Wages - Publications - Faculty & Research

03 Apr 2017
What Do You Think?

How About Investing in Human Infrastructure?

from public funding) to work with over 10 years. That’s enough to design a six-month $10,000 retraining program (focusing on skills defined by unfilled jobs) plus a $10 per hour wage funded by the government followed by six months of... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett; Construction

02 Sep 2014
Research & Ideas

Food Stamp Entrepreneurs: How Public Assistance Enables Business Bootstrapping

that the share of total household income from self-employment versus outside wages increased 16 percent. That is, these new businesses were successful enough to contribute significantly to household income. "The newly self-employed... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Health

15 May 2018
First Look

New Research and Ideas, May 15, 2018

to explore the mechanism behind the rise in income inequality. We find tax cuts lead to higher reported capital income and a decrease in wage and salary income. These effects are concentrated among top earners, and we find no effects for... View Details

Keywords: Dina Gerdeman

13 Oct 2003
Research & Ideas

Negotiating Challenges for Women Leaders

you go back into economic sociology studies and studies of wage gaps, you find that you can pull out those situations that are fairly unambiguous and say that there aren't gaps. But if you go into those situations and industries in which... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

23 Jan 2018
First Look

First Look at New Research and Ideas, January 23, 2018

cross-occupational survey (Study 1), we found that idle time occurs frequently across all occupational categories; we estimate that employers in the United States pay roughly $100 billion in wages for time that employees spend idle.... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

15 Sep 2015
First Look

September 15, 2015

supervisory responsibility if employed, work more hours, and earn marginally higher wages than women whose mothers stayed home full-time. The effects on labor market outcomes are non-significant for men. Maternal employment is also... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

28 May 2012
Research & Ideas

A Pragmatic Alternative for Creating a Corporate Social Responsibility Strategy

bottom line. Some companies have invested time and energy into their CSR programs only after getting burned by bad publicity. For example, Nike suffered from an onslaught of negative press and large-scale protests from those who claimed its contract employees were paid... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

18 Jul 2005
Research & Ideas

Identify Emerging Market Opportunities

Political and Social Systems. Every country's political system affects its product, labor, and capital markets. In socialist societies like China, for instance, workers cannot form independent trade unions in the labor market, which affects View Details

Keywords: by Tarun Khanna, Krishna G. Palepu & Jayant Sinha

12 Feb 2016
Op-Ed

The Real Jobs Tragedy in the US: We've Lost the Skills

workforce. "Companies that might once have moved overseas to access low wage labor will likely in the future do so to access skilled workers" There’s plenty of evidence that the middle skills jobs crisis is really a skills... View Details

Keywords: by Joe Fuller and Matt Sigelman; Manufacturing; Electronics

October 2001
Exercise

Liability Problems

By: Robert S. Kaplan

This case provides three examples of the recognition and measurement of liabilities. The first focuses on recognizing when employees have rendered services for which future period benefits have been earned, that is, whether unused vacation, sick, and personal days at... View Details

Keywords: Cash; Annuities; Interest Rates; Compensation and Benefits; Employees; Wages; Problems and Challenges; Value

Citation

Find at Harvard

April 1996 (Revised May 2008)
Exercise

Adam Baxter Company/Local 190: 1983 Negotiation, Baxter Management Confidential Information

By: Kathleen L. McGinn and Victoria Medvec

Includes a series of three negotiation exercises portraying management/labor relations at ABC over a period of seven years. ABC, initially a family-owned business, had prided itself on its cooperative relationship with its union, Local 190. With the skyrocketing... View Details

Keywords: Inflation and Deflation; Compensation and Benefits; Wages; Working Conditions; Management; Negotiation Process; Labor and Management Relations

Citation

Purchase

08 Jul 2015
What Do You Think?

Do Americans Work Too Much and Think About Work Too Little?

attractive to more people. Increasingly long hours on the job are a fact of American working life. Since 1979, the average workweek in the US has increased 9 percent. This has occurred disproportionately among so-called middle-class wage... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett; Financial Services

23 Aug 2010
Research & Ideas

The Drive to Acquire’s Impact on Globalization

lower-income families. Meanwhile, the resulting profits add to the wealth of the Walton family and their fellow stockholders—a net gain for higher-income families. If one considers only dA, this profit gain could well be more than the View Details

Keywords: by Paul R. Lawrence

24 Dec 2013
First Look

First Look: December 24

accounts for more than a quarter of the overall increase in labor supply to the private sector during 1986-2005. Using the reform to instrument for private-sector labor supply, we find that private-sector labor demand is very elastic. We provide suggestive evidence... View Details

Keywords: Carmen Nobel

09 Jul 2001
Research & Ideas

Does Misery Love Companies? How Social Performance Pays Off

(1998) and Mishel, Bernstein and Schmitt (1999) provide a comprehensive picture of wealth inequality in America, while Conley (1999) clearly points out that many Black Americans have been left out of this economic boom. In real terms, Americans in the 90th percentile... View Details

Keywords: by Joshua D. Margolis & James P. Walsh

22 Jan 2014
Research & Ideas

High-Tech Immigrant Workers Don’t Cost US Jobs

many cases, the firm ends up sponsoring the immigrant for permanent residency, which strengthens the worker's ties with the firm even more. “I don't have the belief that firms are using this to reduce the wage level that they have to pay... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Computer; Financial Services

27 Mar 2018
First Look

First Look at New Research, March 27, 2018

and Hiring By: Stanton, Christopher T., and Catherine Thomas Abstract—New employers in a global online labor market are less likely to hire and, when they do, pay higher hourly wages than employers with market experience. This paper... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

20 Nov 2012
First Look

First Look: November 20

modified Walmart's human resource practices by offering better benefits and wages to associates in response to growing social pressure. Overall, our analysis suggests that the effectiveness of a particular business model depends not only... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

29 Aug 2017
First Look

First Look at New Research and Ideas, August 29

defining societal issue of the 21st century. The debate over “who gets what’ underlies policy debates ranging from taxation to health care to wages and permeates society at all levels, attracting increasing interest from policymakers,... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

March 2022 (Revised March 2024)
Case

DaVita Responds to COVID

By: Susanna Gallani and David Lane

Early in August 2021, DaVita CEO Javier Rodriguez was assessing the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on his firm, which provided life-sustaining kidney dialysis to roughly 240,000 people. Effective infection control practices and information sharing had ensured... View Details