Publications

Find at Harvard

Peter Tufano is a Baker Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School and Senior Advisor to the Harvard Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability. From 2011 to 2021, he served as the Peter Moores Dean at View Details

2014
Working Paper

Adding Value Through Venture Capital in Latin America and the Caribbean

By: Josh Lerner, Ann Leamon, James Tighe and Susana Garcia-Robles

Venture capital (VC) investment has long been recognized as an engine for economic growth and development. Unlike bank loans, where the entrepreneur receives money and is left alone as long as the payments arrive on the pre-arranged schedule, venture capital... View Details

Keywords: Venture Capital; Value; Entrepreneurship; Investment; Latin America; West Indies

2012
Working Paper

Can Implicit Regulation Change Financial Market Behavior? Evidence from Spitzer's Attack on Market Timers

By: Charles C.Y. Wang

This paper explores a natural experiment setup from the 2003-2004 mutual fund scandals to evaluate the effectiveness of implicit regulation on financial markets behavior. On average, buy-and-hold investors lost 218 basis points annually from 1998 to 2002 to market... View Details

Keywords: Financial Markets; Market Timing; United States

February 2001 (Revised February 2002)
Background Note

Leader's (Dis)Advantage, The

Provides a rigorous description of the economic dynamics that may produce inherent advantages for large and/or first-mover firms within an industry, as well as those factors that may result in disadvantages for such leading firms. The leader advantages discussed... View Details

Keywords: Competitive Advantage; Semiconductor Industry

Educators

06 Sep 2007
Working Paper Summaries

The Excess Burden of Government Indecision

Keywords: by Francisco J. Gomes, Laurence J. Kotlikoff & Luis M. Viceira

2024
Working Paper

Lost in Transmission

By: Thomas Graeber, Shakked Noy and Christopher Roth

For many decisions, people rely on information received from others by word of mouth. How does the process of verbal transmission distort economic information? In our experiments, participants listen to audio recordings containing economic forecasts and are paid to... View Details

Keywords: Information Trnasmission; Word Of Mouth; Word-of-Mouth; Narratives; Reliability; Knowledge Sharing; Spoken Communication; Cognition and Thinking

July 2020 (Revised January 2021)
Case

Pattern Brands

By: Sunil Gupta, Elie Ofek and Julia Kelley

In March 2020, direct-to-consumer (DTC) company Pattern Brands needed to decide how to allocate resources across its different brands. Pattern Co-Founders Nick Ling and Emmett Shine hoped to avoid the pitfalls faced by some DTC companies—such as inability to scale and... View Details

Educators

2021
Article

Don't Get It or Don't Spread It: Comparing Self-interested versus Prosocial Motivations for COVID-19 Prevention Behaviors

By: Jillian J. Jordan, Erez Yoeli and David Rand

COVID-19 prevention behaviors may be seen as self-interested or prosocial. Using American samples from MTurk and Prolific (total n = 6,850), we investigated which framing is more effective—and motivation is stronger—for fostering prevention behavior intentions. We... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19; Prevention; Prosocial Motivation; Health Pandemics; Behavior; Motivation and Incentives

29 Oct 2018
Research & Ideas

Hunting for a Hot Job in High Tech? Try 'Digitization Economist'

academic economics department. Amazon is far from alone in this trend. Some 50 tech companies “have been snapping up economists at a remarkable scale,” says Michael Luca, the Lee J. Styslinger III Associate Professor of Business... View Details

Keywords: by Roberta Holland; Technology; Education

March 2024
Article

Human Capital Affects Religious Identity: Causal Evidence from Kenya

By: Livia Alfonsi, Michal Bauer, Julie Chytilová and Edward Miguel

We study how human capital and economic conditions causally affect the choice of religious denomination. We utilize a longitudinal dataset monitoring the religious history of more than 5,000 Kenyans over 20 years, in tandem with a randomized experiment (deworming) that... View Details

Keywords: Religion; Human Capital; Developing Countries and Economies; Welfare; Kenya