Publications

24 Nov 2003
Research & Ideas

Boards and Corporate Governance: A Balanced Scorecard Approach

Companies can create shareholder value through more effective governance, and through boards that do not simply ensure compliance, but focus their time and efforts on the most critical strategic areas. Past board results have often not... View Details

Keywords: Re: Robert S. Kaplan & Krishna G. Palepu

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

October 2023
Article

What Does the Inflation Reduction Act Mean for Patients and Physicians?

By: Amitabh Chandra and Benedic Ippolito

The debate around prescription drug measures in the recently passed U.S. Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which limit some patients’ out-of-pocket costs, has not fully addressed their effect on physicians and patients via their effect on payers. Reducing patients’ costs... View Details

Keywords: Government Legislation; Price; Health Care and Treatment

2019
Working Paper

The Consequences of Invention Secrecy: Evidence from the USPTO Patent Secrecy Program in World War II

By: Daniel P. Gross

This paper studies the effects of the USPTO's patent secrecy program in World War II, under which over 11,000 U.S. patent applications were issued secrecy orders that halted examination and prohibited inventors from disclosing their inventions or filing in foreign... View Details

Keywords: Invention Secrecy; Invention Disclosure; Trade Secrecy; Secrecy Orders; Cummulative Innovation; Wold War 2; Patents; National Security; History; Innovation and Invention; Outcome or Result; Intellectual Property; Policy; Commercialization; United States

SSRN

2013
Working Paper

Financial vs. Strategic Buyers

By: Marc Martos-Vila, Matthew Rhodes-Kropf and Jarrad Harford

This paper introduces the impact of debt misvaluation on merger and acquisition activity. Debt misvaluation helps explain the shifting dominance of financial acquirers (private equity firms) relative to strategic acquirers (operating companies). The effects of... View Details

Keywords: Misvaluation; Mergers and Acquisitions; Private Equity

October 2011
Article

Government Advertising and Media Coverage of Corruption Scandals

By: Rafael Di Tella and Ignacio Franceschelli

We construct measures of the extent to which the four main newspapers in Argentina report government corruption in their front page during the period 1998-2007 and correlate them with government advertising. The correlation is negative. The size is considerable: a one... View Details

Keywords: Crime and Corruption; Advertising; Government and Politics; Newspapers; Media; Argentina

2009
Article

Social Structure Shapes Cultural Stereotypes and Emotions: A Causal Test of the Stereotype Content Model

By: P. Caprariello, A.J.C. Cuddy and S.T. Fiske

The stereotype content model (SCM) posits that social structure predicts specific cultural stereotypes and associated emotional prejudices (Fiske et al., 2002). No prior evidence at a societal level has manipulated both structural predictors and measured both... View Details

Keywords: Competency and Skills; Mathematical Methods; Emotions; Personal Characteristics; Prejudice and Bias; Status and Position; Culture; Competition

06 Dec 2021
Research & Ideas

The Popular Stock Metric That Can Lead Investors Astray

from 75 percent to 45 percent. The metric is no longer accurately predicting future returns and growth while the other valuation metrics continue to do so. "Institutional investors still rely on an increasingly flawed measure for... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne

Research Summary

The Impact of ABC on Managerial Decisions

In this type of research, Ratna Sarkar seeks to determine whether, in fact, new cost systems such as ABC (Activity Based Costing) have a measurable effect on managerial decisions regarding product and customer mix.

The theory of ABC is now academically established,... View Details

June 2007
Article

What Is the Impact of Software Patent Shifts? Evidence from Lotus v. Borland

By: Josh Lerner and Feng Zhu

Economists have debated the extent to which strengthening patent protection spurs or detracts from technological innovation. This paper examines the reduction of software copyright protection in the Lotus v. Borland decision. If patent and copyright protections are... View Details

Keywords: Applications and Software; Patents; Information Technology; Information Technology Industry

13 Oct 2015
News

The Online Ad Scams Every Marketer Should Watch Out For

2021
Working Paper

Stock Investors' Returns Are Exaggerated

By: Jesse M. Fried, Paul Ma and Charles C.Y. Wang

The stock market generates less wealth than it appears. We show that total shareholder return (TSR), the standard measure of stock investor performance, substantially exaggerates returns earned by these investors in aggregate, and thus by most investors. The main... View Details

Keywords: All-shareholder Returns; Capital Flows; Dividend Reinvestment; Equity Premium; Total Shareholder Returns; Stocks; Investment Return; Market Timing

SSRN

14 Feb 2014
HBS Seminar

John Van Reenen, LSE, CEPR, and NBER

Article

Doing Business with Strangers: Reputation in Online Service Marketplaces

By: Antonio Moreno and Christian Terwiesch

Online service marketplaces allow service buyers to post their project requests and service providers to bid for them. To reduce the transactional risks, marketplaces typically track and publish previous seller performance. By analyzing a detailed transactional data... View Details

Keywords: Online Service Marketplace; Procurement; Auctions; Reputation; Bids and Bidding

23 Oct 2013
Research & Ideas

Overcoming Nervous Nelly

danger of failing before, now your anxiety has made failure a foregone conclusion. We've all experienced the crippling effects of job performance anxiety. But far from being uniquely relegated to nightmare scenarios like the one outlined... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

Research Summary

Estimating Demand Uncertainty Using Judgmental Forecasts

Measuring demand uncertainty is a key activity in supply chain planning, but is difficult when demand history is unavailable such as for new products. One method that can be applied in such cases uses dispersion among forecasting experts as a measure of demand... View Details

Article

Human Capital and the Future of Work: Implications for Investors and ESG Integration

By: Sakis Kotsantonis and George Serafeim

Human capital development (HCD) is a key consideration for most companies, but only recently have investors focused on understanding the risks and opportunities related to human capital with the emergence of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investment... View Details

Keywords: Future Of Work; ESG; Employee Engagement; Employee Compensation; Human Capital; Human Resources; Employees; Compensation and Benefits; Wages