Publications

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

Purchase

2023
Working Paper

The Limits of Algorithmic Measures of Race in Studies of Outcome Disparities

By: David S. Scharfstein and Sergey Chernenko

We show that the use of algorithms to predict race has significant limitations in measuring and understanding the sources of racial disparities in finance, economics, and other contexts. First, we derive theoretically the direction and magnitude of measurement bias in... View Details

Keywords: Racial Disparity; Paycheck Protection Program; Measurement Error; AI and Machine Learning; Race; Measurement and Metrics; Equality and Inequality; Prejudice and Bias; Forecasting and Prediction; Outcome or Result

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

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

March 2021
Article

The Crowd Emotion Amplification Effect

By: Amit Goldenberg, Erika Weisz, Timothy D. Sweeney, Mina Cikara and James Gross

How do people go about reading a room or taking the temperature of a crowd? When people catch a brief glimpse of an array of faces, they can only focus their attention on some of the faces. We propose that perceivers preferentially attend to faces exhibiting strong... View Details

Keywords: Crowds; Social Cognition; Intergroup Dynamics; Emotions; Perception; Judgments; Analysis

25 Feb 2019
Research & Ideas

How Gender Stereotypes Kill a Woman’s Self-Confidence

Women make up more than half of the labor force in the United States and earn almost 60 percent of advanced degrees, yet they bring home less pay and fill fewer seats in the C-suite than men, particularly in... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

April 2019
Article

Score Blending: How Scale Response Grouping Biases Perceived Standing

By: Ryan Hauser and Norbert Schwarz

Numerical values—from test scores to credit scores—inform us of our relative standing and can shape our decisions. The values are usually presented in a continuous format (which places scores on a single line) or a grouped format (which separates scores into several... View Details

Keywords: Decision-making; Scale; Decision Making; Perception

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

Purchase

Article

Excusing Selfishness in Charitable Giving: The Role of Risk

By: Christine L. Exley

Decisions involving charitable giving often occur under the shadow of risk. A common finding is that potential donors give less when there is greater risk that their donation will have less impact. While this behavior could be fully rationalized by standard economic... View Details

Keywords: Charitable Giving; Prosocial Behavior; Altruism; Risk Preferences; Risk and Uncertainty; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Behavior

2010
Working Paper

Do Bonuses Enhance Sales Productivity? A Dynamic Structural Analysis of Bonus-Based Compensation Plans

By: Doug J. Chung, Thomas J. Steenburgh and K. Sudhir

We estimate a dynamic structural model of sales force response to a bonus based compensation plan. The paper has two main methodological innovations: First, we implement empirically the method proposed by Arcidiacono and Miller (2010) to accommodate unobserved latent... View Details

Keywords: Compensation and Benefits; Performance Productivity; Mathematical Methods; Salesforce Management; Motivation and Incentives

Article

Overcoming the Winner's Curse: An Adaptive Learning Perspective

By: Yoella Bereby-Meyer and Brit Grosskopf

The winner's curse phenomenon refers to the fact that the winner in a common value auction, in order to actually win the auction, is likely to have overestimated the item's value and consequently is likely to gain less than expected and may even lose (i.e., it is said... View Details

17 May 2017
Research & Ideas

Minorities Who 'Whiten' Job Resumes Get More Interviews

because if they don’t accept my racial identity, I don’t see how I would fit in that job.” How to address discriminatory hiring practices It’s time for employers to acknowledge that bias is hardwired into the hiring system View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

2024
Working Paper

Second- versus Third-party Audit Quality: Evidence from Global Supply Chain Monitoring

By: Maria R. Ibanez, Ashley Palmarozzo, Jodi L. Short and Michael W. Toffel

Capitalizing on the superior credibility and flexibility and potential lower cost of external assessments, many global buyers are relying less on their own employee (“second-party”) auditors and more on third-party auditors to monitor and prevent environmental and... View Details

Keywords: Auditing; Audit Quality; Working Conditions; Sustainability; Empirical Operations; Empirical Service Operations; Sustainability Management; Corporate Accountability; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Supply Chain Management

19 May 2015
First Look

First Look: May 19

and bank executives appear to profit from the analysts' bias since the bias is associated with higher levels of insider trading. Our results highlight the View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

2011
Case

The Secrets to Managing Business Analytics Projects

By: Thomas H. Davenport, Stijn Viaene and Annabel Van den Bunder

Managers have used business analytics to inform their decision making for years. And while few companies would qualify as being what management innovation and strategy expert Thomas H. Davenport has dubbed "analytic competitors," more and more businesses are moving in... View Details

Keywords: Analytics; Business or Company Management; Information Management

Purchase

2006
Working Paper

Managing Functional Biases in Organizational Forecasts: A Case Study of Consensus Forecasting in Supply Chain Planning

To date, little research has been done on managing the organizational and political dimensions of generating and improving forecasts in corporate settings. We examine the implementation of a supply chain planning process at a consumer electronics company, concentrating... View Details

Keywords: Prejudice and Bias; Business or Company Management; Supply Chain Management; Forecasting and Prediction; Planning; Electronics Industry