Publications

Article

Passion Penalizes Women and Advantages (Unexceptional) Men in High-Potential Designations

By: Joyce He, Jon M. Jachimowicz and Celia Moore

High potential programs offer a swift path up the corporate ladder for those who secure a place on them. However, the evaluation of “potential” occurs under considerable uncertainty, creating fertile ground for gender bias. We document that men are more likely than... View Details

Keywords: Passion; Potential; Gender; Motivation and Incentives; Performance; Talent and Talent Management

High potential programs offer a swift path up the corporate ladder for those who secure a place on them. However, the evaluation of “potential” occurs under considerable uncertainty, creating fertile ground for gender bias. We document that men are more likely than... View Details

2012
Article

Hiring Cheerleaders: Board Appointments of 'Independent' Directors

By: Lauren Cohen, Andrea Frazzini and Christopher Malloy

We provide evidence that firms appoint independent directors who are overly sympathetic to management, while still technically independent according to regulatory definitions. We explore a subset of independent directors for whom we have detailed, micro-level data on... View Details

Keywords: Recruitment; Management; Corporate Governance; Performance; Governing and Advisory Boards; Executive Compensation; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Prejudice and Bias

30 Jan 2020
News

Harvard Business School professor shares 4 tips to find your 'edge'

July 1977
Article

Social Roles, Social Control and Biases in Social Perception Processes

By: L. D. Ross, T. M. Amabile and J. Steinmetz

To make accurate social judgments, an individual must both recognize and adequately correct for the self-presentation advantages or disadvantages conferred upon actors by their social roles. Two experiments using 120 undergraduates examined social perceptions formed... View Details

Keywords: Perception; Prejudice and Bias; Social Psychology; Judgments; Power and Influence; Status and Position; Situation or Environment

18 Nov 2014
HBS Seminar

Steve Tadelis, University of California Berkeley Haas School of Business

Spring 2017
Article

Globalizing Latin American Beauty

By: Geoffrey Jones

This article discusses the growth over time of the beauty industry in Latin America and its bias towards celebrating whiter rather than darker skin. Although alleged Latin American fascination with beauty is regularly ascribed to culture, Latin sensuousness, and... View Details

Keywords: Latin America; Race And Ethnicity; Globalization; Race; Ethnicity; Prejudice and Bias; Beauty and Cosmetics Industry; Latin America

We conceptualize leadership development as identity work and show how subtle forms of gender bias in the culture and in organizations interfere with the identity work of women leaders. Based on this insight, we revisit traditional approaches to standard leadership... View Details

10 Apr 2007
First Look

First Look: April 10, 2007

Working PapersNone this week. Cases & Course MaterialsAscent Media Group (A) Harvard Business School Case 607-064 Ascent Media races to adapt to the changes resulting from increasing digitalization of its business, from creative post-production services to... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

2023
Working Paper

Causal Interpretation of Structural IV Estimands

By: Isaiah Andrews, Nano Barahona, Matthew Gentzkow, Ashesh Rambachan and Jesse M. Shapiro

We study the causal interpretation of instrumental variables (IV) estimands of nonlinear, multivariate structural models with respect to rich forms of model misspecification. We focus on guaranteeing that the researcher's estimator is sharp zero consistent, meaning... View Details

Keywords: Mathematical Methods

May–June 2021
Article

How to Close the Gender Gap

By: Colleen Ammerman and Boris Groysberg

Most companies say they’re committed to advancing women into leadership roles. What they may fail to recognize, though, is that systemic barriers are holding women back. As a result, women remain disadvantaged at every stage of their employment and underrepresented in... View Details

Keywords: Gender Discrimination; Employment; Gender; Prejudice and Bias; Talent and Talent Management; Organizational Change and Adaptation

2009
Working Paper

Watch What I Do, Not What I Say: The Unintended Consequences of the Homeland Investment Act

By: Dhammika Dharmapala, C. Fritz Foley and Kristin J. Forbes

This paper analyzes the impact on firm behavior of the Homeland Investment Act of 2004, which provided a one-time tax holiday for the repatriation of foreign earnings by U.S. multinationals. The analysis controls for endogeneity and omitted variable bias by using... View Details

Keywords: Investment; Multinational Firms and Management; Government Legislation; Taxation; Business and Shareholder Relations; Behavior; United States

Forthcoming
Article

Imagining the Future: Memory, Simulation and Beliefs

By: Pedro Bordalo, Giovanni Burro, Katherine B. Coffman, Nicola Gennaioli and Andrei Shleifer

How do people form beliefs about novel risks, with which they have little or no experience? Motivated by survey data on beliefs about Covid we collected in 2020, we build a model based on the psychology of selective memory. When a person thinks about an event,... View Details

Keywords: Expectations; Memory; COVID-19 Pandemic; Risk and Uncertainty; Cognition and Thinking

2025
Working Paper

Enhancing Treatment Effect Prediction on Privacy-Protected Data: An Honest Post-Processing Approach

By: Ta-Wei Huang and Eva Ascarza

As firms increasingly rely on customer data for personalization, concerns over privacy and regulatory compliance have grown. Local Differential Privacy (LDP) offers strong individual-level protection by injecting noise into data before collection. While... View Details

Keywords: Targeted Intervention; Conditional Average Treatment Effect Estimation; Differential Privacy; Honest Estimation; Post-processing; Analytics and Data Science; Consumer Behavior; Marketing

SSRN

25 Feb 2019
Research & Ideas

How Gender Stereotypes Kill a Woman’s Self-Confidence

fields that they’ve performed well in these fields.” It’s unclear whether women would feel better about their abilities if they received repeated rounds of positive feedback, rather than one piece of good news. “I’d be interested to find out if the gender View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

2008
Working Paper

Hiring Cheerleaders: Board Appointments of 'Independent' Directors

By: Lauren Cohen, Andrea Frazzini and Christopher J. Malloy

We test the hypothesis that firms appoint independent directors who are overly sympathetic to management, while still technically independent according to regulatory definitions. We explore a subset of independent directors for whom we have detailed, micro-level data... View Details

Keywords: Competency and Skills; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Governing and Advisory Boards; Managerial Roles; Prejudice and Bias