Publications

Educators

December 1998 (Revised February 1999)
Case

City of Charlotte (A)

By: Robert S. Kaplan

The city manager's office in Charlotte, North Carolina, is attempting to align and focus the city's programs and operating departments. City managers, working collaboratively with the elected mayor and city council, have identified five strategic themes to make... View Details

Keywords: Balanced Scorecard; Government Administration; City; Growth and Development Strategy; Adoption; Public Sector; Management Teams; Programs; Performance Evaluation; Motivation and Incentives; Public Administration Industry; North Carolina

Educators

March 2006
Case

The Whitesides Lab

By: H. Kent Bowen and Francesca Gino

A significant part of the long-term economic growth in developed economies depends on the translation of scientific research into new products and processes. Focuses on the front end of this value creation stream. The laboratory of George Whitesides has a 30-year... View Details

Keywords: Research; Performance Productivity; Economic Growth; Infrastructure; Creativity; Groups and Teams; Value Creation; Factories, Labs, and Plants; Leadership; Resource Allocation

Educators

06 Oct 2015
First Look

October 6, 2015

2015 University of Chicago Press Economic Analysis of the Digital Economy By: Goldfarb, Avi, Shane Greenstein, and Catherine Tucker, eds. Abstract—As the cost of storing, sharing, and analyzing data has decreased, View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

2024
Working Paper

Health, Human Capital Development and the Longevity of Japanese Elites Since 710

By: Tom Nicholas and Hiroshi Shimizu

We examine the lifespan of over 40,000 elites in Japan born between 710 and 1912, including samurai warriors, feudal lords, business, political, cultural, and religious leaders at the apex of the social hierarchy. Japanese elites experienced increases in lifespan about... View Details

Keywords: Life Expectancy; Status and Position; Health; History; Human Capital; Japan

2009
Working Paper

Culture Clash: The Costs and Benefits of Homogeneity

By: Eric J. Van den Steen

This paper develops an economic theory of the costs and benefits of corporate culture—in the sense of shared beliefs and values—in order to study the effects of "culture clash" in mergers and acquisitions. I first use a simple analytical framework to show that shared... View Details

Keywords: Mergers and Acquisitions; Cost vs Benefits; Values and Beliefs; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Culture; Motivation and Incentives; Theory

Winter 2022
Article

Vaccines and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Lessons from Failure and Success

By: Scott Duke Kominers and Alex Tabarrok

The losses from the global COVID-19 pandemic have been staggering—trillions in economic costs, on top of significant losses of life, health, and well-being. The world made significant and successful investments in vaccines to mitigate the pandemic, yet there were... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19; Vaccination; Market Design; Health Pandemics; Loss; Outcome or Result; Opportunities; Crisis Management

13 Aug 2012
Research & Ideas

When Good Incentives Lead to Bad Decisions

employment and economic growth," Cole explains. "But they often find it hard to get access to financing because they lack the large amounts of collateral that banks typically require. So we were interested in studying this small... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Banking

16 Apr 2018
Research & Ideas

Can Consumers Be Saved From Their Misguided Decisions?

correct the [consumer] mistake, but also influences how you interpret whether an intervention is working,” says Schwartzstein. The paper, published in the Winter 2018 edition of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, examined previous work... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne; Consulting; Retail

16 Jul 2007
Research & Ideas

Understanding the ‘Want’ vs. ’Should’ Decision

consumer spending habits, and effective store layout. Sarah Jane Gilbert: What is the difference between the "want-self" and the "should-self"? How does psychology play a role in the internal conflict between the 2?... View Details

Keywords: by Sarah Jane Gilbert; Retail; Entertainment & Recreation

13 Nov 2017
Research & Ideas

Want to Be Happier? Spend Some Money on Avoiding Household Chores

research will get people to think, ‘Hey, how can I spend a little bit of money in a way that will save me time?’” Whillans co-wrote the study with Michael I. Norton, the Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration at HBS; Elizabeth W. Dunn, a View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

2014
Book

Consumer Lending in France and America: Credit and Welfare

By: Gunnar Trumbull

Why did America embrace consumer credit over the course of the twentieth century, when most other countries did not? How did American policy makers by the late twentieth century come to believe that more credit would make even poor families better off? This book traces... View Details

Keywords: Attitudes; Credit; France; United States

Find at Harvard

09 Oct 2001
Research & Ideas

Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Organizations

competition. This type of problem arises again and again in economic activity. Think of the problem of pollution control, of lumbering, of soil conservation—the list goes on and on. To the extent that a living organization managed to... View Details

Keywords: by Paul Lawrence & Nitin Nohria

2022
Working Paper

Measuring the Tolerance of the State: Theory and Application to Protest

By: Veli Andirin, Yusuf Neggers, Mehdi Shadmehr and Jesse M. Shapiro

We develop a measure of a regime's tolerance for an action by its citizens. We ground our measure in an economic model and apply it to the setting of political protest. In the model, a regime anticipating a protest can take a costly action to repress it. We define the... View Details

Keywords: Political Protests; Modeling And Analysis; Government and Politics; Conflict and Resolution

20 Aug 2008
Op-Ed

The Time is Right for Creative Capitalism

In a much admired and debated speech given at the World Economic Forum in Davos last January, Bill Gates said that many of the world's biggest problems cannot be fixed by philanthropy, but instead require free-market... View Details

Keywords: by Nancy Koehn

2023
Working Paper

Cognitive Uncertainty in Intertemporal Choice

By: Benjamin Enke and Thomas Graeber

This paper studies the relevance of cognitive uncertainty – subjective uncertainty over one's utility-maximizing action – for understanding and predicting intertemporal choice. The main idea is that when people are cognitively noisy, such as when a decision is complex,... View Details

Keywords: Cognitive Uncertainty; Intertemporal Choice; Cognition and Thinking; Complexity; Decision Choices and Conditions

Find at Harvard

Web

Research - Behavioral Finance & Financial Stability

They show that funding loans to these borrowers lead to better economic outcomes for the borrowers and higher returns for the fintech platform. See Marco’s other research here , Dimuthu’s other research here , and Don’s other research... View Details

07 Jul 2003
What Do You Think?

Can We Have Too Much Productivity Improvement?

living more affordable for everyone. But can we have too much of it, especially when there is insufficient demand for the resulting output? Given the economic challenges facing the world's economies, does productivity improvement at a... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

2021
Working Paper

Cognitive Biases: Mistakes or Missing Stakes?

By: Benjamin Enke, Uri Gneezy, Brian Hall, David Martin, Vadim Nelidov, Theo Offerman and Jeroen van de Ven

Despite decades of research on heuristics and biases, empirical evidence on the effect of large incentives—as present in relevant economic decisions—on cognitive biases is scant. This paper tests the effect of incentives on four widely documented biases: base rate... View Details

Keywords: Cognitive Biases; Incentives; Motivation and Incentives; Decision Making; Performance

November 2022
Article

The Sharp Spikes of Poverty: Financial Scarcity Is Related to Higher Levels of Distress Intensity in Daily Life

By: Jon M. Jachimowicz, Erin L. Frey, Sandra C. Matz, Bertus F. Jeronimus and Adam D. Galinsky

Although income is an important predictor of life satisfaction, the precise forces that drive this relationship remain unclear. We propose that financial resources afford individuals a path to reducing the distressing impact of everyday hassles, in turn increasing... View Details

Keywords: Distress; Affect; Control; Financial Scarcity; Life Satisfaction; Income; Poverty; Well-being

Find at Harvard