Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(608)
- Faculty Publications (80)
- 2022
- Working Paper
Distributional Consequences of Monetary Policy Across Races: Evidence from the U.S. Credit Register
By: Laura Alfaro, Ester Faia and Camelia Minoiu
We examine the consequences of monetary policy on racial disparities, focusing on the role of bank lending to firms through collateral and selection channels. Leveraging comprehensive loan-level data from the U.S. credit register (Y-14Q) of the Federal Reserve, we show... View Details
- 2022
- Chapter
Lessons Learned from Support to Business during COVID-19
By: Gabriel Chodorow-Reich, Benjamin Iverson and Adi Sunderam
The authors survey the new federal subsidies and loans provided to businesses in the first year of the pandemic—including the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), the Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) program, and aid targeted at specific industries such as airlines... View Details
- April 2022
- Article
Going Out or Opting Out? Capital, Political Vulnerability, and the State in China's Outward Investment
By: Meg Rithmire
How do state-business relations interact with outward investment in authoritarian regimes? This paper examines this question in the context of China’s rapid transformation into a major capital exporter. While most political economy scholarship focuses on firms’... View Details
- Article
Eliminating Unintended Bias in Personalized Policies Using Bias-Eliminating Adapted Trees (BEAT)
By: Eva Ascarza and Ayelet Israeli
An inherent risk of algorithmic personalization is disproportionate targeting of individuals from certain groups (or demographic characteristics such as gender or race), even when the decision maker does not intend to discriminate based on those “protected”... View Details
- February 2022
- Case
CityScore: Big Data Comes to Boston
By: Boris Groysberg and Sarah L. Abbott
In 2016, Martin “Marty” Walsh, the Mayor of Boston, introduced CityScore, a data dashboard that measured the city’s progress across a range of metrics. The dashboard was updated daily and publicly available. The mayor frequently discussed the CityScore targets in... View Details
- Article
Megastudies Improve the Impact of Applied Behavioural Science
By: Katherine L. Milkman, Dena Gromet, Hung Ho, Joseph S. Kay, Timothy W. Lee, Pepi Pandiloski, Yeji Park, Aneesh Rai, Max Bazerman, John Beshears, Lauri Bonacorsi, Colin Camerer, Edward Chang, Gretchen Chapman, Robert Cialdini, Hengchen Dai, Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, Ayelet Fishbach, James J. Gross, Samantha Horn, Alexa Hubbard, Steven J. Jones, Dean Karlan, Tim Kautz, Erika Kirgios, Joowon Klusowski, Ariella Kristal, Rahul Ladhania, Jens Ludwig, George Loewenstein, Barbara Mellers, Sendhil Mullainathan, Silvia Saccardo, Jann Spiess, Gaurav Suri, Joachim H. Talloen, Jamie Taxer, Yaacov Trope, Lyle Ungar, Kevin G. Volpp, Ashley V. Whillans, Jonathan Zinman and Angela L. Duckworth
Policy-makers are increasingly turning to behavioural science for insights about how to improve citizens’ decisions and outcomes. Typically, different scientists test different intervention ideas in different samples using different outcomes over different time... View Details
- Article
A Prescriptive Analytics Framework for Optimal Policy Deployment Using Heterogeneous Treatment Effects
By: Edward McFowland III, Sandeep Gangarapu, Ravi Bapna and Tianshu Sun
We define a prescriptive analytics framework that addresses the needs of a constrained decision-maker facing, ex ante, unknown costs and benefits of multiple policy levers. The framework is general in nature and can be deployed in any utility maximizing context, public... View Details
- Article
Regulating Hospital Prices Based on Market Concentration Is Likely to Leave High-Price Hospitals Unaffected
By: Maximilian J. Pany, Michael E. Chernew and Leemore S. Dafny
Concern about high hospital prices for commercially insured patients has motivated several proposals to regulate these prices. Such proposals often limit regulations to highly concentrated hospital markets. Using a large sample of 2017 US commercial insurance claims,... View Details
- July 2021
- Article
Invisible Inequality Leads to Punishing the Poor and Rewarding the Rich
By: Oliver P. Hauser, Gordon T. Kraft-Todd, David Rand, Martin A. Nowak and Michael I. Norton
Four experiments examine how the lack of awareness of inequality affects behaviour towards the rich and poor. In Experiment 1, participants who became aware that wealthy individuals donated a smaller percentage of their income switched from rewarding the wealthy to... View Details
Keywords: Income Transparency; Income; Wealth; Equality and Inequality; Knowledge; Behavior; Outcome or Result; Society; Policy
- 2021
- Working Paper
The Dance Between Government and Private Investors: Public Entrepreneurial Finance around the Globe
By: Jessica Bai, Shai Bernstein, Abhishek Dev and Josh Lerner
This paper examines the interaction between governments and private capital investors when financing early-stage ventures. We first provide a simple conceptual framework to explore when collaboration between governments and private investors is likely to emerge. Using... View Details
- January 2021 (Revised May 2021)
- Case
Amazon Shopper Panel: Paying Customers for Their Data
By: Eva Ascarza and Ayelet Israeli
