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- Faculty Publications (81)
Friction
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- 2025
- Working Paper
Algorithmic Assortment Curation: An Empirical Study of Buybox in Online Marketplaces
By: Santiago Gallino, Nil Karacaoglu and Antonio Moreno
Most online sales worldwide take place in marketplaces that connect sellers and buyers. The presence of numerous third-party sellers leads to a proliferation of listings for each product, making it difficult for customers to choose between the available options. Online... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
Banking on Transparency for the Poor: Experimental Evidence from India
By: Erica M. Field, Natalia Rigol, Charity M. Troyer Moore, Rohini Pande and Simone G. Schaner
Do information frictions limit the benefits of financial inclusion drives for the rural poor? We evaluate an experimental intervention among recently banked poor Indian women receiving government cash transfers via direct deposit. Treated women were provided automated... View Details
- March 2022 (Revised May 2022)
- Case
Reclaiming the Land of Purple: Purpl’s Mission to Unlock Finance in Lebanon
By: Lauren Cohen and Grace Headinger
Karl Naim, Co-Founder and CEO of Purpl, embarked on a venture to lower remittance costs for his native Lebanon. Since October 2019, the Lebanese economy had entered a free fall as its banking sector collapsed and large swathes of its population were plunged into... View Details
Keywords: Business Startup; Fintech; Inflation; Deflation; Cross-border Frictions; Remittances; Business Startups; Diasporas; Financial Crisis; Money; Entrepreneurship; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Poverty; Financial Institutions; Banking Industry; Financial Services Industry; Technology Industry; Lebanon
- March 2022
- Case
Sonder Holdings Inc: Using Technology to Solve Hospitality's Frictions
By: John Deighton and Leora Kornfeld
- February 2022
- Case
Leading The UK Vaccine Task Force
By: Amy C. Edmondson and Claudia Pienica
This case describes the first six months of the UK Vaccine Taskforce, under the leadership of Kate Bingham. With a career spent in the private sector as a biotech investor, Bingham’s appointment within the government was considered unusual. The overarching brief given... View Details
Keywords: COVID-19; Vaccine; Government; Health Pandemics; Health Care and Treatment; Science; Innovation and Invention; Groups and Teams; Leadership; Decision Making; Government and Politics; Health; Innovation and Management; Governance; Change; Government Administration; Health Industry; Financial Services Industry; Public Administration Industry; Europe; United Kingdom
- 2022
- Article
Alleviating Time Poverty Among the Working Poor: A Pre-Registered Longitudinal Field Experiment
By: A.V. Whillans and Colin West
Poverty entails more than a scarcity of material resources—it also involves a shortage of time. To examine the causal benefits of reducing time poverty, we conducted a longitudinal feld experiment over six consecutive weeks in an urban slum in Kenya with a sample of... View Details
Keywords: Time; Subjective Well Being; Administrative Costs; Friction; Poverty; Well-being; Money; Perception; Kenya
- 2022
- Chapter
CIP Deviations, the Dollar, and Frictions in International Capital Markets
By: Wenxin Du and Jesse Schreger
The covered interest rate parity (CIP) condition is a fundamental arbitrage relationship in international finance. In this chapter, we review its breakdown during the Global Financial Crisis and its continued failure in the subsequent decade. We review how to measure... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Omnia Juncta in Uno: Foreign Powers and Trademark Protection in Shanghai's Concession Era
By: Laura Alfaro, Cathy Bao, Maggie X. Chen, Junjie Hong and Claudia Steinwender
We investigate how firms and markets adapt to trademark protection, an extensively utilized but under-examined form of IP protection to address asymmetric information, by exploring a historical precedent: China’s 1923 trademark law. Exploiting unique, newly digitized... View Details
- March 2021
- Article
International Trade and Social Connectedness
By: Michael Bailey, Abhinav Gupta, Sebastian Hillenbrand, Theresa Kuchler, Robert J. Richmond and Johannes Stroebel
We use de-identified data from Facebook to construct a new and publicly available measure of the pairwise social connectedness between 170 countries and 332 European regions. We find that two countries trade more when they are more socially connected, especially for... View Details
- September 2020
- Case
The Black New Venture Competition
By: Karen Mills, Jeffrey J. Bussgang, Martin Sinozich and Gabriella Elanbeck
Black entrepreneurs encounter many unique obstacles when raising capital to start and grow a business. During their second year at Harvard Business School (HBS), MBA students Kimberly Foster and Tyler Simpson decided to do something to make a difference for... View Details
