Publications
Publications
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(3,851)
- Faculty Publications (513)
- Article
Gross National Happiness As an Answer to the Easterlin Paradox?
By: Rafael Di Tella and Robert MacCulloch
The Easterlin Paradox refers to the fact that happiness data are typically stationary in spite of considerable increases in income. This amounts to a rejection of the hypothesis that current income is the only argument in the utility function. We find that the... View Details
- 2007
- Working Paper
I'll Have the Ice Cream Soon and the Vegetables Later: A Study of Online Grocery Purchases and Order Lead Time
By: Katherine L. Milkman, Todd Rogers and Max H. Bazerman
How do decisions made for tomorrow or two days in the future differ from decisions made for several days in the future? We use data from an online grocer to address this question. In general, we find that as the delay between order completion and delivery increases,... View Details
- March 2007 (Revised May 2012)
- Case
PRG-Schultz International
By: Paul W. Marshall and James Weber
PRG-Schultz will run out of cash within a couple of months unless the new CEO can reduce costs and restructure the company's debt. PRG was the dominant market leader in the audit recovery industry. The industry consisted of firms which employed accounting professionals... View Details
- January 2007 (Revised August 2007)
- Case
Lobbying for Love? Southwest Airlines and the Wright Amendment
By: Felix Oberholzer-Gee, Dennis A. Yao, Libby Cantrill and Patricia Wu
The fall of 2004 brought exciting news to Love Field, the Texas headquarters of Southwest Airlines. Delta Airlines, one of Southwest's main competitors, had announced that it would dramatically decrease service from the nearby Dallas/Fort Worth International (DFW)... View Details
- January 2007
- Article
Introducing the First Management Control Systems: Evidence from the Retail Sector
By: Tatiana Sandino
Focusing on a sample of US retailers, I study the management control systems (MCS) that firms introduce when they first invest in controls, and identify four categories of initial MCS, which are defined in terms of the purposes these MCS fulfill. The first category,... View Details
- Article
The Effect of Dividends on Consumption
By: Malcolm Baker, Stefan Nagel and Jeffrey Wurgler
Classical models predict that the division of stock returns into dividends and capital appreciation does not affect investor consumption patterns, while mental accounting and other economic frictions predict that investors have a higher propensity to consume from... View Details
Keywords: Investment; Investment Return; Economics; Stocks; Capital; Business Earnings; Investment Portfolio; Investment Funds; Cost; Saving
- February 2006 (Revised September 2006)
- Case
Sippican Corporation (A)
By: Robert S. Kaplan
Presents a time-driven version of the Wilkerson Co. activity-based costing case (101092). Faced with declining profits, Sippican Corp. is struggling to understand why it is encountering severe price competition on one product line. The controller collects data that... View Details
- October 2005 (Revised October 2006)
- Case
Infosys (A): Strategic Human Resource Management
By: Thomas J. DeLong, Jaya Tandon and Ganesh Rengaswamy
Hema Ravichandar, head of human resources, was given a new and aggressive milestone to reach: ensure Infosys is on the Top 10 lists of both Best Performing Companies and Best Employers by 2007. No large organization had ever been able to achieve this distinction... View Details
- August 2005 (Revised April 2006)
- Case
Kemps LLC: Introducing Time-Driven ABC
By: Robert S. Kaplan
Kemps is making a strategy shift: from being focused on fulfilling customer requests to becoming the best cost dairy producer in the industry. Its existing manufacturing cost system, however, fails to capture the costs associated with handling special flavors, small... View Details
- July 2005
- Article
The Consequences of Labor Market Flexibility: Panel Evidence Based on Survey Data
By: Rafael Di Tella and Robert MacCulloch
We introduce a new data set on hiring and firing restrictions for 21 OECD countries for the period 1984 –1990. The data are based on surveys of business people in the countries covered, so the indices we use are subjective in nature. Controlling for country and time... View Details
- June 2005 (Revised May 2006)
- Case
Covisint (A): The Evolution of a B2B Marketplace
By: Lynda M. Applegate and Elizabeth Collins
Ford Motor Co., General Motors, and DaimlerChrysler--the three original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) that dominated the automotive industry throughout the 20th century--launched Covisint in February 2000 as an industry supply chain exchange that would drive out cost... View Details
- 2005
- Working Paper
Aggregate Corporate Liquidity and Stock Returns
By: Robin Greenwood
Aggregate investment in cash and liquid assets as a share of total corporate investment is negatively related to subsequent U.S. stock market returns between 1947 and 2003. The share of cash in total investment is a more stable predictor of returns than scaled price... View Details
- April 2005
- Article
Partisan Social Happiness
By: Rafael Di Tella and Robert MacCulloch
We use a new approach to study questions in political economy that relies on data on the subjective well-being of a large sample of people living in the OECD over the period 1975-1992. Controlling for the personal characteristics of the respondents, year and country... View Details
- January 2005 (Revised November 2009)
- Case
Tata Consultancy Services
By: Rohit Deshpande and Seth Schulman
As CEO of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), S. "Ram" Ramadorai had grown the company into an emerging IT services powerhouse, with marquee clients such as General Electric, offices in 32 countries, and revenues of nearly $2 billion dollars. Now, he was about to steer... View Details
- 2005
- Article
Early Decisions: A Regulatory Framework
By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson and Brigitte C. Madrian
We describe a regulatory framework that helps consumers who have difficulty sticking to their own long-run plans. Early Decision regulations help long-run preferences prevail by allowing consumers to partially commit to their long-run goals, making it harder for a... View Details
- November 2004 (Revised July 2006)
- Case
Patrimonio Hoy
By: Arthur I Segel, Michael Chu and Gustavo Herrero
Patrimonio Hoy is a program targeting the housing needs of the low-income population by CEMEX, a major Mexican company and a leading global cement producer. Originally conceived as a project to understand the customers in the self-construction segment better, a major... View Details
- November 2004
- Article
Unemployment Benefits As a Substitute for a Conservative Central Banker
By: Rafael Di Tella and Robert MacCulloch
In the many years since their introduction, positive theories of inflation have rarely been tested. This paper documents a negative relationship between inflation and the welfare state (proxied by the parameters of the unemployment benefit program) that is to be... View Details
- October 2004 (Revised January 2006)
- Tutorial
Introduction to Responsibility Accounting Systems
By: David F. Hawkins, V.G. Narayanan, Jacob Cohen and Michele Jurgens
Responsibility accounting systems generate financial and related nonfinancial information about the actual and planned activities of a company's responsibility centers--organizational units headed by managers responsible for a unit's performance. The principal... View Details
- September 2004 (Revised February 2007)
- Case
Hedging Currency Risks at AIFS
By: Mihir A. Desai, Vincent Dessain and Anders Sjoman
The American Institute for Foreign Studies (AIFS) organizes study abroad programs and cultural exchanges for American students. The firm's revenues are mainly in U.S. dollars, but most of its costs are in eurodollars and British pounds. The company's controllers review... View Details
- July 2004 (Revised July 2005)
- Case
Activision: The 'Kelly Slater's Pro Surfer' Project
By: Alan D. MacCormack, Enrico D"Angelo and Kerry Herman
Mike Ward, the producer in charge of developing the Kelly Slater's Pro Surfer game for Activision, must decide whether to launch the game in time for the 2002 Christmas season. Complicating his decision are the lukewarm response from consumers to TV test spots of the... View Details