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- May 2024
- Article
Relational Attributions for One’s Own Resilience Predict Compassion for Others
By: Rachel Ruttan, Ting Zhang, Sivahn Barli and Katherine DeCelles
Existing work on attribution theory distinguishes between external and internal attributions (i.e., “I overcame adversity due to luck” vs. “my own effort”). We introduce the construct of relational resilience attributions (i.e., “due to help from other people”) as a... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
What Is Newsworthy? Theory and Evidence
By: Luis Armona, Matthew Gentzkow, Emir Kamenica and Jesse M. Shapiro
We study newsworthiness in theory and practice. We focus on situations in which a news outlet observes the realization of a state of the world and must decide whether to report the realization to a consumer who pays an opportunity cost to consume the report. The... View Details
- April 2024
- Article
Decision Authority and the Returns to Algorithms
By: Hyunjin Kim, Edward L. Glaeser, Andrew Hillis, Scott Duke Kominers and Michael Luca
We evaluate a pilot in an Inspections Department to explore the returns to a pair of algorithms that varied in their sophistication. We find that both algorithms provided substantial prediction gains, suggesting that even simple data may be helpful. However, these... View Details
- April 2024
- Article
Speaking up and Taking Action: Psychological Safety and Joint Problem-solving Orientation in Safety Improvement
By: Hassina Bahadurzada, Michaela J. Kerrissey and Amy C. Edmondson
Healthcare organizations face stubborn challenges in ensuring patient safety and mitigating clinician turnover. This paper aims to advance theory and research on patient safety by elucidating how the role of psychological safety in patient safety can be enhanced with... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Anytime-Valid Inference in Linear Models and Regression-Adjusted Causal Inference
By: Michael Lindon, Dae Woong Ham, Martin Tingley and Iavor I. Bojinov
Linear regression adjustment is commonly used to analyze randomized controlled experiments due to its efficiency and robustness against model misspecification. Current testing and interval estimation procedures leverage the asymptotic distribution of such estimators to... View Details
- 2024
- Book
Deals: The Economic Structure of Business Transactions
By: Guhan Subramanian and Michael Klausner
Drawing on real-life cases from a wide range of industries, two acclaimed experts offer a sophisticated but accessible guide to business deals, designed to maximize value for your side.
Business transactions take widely varying forms—from multibillion-dollar... View Details
Business transactions take widely varying forms—from multibillion-dollar... View Details
- March 2024
- Article
How Foes Become Allies: The Shifting Role of Business in Climate Politics
By: Irja Vormedal and Jonas Meckling
Firms often oppose costly public policy reforms—but under what conditions may they
come to support such reforms? Previous scholarship has taken a predominantly static
approach to the analysis of business positions. Here, we advance a dynamic theory of
change in... View Details
- February 2024
- Background Note
Frederick Herzberg on Motivating Employees
By: Willy C. Shih
This background note summarizes Frederick Herzberg's development of his motivation-hygiene theory, his theory regarding job enrichment, and how the theory has evolved. This is at the core of extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation. View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Precautionary Debt Capacity
By: Deniz Aydin and Olivia S. Kim
The determinants of debt capacity are a central theme in finance and macroeconomics, yet it remains unclear why firms leave some of their debt capacity unused and whether this affects investment and growth. Textbook theory suggests that firms should not leave their... 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
- February 2024
- Article
Diversification as an Adaptive Learning Process: An Empirical Study of General-Purpose and Market-Specific Technological Know-How in New Market Entry
By: Dominika Kinga Randle and Gary P. Pisano
An enduring trait of modern corporations is their propensity to diversify into multiple lines of business. Penrosian theories conceptualize diversification as a strategy to exploit a firm’s fungible, yet “untradeable”, resources and point to redeployment of... View Details
- February 2024
- Article
Pricing Power in Advertising Markets: Theory and Evidence
By: Matthew Gentzkow, Jesse M. Shapiro, Frank Yang and Ali Yurukoglu
Existing theories of media competition imply that advertisers will pay a lower price in equilibrium to reach consumers who multi-home across competing outlets. We generalize, extend, and test this prediction. We find that television outlets whose viewers watch more... View Details
- January–February 2024
- Article
The Challenge of Maintaining Passion for Work over Time: A Daily Perspective on Passion and Emotional Exhaustion
By: Joy Bredehorst, Kai Krautter, Jirs Meuris and Jon M. Jachimowicz
Passion for work is highly coveted, but many employees report struggling to maintain their passion over time. In the current research, we explain the challenge of pursuing passion by conceptualizing passion as an attribute with temporal variation. Viewed through a... View Details
- December 2023
- Article
Discerning Saints: Moralization of Intrinsic Motivation and Selective Prosociality at Work
By: Mijeong Kwon, Julia Lee Cunningham and Jon M. Jachimowicz
Intrinsic motivation has received widespread attention as a predictor of positive work outcomes, including employees’ prosocial behavior. In the current research, we offer a more nuanced view by proposing that intrinsic motivation does not uniformly increase prosocial... View Details
- December 2023
- Article
Intermediary Balance Sheets and the Treasury Yield Curve
By: Wenxin Du, Benjamin Hebert and Wenhao Li
We document a regime change in the Treasury market post-Global Financial Crisis (GFC): dealers switched from net short to net long Treasury bonds. We construct “net-long” and “net-short” curves that account for balance sheet and financing costs, and show that actual... View Details
- November 2023
- Article
A Quantity-Driven Theory of Term Premia and Exchange Rates
We develop a model in which specialized bond investors must absorb shocks to the supply and demand for long-term bonds in two currencies. Since long-term bonds and foreign exchange are both exposed to unexpected movements in short-term interest rates, a shift in the... View Details
- November–December 2023
- Article
Network Centralization and Collective Adaptability to a Shifting Environment
By: Ethan S. Bernstein, Jesse C. Shore and Alice J. Jang
We study the connection between communication network structure and an organization’s collective adaptability to a shifting environment. Research has shown that network centralization—the degree to which communication flows disproportionately through one or more... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Deglobalization and Entrepreneurial Investment: The Natural Experiment of Brexit
By: Elisa Alvarez-Garrido and Juan Alcácer
We seek to gain insight into the consequences of deglobalization on entrepreneurial investment by
analyzing an instance of economic disintegration: the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union.
Brexit is not only a unique empirical opportunity, a natural... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Trusting Talent: Cross-Country Differences in Hiring
By: Letian Zhang and Shinan Wang
This article argues that a society’s social trust influences employers’ hiring strategies. In selecting workers, employers could either focus on applicants’ potential and select on foundational skills (e.g., social skills, math skills) or focus on their readiness and... View Details
- September 2023
- Article
A Pull versus Push Framework for Reputation
Reputation is a powerful driver of human behavior. Reputation systems incentivize 'actors' to take reputation-enhancing actions, and 'evaluators' to reward actors with positive reputations by preferentially cooperating with them. This article proposes a reputation... View Details