Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,459)
- Faculty Publications (244)
- 2024
- Working Paper
Corporate Debt, Boom-Bust Cycles, and Financial Crises
By: Victoria Ivashina, Sebnem Kalemli-Özcan, Luc Laeven and Karsten Müller
Using a new dataset on sectoral credit exposures covering financial and non-financial sectors in 115 economies over the period 1940–2014, we document the following evidence that corporate debt plays a key role in explaining boom-bust cycles, financial crises, and slow... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Exports in Disguise? Trade Rerouting During the U.S.-China Trade War
By: Ebehi Iyoha, Edmund Malesky, Jaya Wen and Sung-Ju Wu
This paper introduces a new measure of tariff evasion through rerouting and applies it to the
2018 U.S.–China trade war, focusing on Vietnam as a transit country. We use transaction-level trade data and define rerouting as the flow of a granular eight-digit Harmonized... View Details
- 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
- 2024
- Article
Half the Firms, Double the Profits: Public Firms' Transformation, 1996–2022
By: Mark J. Roe and Charles C.Y. Wang
The number of public firms in the United States has halved since the beginning of the twenty-first century, causing consternation among corporate and securities law regulators. The dominant explanations, often advanced by Securities and Exchange commissioners when... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
'De Gustibus' and Disputes about Reference Dependence
By: Thomas Graeber, Pol Campos-Mercade, Lorenz Goette, Alexandre Kellogg and Charles Sprenger
Existing tests of reference-dependent preferences assume universal loss aversion. This paper examines the implications of heterogeneity in gain-loss attitudes for such tests. In experiments on labor supply and exchange behavior we measure gain-loss attitudes and then... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Corporate Culture Homogeneity and Top Executive Incentive Design: Evidence from CEO Compensation Contracts
By: Dennis Campbell, Ruidi Shang and Zhifang Zhang
We examine how corporate cultures characterized by high degrees of homogeneity in the underlying values and beliefs of organizational members are related to the design of CEO incentive compensation contracts. We argue that culture homogeneity within firms lowers... View Details
- January 2024
- Technical Note
The ICARUS Principles: What It Takes to Tackle the World
By: Debora L. Spar and Julia M. Comeau
Over the course of the 20th century, most of the world’s major multinational corporations framed their mission around Milton Friedman’s famous mantra: that the sole purpose of the firm is to maximize its shareholders’ profits. Recently, however, growing numbers of... View Details
- 2023
- Other Article
The Harvard USPTO Patent Dataset: A Large-Scale, Well-Structured, and Multi-Purpose Corpus of Patent Applications
By: Mirac Suzgun, Luke Melas-Kyriazi, Suproteem K. Sarkar, Scott Duke Kominers and Stuart Shieber
Innovation is a major driver of economic and social development, and information about many kinds of innovation is embedded in semi-structured data from patents and patent applications. Though the impact and novelty of innovations expressed in patent data are difficult... View Details
- December 2023
- Article
When Should the Off-Grid Sun Shine at Night? Optimum Renewable Generation and Energy Storage Investments
By: Christian Kaps, Simone Marinesi and Serguei Netessine
Globally, 1.5 billion people live off the grid, their only access to electricity often limited to operationally-expensive fossil fuel generators. Solar power has risen as a sustainable and less costly option, but its generation is variable during the day and... View Details
- November 2023
- Article
Open Source Software and Global Entrepreneurship
By: Nataliya Langburd Wright, Frank Nagle and Shane Greenstein
This is the first study to consider the relationship between open source software (OSS) and
entrepreneurship around the globe. This study measures whether country-level participation on
the GitHub OSS platform affects the founding of innovative ventures, and where it... View Details
- October 2023
- Article
Product Variety, the Cost of Living, and Welfare Across Countries
By: Alberto Cavallo, Robert C. Feenstra and Robert Inklaar
We use the structure of the Melitz (2003) model to compute the cost of living and welfare across 47 countries, and compare these to conventional measures of prices and real consumption from the International Comparisons Project (ICP). The cost of living is inferred... View Details
- September 2023 (Revised September 2024)
- Technical Note
Measuring and Managing Social Impact
By: Brian Trelstad, Gerald Chertavian and Susan Pinckney
A brief overview of how to measure social impact at nonprofits, social organizations, and impact investments. View Details
