Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(2,361)
- Faculty Publications (529)
- May 30, 2012
- Blog Post
Government Regulation That Actually Works
By: David I. Levine and Michael W. Toffel
- Article
Holdout in the Assembly of Complements: A Problem for Market Design
By: Scott Duke Kominers and E. Glen Weyl
Holdout problems prevent private (voluntary and self-financing) assembly of complementary goods—such as land or dispersed spectrum—from many self-interested sellers. While mechanisms that fully respect sellers' property rights cannot alleviate these holdout problems,... View Details
- 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
- Spring 2012
- Article
The Need for Sector-Specific Materiality and Sustainability Reporting Standards
By: Robert G. Eccles, Michael P. Krzus, Jean Rogers and George Serafeim
Even though the supply of sustainability information has increased considerably in the last decade, companies are still failing to disclose material information in a comparable format. We believe this has two downsides. On the one hand, companies are not adequately... View Details
- Article
Credit Access and Social Welfare: The Rise of Consumer Lending in the United States and France
By: Gunnar Trumbull
Research into the causes of the 2008 financial crisis has drawn attention to a link between growing income inequality in the United States and high household indebtedness. Most accounts trace the U.S. idea of credit-as-welfare to the period of wage stagnation and... View Details
Keywords: Household Finance; Welfare State; Credit; Personal Finance; Welfare; Borrowing and Debt; France; United States
- 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
- 2012
- Chapter
Environmental Federalism in the European Union and the United States
By: David Vogel, Michael W. Toffel, Diahanna Post and Nazli Z. Uludere Aragon
The United States (US) and the European Union (EU) are federal systems in which the responsibility for environmental policy-making is divided or shared between the central government and the (member) states. The attribution of decision-making power has important policy... View Details
- 2012
- Chapter
Lessons for the Financial Sector from 'Preventing Regulatory Capture: Special Interest Influence, and How to Limit It'
By: Daniel Carpenter, David Moss and Melanie Wachtell Stinnett
In the wake of the global financial crisis of 2007–09, regulatory capture has
become at once a diagnosis and a source of discomfort. The word “capture” has been used by dozens upon dozens of authors—ranging from
pundits and bloggers to journalists and leading... View Details
- Article
A Macroprudential Approach to Financial Regulation
By: Samuel G. Hanson, Anil Kashyap and Jeremy C. Stein
- 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
- 2012
- Other Unpublished Work
What Are We Meeting For? The Consequences of Private Meetings with Investors
By: Eugene F. Soltes and David H. Solomon
Executives of publicly-traded firms spend considerable time meeting privately with investors, despite regulation restricting their ability to convey material nonpublic information. Using a set of records of all one-on-one meetings between senior management and... View Details
- September – October 2011
- Article
The Rise and Consequences of Corporate Sustainability Reporting
By: Ioannis Ioannou and George Serafeim
For many decades the cornerstone of corporate reporting has been financial information that is presented in a company's annual, semi-annual, and quarterly reports. These comprehensive financial reports—required by law for public companies in most countries... View Details
- August 2011 (Revised October 2014)
- Case
High Wire Act: Credit Suisse and Contingent Capital (A)
By: Clayton S. Rose and Aldo Sesia
Late in 2010, Credit Suisse CEO Brady Dougan and his team closed in on the decision of whether or not to issue contingent capital, which Swiss regulators would require by 2019. There were a number of substantial issues facing Dougan and his team, including whether... View Details
- August 2011
- Article
Coming Clean and Cleaning Up: Does Voluntary Self-Reporting Indicate Effective Self-Policing
By: Michael W. Toffel and Jodi L. Short
Regulatory agencies are increasingly establishing voluntary self-reporting programs both as an investigative tool and to encourage regulated firms to commit to policing themselves. We investigate whether voluntary self-reporting can reliably indicate effective... View Details
- 2011
- Chapter
The Economics of Housing Finance Reform
By: David S. Scharfstein and Adi Sunderam
This paper analyzes the two leading types of proposals for reform of the housing finance system: (i) broad-based, explicit, priced government guarantees of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and (ii) privatization. Both proposals have drawbacks. Properly-priced... View Details
- June 2011
- Article
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 of the Homeland Investment Act of 2004, which provided a one-time tax holiday for the repatriation of foreign earnings and thereby reduced the cost to U.S. multinationals of accessing a source of internal capital. Lawmakers and lobbyists... View Details
- 9 May 2011 - 11 May 2011
- Conference Presentation
How Firms Respond to Mandatory Information Disclosure
By: Anil Doshi, Michael Toffel and Glen W. S. Dowell
When new institutional pressures arise, which organizations are particularly likely to resist or
acquiesce? When subjected to new information disclosure mandates, an increasingly popular form
of market-based government regulation, which types of organizations are... View Details
- May 2011
- Article
Consequences and Institutional Determinants of Unregulated Corporate Financial Statements: Evidence from Embedded Value Reporting
By: George Serafeim
I analyze Embedded Value (EV) reporting by firms with life insurance operations to assess the impact of unregulated financial reporting on transparency and to examine the institutional characteristics that promote unregulated reporting. Under EV accounting the present... View Details
- March 2011 (Revised March 2011)
- Case
Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey - Managing in the Shadow of Health Care Reform
Per the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), which President Obama signed in 2010, states would be required to create state-wide health insurance marketplaces - the Health Benefit Exchanges (HBEs) - in which individuals and small employers could choose... View Details
- February 2011 (Revised September 2016)
- Case
Investcorp and the Moneybookers Bid
By: Matthew Rhodes-Kropf, Carin-Isabel Knoop and Nori Gerardo Lietz
In January 2007, Hazem Ben-Gacem, managing director and co-head of Investcorp Technology Partners (ITP), needs to decide what to bid at an auction for Moneybookers Limited, one of the top three e-payment solution providers in Europe. However, approximately 70% of... View Details