Publications

June 2009
Case

The Role of the Audit Committee in Risk Oversight

By: Jay W. Lorsch and Kaitlyn Simpson

An audit committee chair considers how he can help his committee become more effective given the increasing regulatory demands on audit committees. He also wrestles with the lack of specificity in audit committee duties and whether his committee should take on... View Details

Keywords: Accounting Audits; Corporate Governance; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Governing and Advisory Boards; Laws and Statutes; Risk Management

Educators

January 2023 (Revised December 2023)
Case

OhmConnect: Energizing the Future

By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Jennifer Fonstad and Nicole Tempest Keller

Founded in 2013, OhmConnect was a free consumer web app that alerted customers about peak hours of electricity demand, and paid them to lower their energy use at home during these periods. The company sold the aggregated reductions generated by thousands of households... View Details

Keywords: App Development; Renewable Energy; Electricity Usage; Regulations; VC; Technology; Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC); Scalability; Applications and Software; Growth and Development Strategy; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Business Model; Venture Capital; Energy Industry; United States; California; Texas; Europe

Educators

March 2024
Article

Establishing the Foundation for Carbon Trading Markets

By: Robert S. Kaplan, Karthik Ramanna and Marc Roston

Poor measurement practices and inadequate controls have led to extensive trading of carbon offset instruments that do not materially reduce the supply of atmospheric GHG. We introduce five carbon offset accounting principles, built from fundamental financial-accounting... View Details

Keywords: Carbon Offsetting; Accounting; Carbon Accounting; E-liabilities; Measurement; Trading; Environmental Accounting; Environmental Sustainability

2016
Working Paper

Operations in the On-Demand Economy: Staffing Services with Self-Scheduling Capacity

By: Itai Gurvich, Martin Lariviere and Antonio Moreno

Motivated by recent innovations in service delivery such as ride-sharing services and work-from-home call centers, we study capacity management when workers self-schedule. Our service provider chooses capacity to maximize its profit (revenue from served customers minus... View Details

Keywords: Strategic Servers; On-demand Economy; Independent Capacity; Distributed Systems; Uber; Service Operations; Performance Capacity

SSRN

Column

What Will U.S. Health Care Look Like After the Pandemic?

By: Robert S. Huckman

The pandemic crisis is almost certain to change many American industries. It would be a shame if health care is not one of them. A number of major practices have been altered to help the country cope with the extraordinary demands that the pandemic has imposed on the... View Details

Keywords: Health Pandemics; Health Care and Treatment; Change; Health Industry; United States

News

We Need Nuclear Power to Solve Climate Change

The Unintended Consequences of the Zero Lower Bound Policy

Our novel evidence suggests that in the times of unusually low interest rates money market fund managers increased, on average, their portfolios’ risk. We also show... View Details

2010
Chapter

The Euro as a Reserve Currency for Global Investors

By: Luis M. Viceira and Ricardo Gimeno

This article explores the demand for the euro for risk management purposes and the evidence of stock market integration in the euro area. We define a reserve currency as one that investors demand either because it helps them hedge real interest risk and inflation risk,... View Details

Keywords: Volatility; Inflation and Deflation; Capital Markets; Currency; Stocks; Financial Markets; Financing and Loans; Investment Return; Investment Portfolio; Risk Management

Find at Harvard

January – February 2011
Article

Creating Shared Value

By: Michael E. Porter and Mark R. Kramer

The capitalist system is under siege. In recent years business has been criticized as a major cause of social, environmental, and economic problems. Companies are widely thought to be prospering at the expense of their communities. Trust in business has fallen to new... View Details

Keywords: Customer Value and Value Chain; Economic Growth; Economic Systems; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Environmental Sustainability; Trust; Human Needs; Welfare; Competitive Advantage; Value Creation

Find at Harvard

11 Nov 2013
Working Paper Summaries

Increased Speed Equals Increased Wait: The Impact of a Reduction in Emergency Department Ultrasound Order Processing Time

Keywords: by Jillian Berry Jaeker, Anita L. Tucker & Michael H. Lee; Health

12 Apr 2021
News

The Answers Are Not Clear Yet on Semi Shortage: Willy Shih

March 2011
Article

Cheaper Patents

By: Tom Nicholas

The 1883 Patents Act in Britain provides perspective for modern patent policy reforms because it radically changed incentives for inventors by reducing filing fees by 84 percent. Patents increased 2.5 fold after the reform, which was evenly distributed across the... View Details

Keywords: Patents; Global Range; Distribution; Demand and Consumers; Organizational Structure; Business Processes; Innovation and Invention; Innovation and Management; Policy; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Fluctuation; Motivation and Incentives; Distribution Industry; United States; Great Britain

Find at Harvard

30 Mar 2020
News

How to Get America Working Again

24 May 2022
News

Is the ‘Remote Work Window’ about to Close?

2010
Chapter

The Many Faces of Nonprofit Accountability

By: Alnoor Ebrahim

Calls for greater accountability are not new. Leaders of organizations, be they nonprofit, business, or government, face a constant stream of demands from various constituents demanding accountable behavior. But what does it mean to be accountable? By and large,... View Details

Keywords: Crime and Corruption; Corporate Accountability; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Taxation; Leadership; Management; Nonprofit Organizations; Behavior; Trust

26 Jun 2015
News

Slumping Red Sox bad for business

November 2014 (Revised March 2015)
Case

Disrupting the Meat Industry: Tissue Culture Beef

By: Jose B. Alvarez and Matthew G. Preble

Dr. Mark Post and his team at Maastricht University were perfecting their tissue culture beef product—made entirely from muscle grown in his lab—to give it the same taste, texture and appearance of a traditional beef hamburger. A previous iteration of this product had... View Details

Keywords: Innovation; Beef Production; Environmental Impacts Of Food Production; Agribusiness; Animal-Based Agribusiness; Disruptive Innovation; Innovation and Invention; Environmental Sustainability; Food; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Netherlands; United States; United Kingdom

Educators

January 2010
Article

Clusters of Entrepreneurship

By: Edward L. Glaeser, William R. Kerr and Giacomo A.M. Ponzetto

Employment growth is strongly predicted by smaller average establishment size, both across cities and across industries within cities, but there is little consensus on why this relationship exists. Traditional economic explanations emphasize factors that reduce entry... View Details

Keywords: Economic Growth; Entrepreneurship; Cost; Employment; Market Entry and Exit