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- May 18, 2012
- Article
Randomized Government Safety Inspections Reduce Worker Injuries with No Detectable Job Loss
By: David I Levine, Michael W. Toffel and Matthew S. Johnson
Controversy surrounds occupational health and safety regulators, with some observers claiming that workplace regulations damage firms' competitiveness and destroy jobs and others arguing that they make workplaces safer at little cost to employers and employees. We... View Details
- 2012
- Chapter
The Confederacy of Heterogeneous Software Organizations and Heterogeneous Developers: Field Experimental Evidence on Sorting and Worker Effort
By: Kevin J. Boudreau and Karim R. Lakhani
Software development occurs in a patchwork or "confederacy" of different types of institutions (universities, small start-ups, multinational enterprises, government agencies, etc.) utilizing varied work approaches. Here we speculate on one possible explanation for this... View Details
- February 2012
- Article
Management Practices across Firms and Countries
By: Nicholas Bloom, Christos Genakos, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
For the last decade we have been using double-blind survey techniques and randomized sampling to construct management data on over 10,000 organizations across 20 countries. On average, we find that in manufacturing American, Japanese, and German firms are the best... View Details
Keywords: Management Practices and Processes; Competency and Skills; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Organizations; Developing Countries and Economies; Economic Sectors; Performance; Business and Shareholder Relations; Private Equity; Multinational Firms and Management; United States; Germany; Japan; China; India
- 2013
- Contribution
Work
By: Nien-he Hsieh
This chapter has two aims. First, in light of the continued dominance of market capitalism, one aim of the chapter is to examine contemporary approaches to traditional concerns about the impact of market capitalism on the manner in which work is carried out. By the... View Details
- 2011
- Working Paper
Management Practices Across Firms and Countries
By: Nicholas Bloom, Christos Genakos, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
For the last decade we have been using double-blind survey techniques and randomized sampling to construct management data on over 10,000 organizations across 20 countries. On average, we find that in manufacturing, American, Japanese, and German firms are the best... View Details
- November 2011
- Article
How Great Companies Think Differently
Corporate leaders have long subscribed to the belief that the sole purpose of business is to make money. That narrow view, deeply embedded in the American capitalist system, molds the actions of most corporations, constraining them to focus on maximizing short-term... View Details
- November 2011 (Revised October 2014)
- Case
The 2010 Chilean Mining Rescue (A)
By: Amy C. Edmondson, Faaiza Rashid and Herman B. "Dutch" Leonard
On August 5, 2010, 700,000 tons of some of the hardest rock in the world caved in Chile's century-old San José mine. The collapse buried 33 miners at a depth almost twice the height of the Empire State Building-over 600 meters (2000 feet) below ground. Never had a... View Details
- 2013
- Working Paper
The Dynamics of Firm Lobbying
By: William R. Kerr, William F. Lincoln and Prachi Mishra
We study the determinants of the dynamics of firm lobbying behavior using a panel data set covering 1998–2006. Our data exhibit three striking facts: (i) few firms lobby, (ii) lobbying status is strongly associated with firm size, and (iii) lobbying status is highly... View Details
- 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
- Article
Economic Impacts of Immigration: A Survey
By: Sari Pekkala Kerr and William R. Kerr
This paper surveys recent empirical studies on the economic impacts of immigration. The survey first examines the magnitude of immigration as an economic phenomenon in various host countries. The second part deals with the assimilation of immigrant workers into... View Details
- July 2010 (Revised March 2012)
- Case
China 'Unbalanced'
By: Diego A. Comin and Richard H.K. Vietor
In 2010, Wen Jiabao looked back at the financial crisis with some satisfaction. Using aggressive fiscal and monetary policy, China had weathered the crisis successfully, growing 8.7% annually in 2010. Most of the unemployed workers had returned to work, often... View Details
- 2011
- Working Paper
Managerial Practices That Promote Voice and Taking Charge among Frontline Workers
By: Julia Adler-Milstein, Sara J. Singer and Michael W. Toffel
Process-improvement ideas often come from frontline workers who speak up by voicing concerns about problems and by taking charge to resolve them. We hypothesize that organization-wide process-improvement campaigns encourage both forms of speaking up, especially voicing... View Details
- 2010
- Working Paper
Unraveling Results from Comparable Demand and Supply: An Experimental Investigation
By: Muriel Niederle, Alvin E. Roth and M. Utku Unver
Markets sometimes unravel, with offers becoming inefficiently early. Often this is attributed to competition arising from an imbalance of demand and supply, typically excess demand for workers. However this presents a puzzle, since unraveling can only occur when firms... View Details
- March 2010 (Revised June 2010)
- Case
Malden Mills (A) (Abridged)
By: Nitin Nohria and Thomas R. Piper
CEO Aaron Feuerstein of Malden Mills decided to pay idled workers after a massive fire at his mill in 1995. Focuses on the decisions made post-fire and the rebuilding process and eventual bankruptcy of the company. Also outlines creditors' struggle to decide whether to... View Details
- March 2010 (Revised August 2010)
- Case
Systems Infrastructure at Google (A)
By: Linda A. Hill and Emily Stecker
This case describes how a senior vice president of engineering at Google, Bill Coughran, leads a high-performing engineering organization. The case focuses specifically on Coughran's encouraging two teams of engineers to develop competing solutions for application... View Details
- March 2010 (Revised August 2010)
- Supplement
Systems Infrastructure at Google (B)
By: Linda A. Hill and Emily Stecker
This case is a thick description of how a Senior Vice President of Engineering at Google, Bill Coughran, leads a high-performing engineering organization. The case focuses specifically on Coughran's use of encouraging two teams of engineers to develop competing... View Details
- February 2010 (Revised April 2010)
- Case
China: Getting Richer Still
By: Diego A. Comin and Richard H. K. Vietor
In the last quarter of 2009, China's GDP growth rate again approached 10%. While the global financial crisis had certainly hurt - causing layoffs of as many as 20 million factory workers - a huge stimulus package on top of continuing domestic demand had restored... View Details
- 2010
- Article
An Organizational Approach to Undoing Gender: The Unlikely Case of Offshore Oil Platforms
By: Robin J. Ely and Debra E. Meyerson
This case study of two offshore oil platforms illustrates how an organizational initiative designed to enhance safety and effectiveness created a culture that unintentionally released men from societal imperatives for "manly" behavior, prompting them to let go of... View Details
- January 2010
- Article
Clusters of Entrepreneurship
By: Edward L. Glaeser, William R. Kerr and Giacomo A.M. Ponzetto
Employment growth is strongly predicted by smaller average establishment size, both across cities and across industries within cities, but there is little consensus on why this relationship exists. Traditional economic explanations emphasize factors that reduce entry... View Details
- Article
What Really Motivates Workers
By: Teresa M. Amabile and Steve J. Kramer
This essay appears in "The HBR List: Breakthrough Ideas for 2010," which is compiled by this journal in collaboration with the World Economic Forum. The ten problems and the innovative solutions are discussed in each essay. This particular essay describes research... View Details