Keywords: Analysis; Change; Transformation; Decision Making; Cost vs Benefits; Decision Choices and Conditions; Decisions; Forecasting and Prediction; Public Sector; Entrepreneurship; Social Entrepreneurship; Fairness; Entrepreneurial Finance; Governance; Governing and Advisory Boards; Policy; Innovation and Management; Knowledge Acquisition; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Goals and Objectives; Growth and Development Strategy; Growth Management; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Management Practices and Processes; Resource Allocation; Measurement and Metrics; Standards; Strength and Weakness; Mission and Purpose; Success; Performance; Performance Evaluation; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Strategic Planning; Programs; Risk and Uncertainty; Social Enterprise; Non-Governmental Organizations; Social Issues; United States
- 2023
- Working Paper
Global Supply Chains: The Looming 'Great Reallocation'
By: Laura Alfaro and Davin Chor
Global supply chains have come under unprecedented stress as a result of U.S.-China trade tensions, the COVID-19 pandemic, and geopolitical shocks. We document shifts in the pattern of U.S. participation in global value chains over the last four decades, in terms of... View Details
- September 2023
- Article
Addressing Vaccine Hesitancy: Experimental Evidence from Nine Countries during the COVID-19 Pandemic
By: Vincenzo Galasso, Vincent Pons, Paola Profeta, Martin McKee, David Stuckler, Michael Becher, Sylvain Brouard and Martial Foucault
We study the impact of public health messages on intentions to vaccinate and vaccination uptakes, especially among hesitant groups. We performed an experiment comparing the effects of egoistic and altruistic messages on COVID-19 vaccine intentions and behaviour. We... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Targeting, Personalization, and Engagement in an Agricultural Advisory Service
By: Susan Athey, Shawn Cole, Shanjukta Nath and Jessica Zhu
ICT is increasingly used to deliver customized information in developing countries. We
examine whether individually targeting the timing of automated voice calls meaningfully
increases engagement in an agricultural advisory service. We define, estimate, and... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
How People Use Statistics
By: Pedro Bordalo, John J. Conlon, Nicola Gennaioli, Spencer Yongwook Kwon and Andrei Shleifer
We document two new facts about the distributions of answers in famous statistical problems: they are i) multi-modal and ii) unstable with respect to irrelevant changes in the problem. We offer a model in which, when solving a problem, people represent each hypothesis... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
The Complexity of Economic Decisions
By: Xavier Gabaix and Thomas Graeber
We propose a theory of the complexity of economic decisions. Leveraging a macroeconomic framework of production functions, we conceptualize the mind as a cognitive economy, where a task’s complexity is determined by its composition of cognitive operations. Complexity... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Turning Points in Inflation: A Structural Breaks Approach with Micro Data
By: Alberto Cavallo and Gaston Garcia Zavaleta
We introduce a novel methodology for detecting inflation turning points that combines high-frequency, disaggregated price data with standard structural break techniques to provide policymakers with more precise and timely signals of inflation dynamics. The methodology... View Details
- April 2023
- Article
The Preference Survey Module: A Validated Instrument for Measuring Risk, Time, and Social Preferences
By: Armin Falk, Anke Becker, Thomas Dohmen, David B. Huffman and Uwe Sunde
Incentivized choice experiments are a key approach to measuring preferences in economics but are also costly. Survey measures are a low-cost alternative but can suffer from additional forms of measurement error due to their hypothetical nature. This paper seeks to... View Details
- January 2023
- Case
Natura: Weathering the Pandemic at Brazil's Cosmetic Giant
By: Brian Trelstad, Pedro Levindo and Carla Larangeira
Brazil's Natura, a multi-brand cosmetics group, has taken several measures to safeguard the livelihoods of its thousands of employees and millions of sales representatives during the COVID-19 health and economic crisis. The company has also made strides in its efforts... View Details
Keywords: COVID-19 Pandemic; ESG Reporting; Acquisition; Customer Focus and Relationships; Decision Making; Social Entrepreneurship; Environmental Sustainability; Environmental Management; Climate Change; Ethics; Moral Sensibility; Values and Beliefs; Global Strategy; Corporate Governance; Health Pandemics; Human Resources; Human Capital; Crisis Management; Growth and Development Strategy; Marketing; Distribution Channels; Supply Chain; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Mission and Purpose; Organizational Culture; Customer Ownership; Relationships; Business and Community Relations; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Networks; Partners and Partnerships; Science-Based Business; Reputation; Human Needs; Social Issues; Strategy; Equality and Inequality; Beauty and Cosmetics Industry; Brazil; Latin America