Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(470)
- Faculty Publications (77)
- 2020
- Working Paper
Dog Eat Dog: Balancing Network Effects and Differentiation in a Digital Platform Merger
By: Chiara Farronato, Jessica Fong and Andrey Fradkin
Digital platforms are increasingly the subject of regulatory scrutiny. In comparison to multiple competitors, a single platform may increase consumer welfare if network effects are large or may decrease welfare due to higher prices or reduction in platform variety. We... View Details
- October 2020 (Revised March 2022)
- Case
The What Works Centre: Using Behavioral Science to Improve Social Worker Well-being (A)
By: Ashley V. Whillans and Shibeal O'Flaherty
This case describes the experiences of Michael Sanders—the Chief Executive of the What Works Center for Children’s Social Care—as he led the design and implementation of a program of research aimed at improving the social care system in the United Kingdom (UK) at the... View Details
- August 2020 (Revised May 2021)
- Case
PayPal: The Next Chapter
By: Michael Porter, Mark Kramer and Annelena Lobb
Can a social purpose and stakeholder capitalism confer a powerful competitive advantage in the age of COVID-19? For PayPal, the answer is yes. After spinning off from eBay in a 2015 IPO, the company declared its purpose as "democratizing financial services" by ensuring... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Scientific Production: An Exploration into Organization, Resource Allocation, and Funding
By: Jerry Thursby, Marie Thursby, Karim R. Lakhani, Kyle R. Myers, Nina Cohodes, Sarah Bratt, Dennis Byrski, Hannah Cohoon and Maria Roche
Production of scientific knowledge is core to civilizational advancement in economic and material wellbeing of societies. Despite its fundamental importance, however, a systematic effort to quantitatively study the factors underlying scientific production, particularly... View Details
- May 2019
- Teaching Note
Universal Basic Income, Job Guarantees, or None of the Above?
By: William R. Kerr and Jordan Bach-Lombardo
Teaching Note for HBS No. 819-035. View Details
Keywords: UBI; Job Guarantee; Public Policy; EITC; Employment; Labor; Social Issues; Income; Governance; Policy; Welfare
- 2018
- Chapter
Behavioral Household Finance
By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson and Brigitte C. Madrian
This chapter provides an overview of household finance. The first part summarizes key facts regarding household financial behavior, emphasizing empirical regularities that are inconsistent with the standard classical economic model and discussing extensions of the... View Details
- April 2018
- Teaching Note
Happy UAE
Teaching Note for HBS No. 918-041. View Details
- 2018
- Chapter
Time, Money, and Subjective Wellbeing
By: Cassie Mogilner, A.V. Whillans and Michael I. Norton
Time and money are scarce and precious resources: people experience stress about having insufficient time and worry about having insufficient money. This chapter reviews research showing that the ways in which people spend their time and money, the tradeoffs that... View Details
- Article
"Troll" Check? A Proposal for Administrative Review of Patent Litigation
By: Lauren Cohen, John Golden, Umit Gurun and Scott Duke Kominers
The patent system is commonly justified as a way to promote social welfare and, more specifically, technological progress. For years, however, there has been concern that patent litigation is undermining, rather than furthering, these goals. Particularly in the United... View Details
- February 2017
- Article
The Effect of Prohibiting Deal Protection on M&A Activity: Evidence from the United Kingdom
By: Fernán Restrepo and Guhan Subramanian
Since 2011, the UK has prohibited all deal protections—including termination fees—in M&A deals. Prior to 2011, the UK permitted termination fees up to 1% of deal value and there was no prohibition on other protection devices. We examine the effect of this regulatory... View Details
- July 2016
- Article
Taxation, Corruption, and Growth
By: Philippe Aghion, Ufuk Akcigit, Julia Cagé and William R. Kerr
We build an endogenous growth model to analyze the relationships between taxation, corruption, and economic growth. Entrepreneurs lie at the center of the model and face disincentive effects from taxation but acquire positive benefits from public infrastructure.... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
Fiscal Rules and Sovereign Default
By: Laura Alfaro and Fabio Kanczuk
Recurrent concerns over debt sustainability in emerging and developed nations have prompted renewed debate on the role of fiscal rules. Their optimality, however, remains unclear. We provide a quantitative analysis of fiscal rules in a standard model of sovereign debt... View Details
- 2016
- Blog
Building A Culture of Health - John A. Quelch: The Marketing of Prevention
By: John A. Quelch
The US will devote 17.5% of GDP to health care this year, around $3 trillion. Yet only 3 percent of that will be spent on prevention, including both primary prevention (preventing illness in the first place) and secondary prevention (preventing sick people getting... View Details
- February 2016
- Article
Positive and Normative Judgments Implicit in U.S. Tax Policy, and the Costs of Unequal Growth and Recessions
By: Benjamin B. Lockwood and Matthew Weinzierl
Calculating the welfare implications of changes to economic policy or shocks to the economy requires economists to decide on a normative criterion. One way to make that decision is to elicit the relevant moral criteria from real-world policy choices, converting a... View Details
- Article
Transition to Clean Technology
By: Daron Acemoglu, Ufuk Akcigit, Douglas Hanley and William R. Kerr
We develop a microeconomic model of endogenous growth where clean and dirty technologies compete in production and innovation, in the sense that research can be directed to either clean or dirty technologies. If dirty technologies are more advanced to start with, the... View Details
- 2016
- Article
Does volunteering improve well-being?
By: A.V. Whillans, Scott C. Seider, Lihan Chen, Ryan J. Dwyer, Sarah Novick, Kathryn J. Gramigna, Brittany A. Mitchell, Victoria Savalei, Sally S. Dickerson and Elizabeth W. Dunn
Does volunteering causally improve well-being? To empirically test this question, we examined one instantiation of volunteering that is common at post-secondary institutions across North America: community service learning (CSL). CSL is a form of experiential learning... View Details
- Article
Behavioral Hazard in Health Insurance
By: Katherine Baicker, Sendhil Mullainathan and Joshua Schwartzstein
A fundamental implication of standard moral hazard models is overuse of low-value medical care because copays are lower than costs. In these models, the demand curve alone can be used to make welfare statements, a fact relied on by much empirical work. There is ample... View Details
- June 2015
- Case
1996 Welfare Reform in the United States
By: Matthew Weinzierl, Katrina Flanagan and Alastair Su
On August 22, 1996, U.S. President Bill Clinton signed into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA)—a dramatic reform of the American system of economic assistance for the poor that, as its title suggested, attempted to... View Details
- April 2015 (Revised October 2024)
- Case
The German Export Engine
By: Gunnar Trumbull, Jonathan Schlefer and Sophus A. Reinert
In fall of 2018, Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel had logged significant successes. Germany was the largest exporter in the world, had maintained low unemployment through the 2008 financial crisis, and was gradually reforming its welfare state to meet future pension... View Details
- September 2014 (Revised May 2015)
- Case
The United Kingdom and the Means to Prosperity
By: Laura Alfaro, Lakshmi Iyer and Hilary White
After struggling through the country's longest recession since 2008, the U.K. was expected to grow faster than any other G7 nation in 2014. Analysts wondered whether the return to growth was because, or in spite of, Prime Minister David Cameron's controversial £113... View Details
Keywords: United Kingdom; Keynesian Multiplier; Inflation; Inflation Targeting; Government Spending; Government Intervention In The Markets; Monetary Policy; Financial Crisis Management; Austerity; Inequality; Public Finance; Government Finance; Macroeconomics; Economics; Government and Politics; Inflation and Deflation; Financial Crisis; Economic Slowdown and Stagnation; Economic Growth; Business Cycles; Welfare; United Kingdom