Publications

07 Apr 2008
Research & Ideas

The Debate over Taxing Foreign Profits

Congress and the next president of the United States will be under pressure to make major changes to U.S. corporate tax policy, the consequences of which could have significant impact on profit and competitiveness of American companies on... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

January 2012 (Revised April 2015)
Case

India 2014: The Challenges of Governance

By: Lakshmi Iyer and Richard H. K. Vietor

In January 2012, the government of India faced significant challenges to achieving three key objectives of high growth, inclusive development, and improved governance. The economy was experiencing a growth slowdown, persistently high inflation, and infrastructure and... View Details

Keywords: Governance; Government and Politics; Problems and Challenges; Economic Growth; India

Educators

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January 2001 (Revised August 2003)
Case

Diageo plc

A major U.K.-based multinational is reevaluating its leverage policy as it restructures its business. The treasury team models the tradeoffs between the benefits and costs of debt financing, using Monte Carlo simulation to estimate the savings from the interest tax... View Details

Keywords: Cost vs Benefits; Multinational Firms and Management; Capital Structure; Restructuring; United Kingdom

Educators

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20 Oct 2010
Op-Ed

Export Competitiveness: Reversing the Logic

the analytics of identifying relations between industries that make successful diversification seem more likely (Hausmann/Klinger, 2006; Delgado/Porter/Stern, 2009; Neffke et al., 2009). There is less systematic progress on identifying... View Details

Keywords: by Christian Ketels

February 2023
Article

Increasing the Demand for Workers with a Criminal Record

By: Zoë Cullen, Will Dobbie and Mitchell Hoffman

State and local policies increasingly restrict employers’ access to criminal records, but without addressing the underlying reasons that employers may conduct criminal background checks. Employers may thus still want to ask about a job applicant’s criminal record... View Details

Keywords: Criminal Record; Hiring; Background Checks; Recruitment; Insurance

07 Dec 2015
News

Need to look at the structure of regulations again

16 Apr 2018
Research & Ideas

Can Consumers Be Saved From Their Misguided Decisions?

iStock Consumers make regretable decisions every day, even though easily available information should convince them to do otherwise: Twenty-six percent of consumers choose Advil or other branded headache remedies when they walk into a... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne; Consulting; Retail

18 Feb 2015
News

The National Front’s Post-Charlie Hebdo Moment

2017
Article

Frictions or Mental Gaps: What's Behind the Information We (Don't) Use and When Do We Care?

By: Benjamin Handel and Joshua Schwartzstein

Consumers suffer significant losses from not acting on available information. These losses stem from frictions such as search costs, switching costs, and rational inattention, as well as what we call mental gaps resulting from wrong priors/worldviews, or relevant... View Details

Keywords: Information; Consumer Behavior

Research Summary

The Political Power of Weak Interests

By: Gunnar Trumbull

One of the most broadly accepted theoretical claims of public policy is the proposal that interests shared by a large set of actors tend to be under-represented in public policy. From Mancur Olson to George Stigler to James Q. Wilson, our most influential theorists... View Details

March 2011
Article

Zoom In, Zoom Out

By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Zoom buttons on digital devices let us examine images from many viewpoints. They also provide an apt metaphor for modes of strategic thinking. Some people prefer to see things up close, others from afar. Both perspectives have virtues. But they should not be fixed... View Details

Keywords: Strategy; Cognition and Thinking; Perspective; Leadership; Opportunities; Decisions

Purchase

2023
Working Paper

Saving and Consumption Responses to Student Loan Forbearance

By: Justin Katz

How do households adjust savings and consumption in response to liquidity from debt relief? I study this question using policy variation induced by federal student loan forbearance in the 2020 CARES Act and an individual-level panel of daily financial transactions for... View Details

Keywords: Saving; Consumer Behavior; Borrowing and Debt; Interest Rates; Financial Liquidity; Personal Finance; Government Legislation

SSRN

Blog

Recent Insights from HBS Podcasts

isn’t your thing, you can still take advantage of them, as many of our podcasts provide full transcripts as well. Managing Electricity to Meet Net Zero Targets In this episode of Climate Rising, hosted by HBS professor Mike Toffel, two experts in energy View Details

June 2015
Article

Standard-Essential Patents

By: Josh Lerner and Jean Tirole

A major policy issue in standard setting is that patents that are ex-ante not that important may, by being included into the standard, become standard-essential patents (SEPs). In an attempt to curb the monopoly power that they create, most standard-setting... View Details

Keywords: Patents; Policy; Standards

2016
Article

The Federal Reserve's Balance Sheet as a Financial-Stability Tool

By: Robin Greenwood, Samuel Gregory Hanson and Jeremy C. Stein

We argue that the Federal Reserve should use its balance sheet to help reduce a key threat to financial stability: the tendency for private-sector financial intermediaries to engage in excessive amounts of maturity transformation—i.e., to finance risky assets using... View Details

Keywords: Central Banking; Policy; Risk Management; Public Administration Industry; United States

After decades of centralized control of economic activity in space, NASA and US policymakers have begun to cede the direction of human activities in space to commercial companies. The shift from public to private priorities in space is especially significant because... View Details

2009
Working Paper

Labor Regulations and European Private Equity

By: Ant Bozkaya and William R. Kerr

European nations substitute between employment protection regulations and labor market expenditures (e.g., unemployment insurance benefits) for providing worker insurance. Employment regulations more directly tax firms making frequent labor adjustments than other labor... View Details

Keywords: Venture Capital; Private Equity; Insurance; Investment; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Taxation; Employment; Europe