Keywords: Startup; Start-up; Startup Financing; Startups; Start-ups; African-American Protagonist; African-american Entrepreneurs; African-american Investors; African-Americans; African-American Women; Black Leadership; Black Inventors; Black Entrepreneurs; Harvard Business School; Harvard; Business And Society; Early Stage Funding; Early Stage Finance; Technology Entrepreneurship; Discrimination; Technology Ventures; Entrepreneurial Finance; Entrepreneurial Financing; Business Plan; Business Startups; Business Ventures; Financing and Loans; Business Growth and Maturation; Diversity; Gender; Race; Entrepreneurship; Venture Capital; Small Business; Leadership; Information Technology; Competition; Technology Industry
- September 2020
- Case
Keeping It in the Family at the Hayden Saw Company
By: V.G. Narayanan and John Masko
In 2019, Board Chair and third-generation shareholder Helen Fullerton was preparing for a meeting to discuss Ohio-based Hayden Saw Company’s (Hayden) future as a family business. As the company entered its fifth decade, the Hayden family was dealing with three distinct... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Long-Run Returns to Private Equity in Emerging Markets
By: Shawn Cole, Martin Melecky, Florian Mölders and Tristan Reed
We provide the first evidence on the long-run returns to private equity in emerging and frontier markets using the cash flows from every equity investment made by the International Finance Corporation across 130 countries over 58 years. Risk-adjusted returns are... View Details
- August 2020
- Article
Workplace Knowledge Flows
By: Jason Sandvik, Richard Saouma, Nathan Seegert and Christopher Stanton
We conducted a field experiment in a sales firm to test whether improving knowledge flows between coworkers affects productivity. Our design allows us to compare different management practices and to isolate whether frictions to knowledge transmission primarily reside... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Food Security and Human Mobility During the COVID-19 Lockdown
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Wesley W. Koo, Xina Li, Nishant Kishore, Satchit Balsari and Tarun Khanna
During the COVID-19 crisis, millions of migrants around the world face food insecurity. This could force migrants to travel during the pandemic, exposing them to health risks and accelerating the spread of the virus. Anecdotal evidence demonstrates the importance of... View Details
Keywords: COVID-19; Migrants; Food Security; Mobility; Health Pandemics; Food; Distribution; Policy; Global Range
- 2020
- Working Paper
Sticky Capital Controls
By: Miguel Acosta-Henao, Laura Alfaro and Andres Fernandez
There is much ongoing debate on the merits of capital controls as effective policy instruments. The differing perspectives are due in part to a lack of empirical studies that look at the intensive margin of controls, which in turn has prevented a quantitative... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
How Do Private Equity Fees Vary Across Public Pensions?
By: Juliane Begenau and Emil Siriwardane
We study how investment fees vary within private-capital funds. Net-of-fee return clustering suggests that most funds have two tiers of fees, and we decompose differences across tiers into both management and performance-based fees. Managers of venture capital funds... View Details
- December 2019
- Article
The Impact of Increasing Search Frictions on Online Shopping Behavior: Evidence from a Field Experiment
By: Donald Ngwe, Kris J. Ferreira and Thales Teixeira
Many online stores are designed such that shoppers can easily access any available discounted products. We propose that deliberately increasing search frictions by placing small obstacles to locating discounted items can improve online retailers’ margins and even... View Details
- October 2019
- Article
Limited Investment Capital and Credit Spreads
Using proprietary credit default swap (CDS) data, I investigate how capital shocks at protection sellers impact pricing in the CDS market. Seller capital shocks—measured as CDS portfolio margin payments—account for 12% of the time-series variation in weekly spread... View Details
- August 2019 (Revised April 2021)
- Case
Unifying Divisions: Joro's Mission to Preserve the Planet
By: Shikhar Ghosh and Marilyn Morgan Westner
The case focuses on the initial startup team and Founders’ agreements. In March 2018, Sanchali Pal proposed renegotiating the informal founders’ agreement and equity split she and her co-founders had drafted the previous spring. They had been working together for over... View Details
- June 2019
- Article
Brokers vs. Retail Investors: Conflicting Interests and Dominated Products
By: Mark Egan
I study how brokers distort household investment decisions. Using a novel convertible bond dataset, I find that consumers often purchase dominated bonds—cheap and expensive versions of otherwise identical bonds coexist in the market. The empirical evidence suggests... View Details