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- December 2014
- Article
Rethink What You 'Know' about High-Achieving Women
By: Robin Ely, Pamela Stone and Colleen Ammerman
On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the admission of women to Harvard Business School's MBA program, the authors, who have spent more than 20 years studying professional women, set out to learn what HBS graduates had to say about work and family and how their... View Details
- Article
The Not-So-Common-Wealth of Australia: Evidence for a Cross-Cultural Desire for a More Equal Distribution of Wealth.
By: Michael I. Norton, David T. Neal, Cassandra L. Govan, Dan Ariely and Elise Holland
Recent evidence suggests that Americans underestimate wealth inequality in the United States and favor a more equal wealth distribution (Norton & Ariely, 2011). Does this pattern reflect ideological dynamics unique to the United States, or is the phenomenon evident in... View Details
- October 2014
- Article
The Promise of Positive Optimal Taxation: Normative Diversity and a Role for Equal Sacrifice
A prominent assumption in modern optimal tax research is that the objective of taxation is Utilitarian. I present new survey evidence that most people disagree with this assumption, preferring tax policies based at least in part on a classic alternative objective: the... View Details
- September 2, 2014
- Article
Development of In-Group Favoritism in Children's Third-Party Punishment of Selfishness
By: Jillian J. Jordan, Katherine McAuliffe and Felix Warneken
When enforcing norms for cooperative behavior, human adults sometimes exhibit in-group bias. For example, third-party observers punish selfish behaviors committed by out-group members more harshly than similar behaviors committed by in-group members. Although evidence... View Details
- Article
Getting the Most Out of Giving: Concretely Framing a Prosocial Goal Maximizes Happiness
By: Melanie Rudd, Jennifer Aaker and Michael I. Norton
Across six field and laboratory experiments, participants assigned a more concretely-framed prosocial goal (e.g., making someone smile or increasing recycling) felt happier and reported creating greater personal happiness after performing a goal-directed act of... View Details
- Article
How Much (More) Should CEOs Make? A Universal Desire for More Equal Pay
By: Sorapop Kiatpongsan and Michael I. Norton
Do people from different countries and different backgrounds have similar preferences for how much more the rich should earn than the poor? Using survey data from 40 countries (N = 55,238), we compare respondents' estimates of the wages of people in different... View Details
- September 2014
- Article
Income Inequality and Social Preferences for Redistribution and Compensation Differentials
By: William R. Kerr
In cross-sectional studies, countries with greater income inequality typically exhibit less support for government-led redistribution and greater acceptance of wage inequality (e.g., United States versus Western Europe). If individual nations evolve along this pattern,... View Details
- Article
What's Your Language Strategy?: It Should Bind Your Company's Global Talent Management and Vision
By: Tsedal Neeley and Robert Steven Kaplan
Language pervades every aspect of organizational life. Yet leaders of global organizations—where unrestricted multilingualism can create friction—often pay too little attention to it in their approach to talent management. By managing language carefully, firms can hire... View Details
- July–August 2014
- Article
Obamacare Rules Pose Challenges for S Corp Owners
By: Josh Baron, Steve Salley and Judith L. Walsh
The article offers information financial impacts of tax by the U.S. Affordable Care Act (ACA) applied in January 2013 on family business shareholders and owners of S Corp. It discusses suggestions in tax planning to equalize tax burden including establishing family... View Details
- June–July 2014
- Article
Language as a Lightning Rod: Power Contests, Emotion Regulation, and Subgroup Dynamics in Global Teams
By: Pamela J. Hinds, Tsedal Neeley and Catherine Durnell Cramton
Through an ethnographic study comprised of interviews with and observations of 96 globally distributed members in six software development teams, we propose a model that captures how asymmetries in language fluency contribute to an us vs. them dynamic so common in... View Details
- 2014
- Article
Unequality: Who Gets What and Why It Matters
Who should get what, and what are the consequences? Economic inequality in the United States has been rising for decades, yet only recently have behavioral scientists explored two central questions surrounding the optimal level of inequality. First, what are the... View Details
- Article
Currency Unions, Product Introductions, and the Real Exchange Rate
By: Alberto Cavallo, Brent Neiman and Roberto Rigobon
We use a novel dataset of online prices of identical goods sold by four large global retailers in dozens of countries to study good-level real exchange rates and their aggregated behavior. First, in contrast to the prior literature, we demonstrate that the law of one... View Details
- March 2014
- Case
Inequality and Growth in the 'Chinese Dream'
By: Rafael Di Tella, Meg Rithmire and Kaitlyn Szydlowski
Xi Jinping assumed his position as head of China's fifth generation of leaders in 2012. Xi was head of both the People's Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party, which had ruled China since 1949. Xi inherited a country far more unequal than the one that Mao... View Details
- 2014
- Article
Paying It Forward: Generalized Reciprocity and the Limits of Generosity
By: Kurt Gray, Adrian F. Ward and Michael I. Norton
When people are the victims of greed or recipients of generosity, their first impulse is often to pay back that behavior in kind. What happens when people cannot reciprocate, but instead have the chance to be cruel or kind to someone entirely different—to pay it... View Details
- September 27, 2013
- Other Article
Closing the Opportunity Divide
- 2014
- Working Paper
Sharing Design Rights: A Commons Approach for Developing Infrastructure
By: Nuno Gil and Carliss Y. Baldwin
This study empirically investigates the relationship between design structure and organization structure in the context of new infrastructure development projects. Our research setting is a capital program to develop new school buildings in the city of Manchester, UK.... View Details
- 2013
- Working Paper
Inequality and Decision Making: Imagining a New Line of Inquiry
By: David Moss, Anant Thaker and Howard Rudnick
The substantial increase in inequality in the United States over the past three decades has provoked considerable debate, with some analysts characterizing rising inequality as among the greatest threats facing the nation and others dismissing it as little more than a... View Details
- June 2013
- Article
Dysfunction in the Boardroom: Understanding the Persistent Gender Gap at the Highest Levels
By: Boris Groysberg and Deborah Bell
The article examines the gender gap that is present in boardrooms in U.S. corporations and internationally in 2013 as more women attempt to reach executive-level positions. Countries in the European Union are attempting to institute laws regarding the minimum... View Details
- March 2013
- Article
The Unintended Consequences of Ownership Transfer Planning
By: Josh Baron and Marion McCollom Hampton
The article discusses the challenges of passing down family businesses across generations, highlighting complexities in executive succession and estate planning. It emphasizes how emotional factors, complicated family dynamics, and unintended consequences influence... View Details
- February 2013
- Case
18 Months in a Startup: Zaggora.com
By: Tom Nicholas
The founders of Zaggora reflected back on a tumultuous year-and-a-half in which they had generated, from just $40,000 in personal savings, a multi-million dollar sportswear enterprise selling Hotpants to women. These were hotpants not of the 1960s hipster variety, but... View Details