Publications

2022
White Paper

The American Opportunity Index: A Corporate Scorecard of Worker Advancement

By: Matt Sigelman, Joseph Fuller, Nik Dawson and Gad Levanon

The American Opportunity Index: A Corporate Scorecard of Worker Advancement is a new effort to give companies and other stakeholders a set of robust tools that measure how well major employers are doing in fostering economic mobility for workers and how they could do... View Details

Keywords: Upward Mobility; Career Advancement; Personal Development and Career; Compensation and Benefits; Employees; Wages; Human Capital; Recruitment

September 16, 2022
Article

A Causal Test of the Strength of Weak Ties

By: Karthik Rajkumar, Guillaume Saint-Jacques, Iavor I. Bojinov, Erik Brynjolfsson and Sinan Aral

The authors analyzed data from multiple large-scale randomized experiments on LinkedIn’s People You May Know algorithm, which recommends new connections to LinkedIn members, to test the extent to which weak ties increased job mobility in the world’s largest... View Details

Keywords: Job Mobility; Social Networks; Social Ties; Networks; Personal Development and Career

Register to Read

August 2015 (Revised December 2016)
Case

Apple Pay

By: Sunil Gupta, Shelle Santana and Margaret L. Rodriguez

On September 9, 2014, in front of a packed audience in Cupertino, CA, Tim Cook, the chief executive officer of Apple, announced the much anticipated launch of Apple Pay. "Our vision is to replace this [wallet] and we are going to start with payments." Cook then invited... View Details

September 2022
Article

Health Externalities and Policy: The Role of Social Preferences

By: Laura Alfaro, Ester Faia, Nora Lamersdorf and Farzad Saidi

Social preferences facilitate the internalization of health externalities, for example by reducing mobility during a pandemic. We test this hypothesis using mobility data from 258 cities worldwide alongside experimentally validated measures of social preferences.... View Details

Keywords: Social Preferences; Pandemics; Mobility; Health Externalities; Mitigation Policies; Health Pandemics; Cooperation; Behavior; Policy

April 2023 (Revised July 2023)
Case

Dena Almansoori at e&: Fostering Culture Change at a UAE Telco Transforming to a Global Techco (Abridged)

By: Emily Truelove, Michelle Zhang and Alpana Thapar

Dena Almansoori, the first female and one of the youngest members of the United Arab Emirates-based e&’s leadership team, joined in 2020 just before e& began a strategic transition from being a regional telecommunications company to becoming a global technology... View Details

Keywords: Technology; Telecommunications; Employee Mobility; Leading Change; Human Resources; Organizational Culture; Transformation; Change Management; Employee Relationship Management; Leadership; Talent and Talent Management; Telecommunications Industry; Technology Industry; Middle East; United Arab Emirates

2024
Working Paper

Bounded Solidarity: The Role of Migrants in Shaping Entrepreneurial Ventures

By: Astrid Marinoni and Prithwiraj Choudhury

We explore a previously unexamined aspect of migrants’ contributions to local entrepreneurial ecosystems: the value created by cooperative interactions between migrants and locals in entrepreneurial ventures. Specifically, we analyze whether mixed teams composed of... View Details

Keywords: Migration; Mobility; Entrepreneurship; Immigration; Demographics; Groups and Teams

SSRN

September 2024
Article

Investing in the Next Generation: The Long-Run Impacts of a Liquidity Shock

By: Patrick Agte, Arielle Bernhardt, Erica M. Field, Rohini Pande and Natalia Rigol

How do poor entrepreneurs trade off investments in business enterprises versus children's human capital, and how do these choices influence intergenerational socio-economic mobility? To examine this, we exploit experimental variation in household income resulting from... View Details

Keywords: Socio-economic Mobility; Entrepreneurship; Education; Income; Literacy; Poverty

Find at Harvard

Register to Read

July 2018
Article

Global Collaborative Patents

By: Sari Pekkala Kerr and William R. Kerr

We study the prevalence and traits of global collaborative patents for U.S. public companies, where the inventor team is located both within and outside of the United States. Collaborative patents are frequently observed when a corporation is entering into a new... View Details

Keywords: Innovation; Ethnic Networks; Migration; Technology Transfer; Mobility; Information Technology; Globalized Firms and Management; Diasporas; Patents; Ethnicity; Entrepreneurship; Research and Development; Foreign Direct Investment; Innovation and Invention; Globalization; United States

February 2022 (Revised February 2023)
Case

TikTok in 2020: Super App or Supernova? (Abridged)

By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Dan Maher and Dan O'Brien

TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, was launched in 2012 around a simple idea—helping users entertain themselves on their smartphones while on the Beijing Subway. In less than a decade, it had become one of the world’s most valuable private companies, with investors... View Details

Keywords: Digital Platform; Artificial Intelligence; AI; Mobile App; Mobile App Industry; Mobile and Wireless Technology; Market Entry and Exit; Brands and Branding; Growth and Development Strategy; China

May 2022
Case

Rawbank's Illico Cash: Can 'Fast Money' Overcome Cash Dependency in the DRC?

By: Lauren Cohen and Grace Headinger

Thomas de Dreux-Brézé, the Head of Strategy and Project Management at Rawbank Congo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), was perplexed as he reviewed annual adoption rates for the bank’s launch of Illico Cash 2.0. As the bank’s mobile money app, Illico Cash... View Details

Web

Mobility in the Motor City: My Summer at the City of Detroit Office of the Mayor | Social Enterprise | Harvard Business School

February 2024
Supplement

Dena Almansoori at e&: Fostering Culture Change at a UAE Telco Transforming to a Global Techco

By: Emily Truelove, Michelle Zhang and Alpana Thapar

Dena Almansoori, the first female and one of the youngest members of the United Arab Emirates-based e&’s leadership team, joined in 2020 just before e& began a strategic transition from being a regional telecommunications company to becoming a global technology... View Details

Keywords: Technology; Telecommunications; Employee Mobility; Leading Change; Human Resources; Organizational Culture; Transformation; Talent and Talent Management; Change Management; Employee Relationship Management; Telecommunications Industry; Technology Industry; Middle East; United Arab Emirates

Article

Comment mobiliser les exclus du jeu politique?

By: Vincent Pons

Keywords: Elections; Voter Mobilization; France; Voting; Political Elections; France

Find at Harvard

20 Nov 2015
News

A Smart(Phone) Approach to Diabetes Testing

Keywords: mobile technology; mobile healthcare; India; diabetes; social enterprise; entrepreneurship; Ambulatory Health Care Services; Health, Social Assistance

Article

Beyond the Target Customer: Social Effects in CRM Campaigns

By: Eva Ascarza, Peter Ebbes, Oded Netzer and Matthew Danielson

Customer relationship management (CRM) campaigns have traditionally focused on maximizing the profitability of the targeted customers. The authors demonstrate that in business settings characterized by network externalities, a CRM campaign that is aimed at changing the... View Details

Keywords: Social Effects; Field Experiment; Mobile; Customer Relationship Management; Network Effects; Consumer Behavior

Find at Harvard

February 2017 (Revised April 2018)
Case

Shopkick: The Power of Shopper Data

By: John Deighton, Allison Ciechanover and Mike Horia Todorescu

Keywords: Big Data; Mobile App; Marketing; Mobile and Wireless Technology; Analytics and Data Science