Publications
Publications
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(2,866)
- Faculty Publications (378)
- 2012
- Working Paper
Risky Business: The Impact of Property Rights on Investment and Revenue in the Film Industry
By: Venkat Kuppuswamy and Carliss Y. Baldwin
Our paper tests a key prediction of property rights theory, specifically, that agents will respond to marginal incentives embedded in property rights when making non-contractible, revenue-enhancing investments (Grossman and Hart, 1986; Hart and Moore, 1990). Using rich... View Details
- 2013
- Working Paper
FIN Around the World: The Contribution of Financing Activity to Profitability
By: Russell Lundholm, George Serafeim and Gwen Yu
We study how the availability of domestic credit influences the contribution that financing activities make to a firm's return on equity (ROE). Using a sample of 51,866 firms from 69 countries, we find that financing activities contribute more to a firm's ROE in... View Details
- June 2012
- Class Lecture
Why You're Not Buying Venezuelan Chocolate: The Provenance Paradox
By: Rohit Deshpandé
A product's country of origin establishes its authenticity. This is the provenance paradox. Consumers associate certain geographies with the best products: French wine, Italian sports cars, Swiss watches. Competing products from other countries - especially developing... View Details
Keywords: Global Business; Branding; Strategic Planning; Strategic Positioning; Emergent Countries; Consumer Perception; Developing Markets; Brands and Branding; Geographic Location; Globalized Markets and Industries; Perception; Emerging Markets; Product Positioning; Global Strategy; Marketing Strategy; Food and Beverage Industry; Venezuela
- 2012
- Working Paper
Reaching for Yield in the Bond Market
By: Bo Becker and Victoria Ivashina
Reaching-for-yield—the propensity to buy riskier assets in order to achieve higher yields—is believed to be an important factor contributing to the credit cycle. This paper analyses this phenomenon in the corporate bond market. Specifically, we show evidence for... View Details
- 2012
- Working Paper
'Power from Sunshine': A Business History of Solar Energy
By: Geoffrey Jones and Loubna Bouamane
This working paper provides a longitudinal perspective on the business history of solar energy between the nineteenth century and the present day. It covers early attempts to develop solar energy, the use of passive solar in architecture before World War 2, and the... View Details
- April 2012
- Article
Bouncing Out of the Banking System: An Empirical Analysis of Involuntary Bank Account Closures
By: Dennis Campbell, F. Asis Martinez-Jerez and Peter Tufano
Using a new database, we document the factors that relate to the extent of involuntary consumer bank account closure resulting from excessive overdraft activity. Consumers who have accounts involuntarily closed for overdraft activity may have limited or no access to... View Details
- April 2012
- Article
Broadening Focus: Spillovers, Complementarities and Specialization in the Hospital Industry
By: Jonathan R. Clark and Robert S. Huckman
The long-standing argument that focused operations outperform others stands in contrast to claims about the benefits of broader operational scope. The performance benefits of focus are typically attributed to reduced complexity, lower uncertainty, and the development... View Details
- April 2012
- Article
Retail Doesn't Cross Borders: Here's Why and What to Do about It
By: Marcel Corstjens and Rajiv Lal
Most companies assume that the easiest way to grow is by investing overseas and that the developing world offers the best opportunities for boosting revenues and profits today. However, success abroad varies widely, and research shows that it's often tough to... View Details
- March 2012 (Revised January 2013)
- Case
Boston Children's Hospital: Measuring Patient Costs
By: Robert S. Kaplan, Mary L. Witkowski and Jessica A. Hohman
The case describes two pilot projects on applying activity-based costing to measuring the cost of treating patients. It presents process maps and financial data relating to the processes used during (1) an office visit to a plastic surgeon for three different diagnoses... View Details
- 2012
- Working Paper
~Why Do We Redistribute so Much but Tag so Little? Normative Diversity, Equal Sacrifice and Optimal Taxation
Tagging is a free lunch in conventional optimal tax theory because it eases the classic tradeoff between efficiency and equality. But tagging is used in only limited ways in tax policy. I propose one explanation: conventional optimal tax theory has yet to capture the... View Details
