuing forecasted cash flows that are biased measures of expected cash flows. I imagine a simple setting where the expected cash flows equal the forecasted cash flows plus an omitted downside.... View Details

Keywords: Forecasting and Prediction; Cash Flow; Cost of Capital; Performance Expectations; Prejudice and Bias; Valuation

2023
Working Paper

Avoiding Idiosyncratic Volatility: Flow Sensitivity to Individual Stock Returns

By: Marco Di Maggio, Francesco Franzoni, Shimon Kogan and Ran Xing

Despite positive and significant earnings announcement premia, we find that institutional investors reduce their exposure to stocks before earnings announcements. A novel result on the sensitivity of flows to individual stock returns provides a potential explanation.... View Details

Keywords: New Trading; Mutual Funds; Fund Flows; Limits To Arbitrage; Financial Constraints; Earnings Announcements; Institutional Investing; Stocks

SSRN

Summer 2021
Article

Predictable Country-level Bias in the Reporting of COVID-19 Deaths

By: Botir Kobilov, Ethan Rouen and George Serafeim

We examine whether a country’s management of the COVID-19 pandemic relate to the downward biasing of the number of reported deaths from COVID-19. Using deviations from historical averages of the total number of monthly deaths within a country, we find that the... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19; Deaths; Reporting; Incentives; Government Policy; Health Pandemics; Health Care and Treatment; Country; Crisis Management; Outcome or Result; Reports; Policy

Article

Doing Business with Strangers: Reputation in Online Service Marketplaces

By: Antonio Moreno and Christian Terwiesch

Online service marketplaces allow service buyers to post their project requests and service providers to bid for them. To reduce the transactional risks, marketplaces typically track and publish previous seller performance. By analyzing a detailed transactional data... View Details

Keywords: Online Service Marketplace; Procurement; Auctions; Reputation; Bids and Bidding

Purchase

July 2014
Article

Smart Money? The Effect of Education on Financial Outcomes

By: Shawn A. Cole, Anna Paulson and Gauri Kartini Shastry

Household financial decisions are important for household welfare, economic growth and financial stability. Yet, our understanding of the determinants of financial decision-making is limited. Exploiting exogenous variation in state compulsory schooling laws in both... View Details

Keywords: Personal Finance; Investment; Decisions; Behavior; Financial Condition

2009
Working Paper

Patent Policy, Patent Pools, and the Accumulation of Claims in Sequential Innovation

By: Gaston Llanes and Stefano Trento

We present a dynamic model where the accumulation of patents generates an increasing number of claims on sequential innovation. We study the equilibrium innovation activity under three regimes: patents, no-patents and patent pools. Patent pools increase the probability... View Details

Keywords: Innovation and Invention; Patents; Rights; Mathematical Methods

15 Jul 2022
News

The Right Step: Q+A With Rakoh Founder Raphael Kohlberg (MBA 2018)

Price Anchors and Mergers and Acquisitions

Prior stock price peaks of targets affect several aspects of merger and acquisition activity. Offer prices are biased toward recent peak prices although they are economically unremarkable. An offer's probability of acceptance jumps discontinuously when it exceeds a... View Details

September 2019
Article

Bankruptcy Spillovers

By: Shai Bernstein, Emanuele Colonnelli, Xavier Giroud and Benjamin Iverson

How do different bankruptcy approaches affect the local economy? Using U.S. Census microdata, we explore the spillover effects of reorganization and liquidation on geographically proximate firms. We exploit the random assignment of bankruptcy judges as a source of... View Details

Keywords: Agglomeration; Insolvency and Bankruptcy; Economy; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms

There were probably 30,000 public buses, minibuses, and vans in Mexico City. Though, in 2015, no one knew for certain since no comprehensive schedule existed. This was why el Laboratorio para la Ciudad (or LabCDMX) had spawned an effort to generate a map of the... View Details

27 Mar 2025
HBS Seminar

John Horton, MIT Sloan

15 May 2009
Working Paper Summaries

Money or Knowledge? What Drives Demand for Financial Services in Emerging Markets?

Keywords: by Shawn Cole, Thomas Sampson & Bilal Zia; Financial Services

05 Jul 2006
Working Paper Summaries

The IPS Property

Keywords: by Thomas J. Steenburgh; Financial Services

Forthcoming
Article

FinTech Lending and Cashless Payments

By: Pulak Ghosh, Boris Vallée and Yao Zeng

Borrower's use of cashless payments both improves their access to capital from FinTech lenders and predicts a lower probability of default. These relationships are stronger for cashless technologies providing more precise information, and for outflows. Cashless payment... View Details

Keywords: Fintech; Lending; Payments; Data Sharing; Financing and Loans; Information Technology; Banks and Banking; Business Model

Article

Job Loss, Credit and Crime in Colombia

By: Gaurav Khanna, Carlos Medina, Anant Nyshadham, Christian Posso and Jorge Tamayo

We investigate the effects of job displacement, as a result of mass layoffs, on criminal arrests using a matched employer-employee-crime dataset from Medellín, Colombia. Job displacement leads to immediate and persistent earnings losses and higher probability of arrest... View Details

Keywords: Job Displacements; Job Cuts and Outsourcing; Crime and Corruption; Credit; Colombia; Medellín