This case introduces a new Amazon program that has consumers upload their receipts from transactions outside of Amazon, in exchange for money. Through the discussion, the case aims to explore issues in customers’ privacy in the digital age, the value of customers’ own... View Details
Keywords: Data Analytics; Data Privacy; Data Management; ＂Marketing Analytics＂; Marketing Communication; Marketing Research; Data-driven Management; E-Commerce Strategy; Ethical Decision Making; CRM; Consumer Protection; Targeted Advertising; Targeted Policies; Data Ownership; Marketing; Research; Marketing Communications; Analytics and Data Science; Management; Customer Relationship Management; Ethics; E-commerce; Retail Industry; Technology Industry; United States
- January 2021
- Article
How Personality and Policy Predict Pandemic Behavior: Understanding Sheltering-in-Place in 55 Countries at the Onset of COVID-19
By: Friedrich M. Götz, Andrés Gvirtz, Adam D. Galinsky and Jon M. Jachimowicz
The spread of COVID-19 within any given country or community at the onset of the pandemic depended in part on the sheltering-in-place rate of its citizens. The pandemic led us to revisit one of psychology’s most fundamental and most basic questions in a high-stakes... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Consumption: The Impact of Access and Value
By: Retsef Levi, Elisabeth Paulson and Georgia Perakis
The goal of this paper is to leverage household-level data to improve food-related policies aimed at increasing the consumption of fruits and vegetables (FVs) among low-income households. Currently, several interventions target areas where residents have limited... View Details
Keywords: Food Deserts; Food Access; Food Policy; Causal Inference; Food; Nutrition; Poverty; Government Administration
- 2020
- Working Paper
Targeting for Long-Term Outcomes
By: Jeremy Yang, Dean Eckles, Paramveer Dhillon and Sinan Aral
Decision makers often want to target interventions so as to maximize an outcome that is observed only in the long term. This typically requires delaying decisions until the outcome is observed or relying on simple short-term proxies for the long-term outcome. Here we... View Details
- September 2020 (Revised June 2023)
- Exercise
Artea: Designing Targeting Strategies
By: Eva Ascarza and Ayelet Israeli
This collection of exercises aims to teach students about 1)Targeting Policies; and 2)Algorithmic bias in marketing—implications, causes, and possible solutions. Part (A) focuses on A/B testing analysis and targeting. Parts (B),(C),(D) Introduce algorithmic bias. The... View Details
Keywords: Algorithmic Data; Race And Ethnicity; Experimentation; Promotion; ＂Marketing Analytics＂; Marketing And Society; Big Data; Privacy; Data-driven Management; Data Analytics; Data Analysis; E-Commerce Strategy; Discrimination; Targeted Advertising; Targeted Policies; Targeting; Pricing Algorithms; A/B Testing; Ethical Decision Making; Customer Base Analysis; Customer Heterogeneity; Coupons; Algorithmic Bias; Marketing; Race; Gender; Diversity; Customer Relationship Management; Marketing Communications; Advertising; Decision Making; Ethics; E-commerce; Analytics and Data Science; Retail Industry; Apparel and Accessories Industry; United States
- 2020
- Chapter
Reserve Accumulation, Sovereign Debt, and Exchange Rate Policy
By: Laura Alfaro and Fabio Kanczuk
In the past decade, foreign participation in local-currency bond markets in emerging countries increased dramatically. Additionally, emerging countries are increasingly deviating from inflation targeting regimes, managing their exchange rate and engaging in... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
When Should Public Programs Be Privately Administered? Theory and Evidence from the Paycheck Protection Program
By: Alexander Bartik, Zoë B. Cullen, Edward L. Glaeser, Michael Luca, Christopher Stanton and Adi Sunderam
What happens when public resources are allocated by private companies whose objectives may be
imperfectly aligned with policy goals? We study this question in the context of the Paycheck
Protection Program (PPP), which relied on private banks to disburse aid to small... View Details
- June 18, 2020
- Article
What CEOs Still Haven't Said about Race and Policing
By: Aaron K. Chatterji and Michael W. Toffel
While many CEOs have spoken out to share their thoughts on race and police misconduct in America, they have yet to advocate for policy solutions for police reform, focusing instead on their own corporate and personal values. But lasting change must also involve ... View Details
- June 2020 (Revised October 2020)
- Case
Muddy Waters vs. eHealth: The Debate of a 'Lifetime'
By: Jonas Heese and Cristo Liautaud
In May 2020, an analyst was assessing eHealth’s performance. eHealth was an online / tele-sales broker of health insurance products. The stock had recently hit all-time highs, closing at a peak of $146 on March 4, 2020. But now, May 4, 2020, eHealth traded at $103. The... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Social Interactions in Pandemics: Fear, Altruism, and Reciprocity
By: Laura Alfaro, Ester Faia, Nora Lamersdorf and Farzad Saidi
In SIR models, homogeneous or with a network structure, infection rates are assumed to be exogenous. However, individuals adjust their behavior. Using daily data for 89 cities worldwide, we document that mobility falls in response to fear, as approximated by Google... View Details