- 2014
- Working Paper
De Gustibus non est Taxandum: Heterogeneity in Preferences and Optimal Redistribution
By: Benjamin B Lockwood and Matthew Weinzierl
The prominent but unproven intuition that preference heterogeneity reduces redistribution in a standard optimal tax model is shown to hold under the plausible condition that the distribution of preferences for consumption relative to leisure rises, in terms of... View Details
- 2012
- Article
The Excess Burden of Government Indecision
By: Francisco J. Gomes, Laurence J. Kotlikoff and Luis M. Viceira
Governments are known for procrastinating when it comes to resolving painful policy problems. Whatever the political motives for waiting to decide, procrastination distorts economic decisions relative to what would arise with early policy resolution. In so doing, it... View Details
- October 2011 (Revised March 2012)
- Case
Cottle-Taylor: Expanding the Oral Care Group in India
By: John A. Quelch and Alisa Zalosh
Brinda Patel, director of oral care products for the India division of a consumer home-care product company, develops a data-driven marketing plan for toothbrushes. She believes her plan can support a 20% increase in unit sales based on rising demand for modern... View Details
Keywords: Forecasting; Budgeting; International Marketing; Product Planning ＆ Policy; Sales Promotions; Marketing Plans; Products; Marketing Strategy; Consumer Behavior; Emerging Markets; Forecasting and Prediction; Advertising; Product Launch; Budgets and Budgeting; Product Development; Consumer Products Industry; Health Industry; India
- October 2011
- Article
The Surprising Power of Age-Dependent Taxes
This article provides a new, empirically driven application of the dynamic Mirrleesian framework by studying a feasible and potentially powerful tax reform: age-dependent labor income taxation. I show analytically how age dependence improves policy on both the... View Details
- September 2011 (Revised August 2015)
- Case
ScoreBig
By: William A. Sahlman, Jeffrey Glass and Evan W. Richardson
The founding team at ScoreBig, an event ticketing company, is on the verge of a public launch of their product. The company has made great progress in negotiating access to tickets, designing its interface, and building a proprietary architecture. For consumers,... View Details
- September 2011 (Revised January 2012)
- Case
Telemonitoring at Visiting Nurse Health System
By: F. Warren McFarlan, Mark Keil and Mala Kaul
The Telemonitoring at Visiting Nurse Health System case presents one home healthcare organization's efforts to use telemonitoring to improve the quality of care provided to at-risk patients who were discharged from hospitals and needed home care. After two years of... View Details
- Article
Product Positioning in a Two-Dimensional Vertical Differentiation Model: The Role of Quality Costs
By: Dominique Lauga and Elie Ofek
We study a duopoly model where consumers are heterogeneous with respect to their willingness to pay for two product characteristics and marginal costs are increasing with the quality level chosen on each attribute. We show that while firms seek to manage competition... View Details
Keywords: Duopoly and Oligopoly; Customers; Quality; Product Positioning; Competition; Management; Cost; Product
- June 2011 (Revised August 2012)
- Case
Coca-Cola in 2011: In Search of a New Model
By: David B. Yoffie and Renee Kim
Muhtar Kent, CEO of the Coca-Cola Company, faced a critical decision in 2011 after closing a $12 billion deal to buy its troubled North America bottling operations from its biggest bottler, Coca-Cola Enterprises. The decision was prompted by several changes in the U.S.... View Details
- May – June 2011
- Article
Too Many Cooks Spoil the Broth: How High Status Individuals Decrease Group Effectiveness
By: Boris Groysberg, Jeffrey T. Polzer and Hillary Anger Elfenbein
Can groups become effective simply by assembling high status individual performers? Though an affirmative answer may seem straightforward on the surface, this answer becomes more complicated when group members benefit from collaborating on interdependent tasks.... View Details
- April 2011 (Revised May 2011)
- Case
EMC2: Delivering Customer Centricity
By: Thomas Steenburgh and Jill Avery
This case introduces the concept of customer centricity and traces its development at EMC, the world's leading data storage hardware and information management software company. EMC's customers had historically relied on EMC salespeople to guide them through the... View Details