Publications

September 2018
Article

Aggregation of Consumer Ratings: An Application to Yelp.com

By: Weijia Dai, Ginger Jin, Jungmin Lee and Michael Luca

Because consumer reviews leverage the wisdom of the crowd, the way in which they are aggregated is a central decision faced by platforms. We explore this "rating aggregation problem" and offer a structural approach to solving it, allowing for (1) reviewers to vary in... View Details

Keywords: User Generated Content; Crowdsourcing; Yelp; Social and Collaborative Networks; Information; Internet and the Web; Learning; Mathematical Methods; E-commerce

April 2012
Article

The Changing Ecology of Teams: New Directions for Teams Research

By: Ruth Wageman, Heidi K. Gardner and Mark Mortensen

The nature of collaboration has been changing at an accelerating pace, particularly in the last decade. Much of the published work in teams research, however, is still focused on the archetypal team that has well-defined membership, purposes, leadership, and standards... View Details

Keywords: Groups and Teams; Research; Change Management; Leadership; Standards; Performance Effectiveness; Theory; Civil Society or Community

Firms offering "buy now, pay later" (BNPL) point-of-sale loans with minimal underwriting have grown in popularity in the last couple of years. According to Worldpay, BNPL accounted for 2.1% – or roughly $97b – of global e-commerce transactions in 2020, and is... View Details

Research Summary

Conceptualizing and measuring environmental sustainability

By: Michael W. Toffel

This research involves developing clarity around the murky construct of environmental sustainability, and improving techniques to measure corporate environmental performance. My prior research in this domain includes View Details

May 2017
Article

Distracted Shareholders and Corporate Actions

By: Elisabeth Kempf, Alberto Manconi and Oliver Spalt

Investor attention matters for corporate actions. Our new identification approach constructs firm-level shareholder "distraction" measures, by exploiting exogenous shocks to unrelated parts of institutional shareholders' portfolios. Firms with "distracted" shareholders... View Details

Keywords: Investors; Business and Shareholder Relations; Executive Compensation; Stocks; Mergers and Acquisitions

2021
Article

Leisure Beliefs and the Subjective Well-being of Nations

By: Lucia Macchia and A.V. Whillans

Here, we construct a data set of 79 countries (N = 220,000) and explore whether differences in the prioritization of time (leisure) vs. money (work) explain cross-country differences in happiness. Consistent with our predictions, countries whose citizens value leisure... View Details

Keywords: Leisure; Work; Subjective Well-being; Public Policy; Employment; Happiness; Governance; Policy

Purchase

2012
Article

Organizational Identity as an Anchor for Adaptation: An Emerging Market Perspective

By: Andres Hatum, Luciana Silvestri, Roberto Vassolo and Andrew Pettigrew

There is little doubt that organizational identity—that which is central, distinctive, and enduring about an organization—mediates in adaptive processes. Exactly how this mediation takes place, and whether it is favorable or unfavorable to adaptation, must still be... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Identity; Emerging Economies; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Culture

2013
Working Paper

Redrawing the Lines: Did Political Incumbents Influence Electoral Redistricting in the World's Largest Democracy?

By: Lakshmi Iyer and Maya Reddy

In 2008, the boundaries of national and state electoral constituencies in India were redrawn for the first time in three decades. We use detailed demographic and electoral data to construct measures of the extent of redistricting in a given constituency. We find the... View Details

Keywords: Political Elections; India

October 2011
Article

Government Advertising and Media Coverage of Corruption Scandals

By: Rafael Di Tella and Ignacio Franceschelli

We construct measures of the extent to which the four main newspapers in Argentina report government corruption in their front page during the period 1998-2007 and correlate them with government advertising. The correlation is negative. The size is considerable: a one... View Details

Keywords: Crime and Corruption; Advertising; Government and Politics; Newspapers; Media; Argentina

June 2010
Article

What Causes Industry Agglomeration? Evidence from Coagglomeration Patterns

By: Glenn Ellison, Edward Glaeser and William R. Kerr

Why do firms cluster near one another? We test Marshall's theories of industrial agglomeration by examining which industries locate near one another, or coagglomerate. We construct pairwise coagglomeration indices for US manufacturing industries from the Economic... View Details

Keywords: Production; Economics; Industry Clusters; Analytics and Data Science; Labor; Theory; Goods and Commodities; United States; United Kingdom

01 Jul 2015
News

From Waze for crowds to Uber for street food

Taking Innovation to the Streets: Microgeography, Physical Structure, and Innovation

In this paper, I analyze how the physical layout of cities affects innovation by influencing the organization of knowledge exchange. I exploit a novel data set covering all census block groups in the contiguous United States with information on innovation outcomes,... View Details

June 2023
Case

Investing in the Climate Transition at Neuberger Berman

By: George Serafeim and Benjamin Maletta

By mid-2023, Neuberger Berman (NB), an active asset manager, had grown its assets under management to about half a trillion dollars and took pride in its client centricity and innovative spirit. Responding to client demand for investment products that integrated... View Details

Educators

Purchase

18 May 2016
Working Paper Summaries

The Impact of Mass Shootings on Gun Policy

Keywords: by Michael Luca, Deepak Malhotra, and Christopher Poliquin; Entertainment & Recreation

Research Summary

Come Together: Firm Boundaries and Delegation

By: Laura Alfaro

We develop an incomplete-contracts model to jointly study firm boundaries and the allocation of decision rights within them. Integration has an option value: it gives firm owners authority to delegate or centralize decision rights, depending on who can best solve... 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

Keywords: Bonds; Financial Markets; Financial Crisis; Asset Pricing

February 2024
Article

Come Together: Firm Boundaries and Delegation

By: Laura Alfaro, Nick Bloom, Paola Conconi, Harald Fadinger, Patrick Legros, Andrew F. Newman, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen

We develop an incomplete-contracts model to jointly study firm boundaries and the allocation of decision rights within them. Integration has an option value: it gives firm owners authority to delegate or centralize decision rights, depending on who can best solve... View Details

Keywords: Boundaries; Decision Choices and Conditions; Risk and Uncertainty

November 1989 (Revised January 1991)
Case

Honda Motor Co. and Honda of America (A)

In its 43-year history, Honda grew from an also-ran in the Japanese motorcycle market to a dominant force in the worldwide motorcycle and automobile markets. To do this, Honda has developed a unique organizational style based on constructive conflict and organizational... View Details

Keywords: Expansion; Organizational Culture; Business Processes; Motorcycle Industry; Auto Industry; Japan; United States