Publications

September 2020
Teaching Note

West Side United: Hospitals Tackle the Racial Health and Wealth Gap

By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Joyce J. Kim

Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 321-026. View Details

Keywords: COVID-19; COVID; Hospital; Coalition; Health Pandemics; Race; Health; Wealth and Poverty; Equality and Inequality; Change; Leadership; Chicago

Forthcoming
Article

Imagining the Future: Memory, Simulation and Beliefs

By: Pedro Bordalo, Giovanni Burro, Katherine B. Coffman, Nicola Gennaioli and Andrei Shleifer

How do people form beliefs about novel risks, with which they have little or no experience? Motivated by survey data on beliefs about Covid we collected in 2020, we build a model based on the psychology of selective memory. When a person thinks about an event,... View Details

Keywords: Expectations; Memory; COVID-19 Pandemic; Risk and Uncertainty; Cognition and Thinking

01 Jun 2020
News

Post-Office

Image by John Ritter On March 8, in the early days of the global COVID-19 pandemic, Stack Overflow, the world’s largest online community for software developers and technologists, announced that its nearly 250-employee workforce would be... View Details

Keywords: Dan Morrell; Remote work; COVID-19; Management of Companies and Enterprises; Management

February 2024
Article

An Economic Framework for Vaccine Prioritization

By: Mohammad Akbarpour, Eric Budish, Piotr Dworczak and Scott Duke Kominers

We propose an economic framework for determining the optimal allocation of a scarce supply of vaccines that become gradually available during a public health crisis, such as the Covid-19 pandemic. Agents differ in observable and unobservable characteristics, and the... View Details

Keywords: Vaccine; Fairness; Public Finance; Public Goods; Allocation Problems; Allocative Efficiency; Allocation Rules; Social Welfare; Pandemics; Inequality; COVID-19; COVID-19 Pandemic; Public Sector; Resource Allocation; Market Design; Marketplace Matching; Public Administration Industry

SSRN

2022
Editorial

It’s Time to Redouble and Refocus Our Efforts to Fight COVID, Not Retreat

By: Kathleen Bachynski, Brian C. Castrucci, Esther K. Choo, Ranu Dhillon, Jim Downs, Lakshmi Ganapathi, Gregg Gonsalves, Abraar Karan, Richard C. Keller, Scott Duke Kominers, Jonathan Levy, Martha Lincoln, Seth Prins, Julia Raifman and Anne Sosin

Keywords: COVID; COVID-19; COVID-19 Pandemic; Public Health; Public Health Measures; Vaccination; Health Policy; Health Pandemics; Government and Politics; United States

August 24, 2020
Editorial

How to (Actually) Save Time When You're Working Remotely

By: Lauren C. Howe, A.V. Whillans and Jochen I. Menges

The pandemic has given many of us the opportunity to ditch the commute and work from home long-term, offering huge potential time savings. But to truly reap the benefits of remote work during the current crisis and beyond, we need to think proactively about how we... View Details

Keywords: Time; Remote Work; COVID-19 Pandemic; Work-Life Balance; Time Management; Well-being

August 13, 2022
Article

A Historic Opportunity for Universal Health Coverage in India

By: Vikram Patel, Shubhangi Bhadada, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Arnab Mukherji, Tarun Khanna and Gagandeep Kang

The milestone of India's 75th anniversary of independence on Aug 15, 2022, offers an opportunity to reassert the country's commitment to realising universal health coverage (UHC). The first such effort predates independence, with the 1946 Bhore Committee report.... View Details

Keywords: Universal Health Coverage; COVID-19 Pandemic; Health Care and Treatment; Gender; Prejudice and Bias; Health Industry; India

2023
Working Paper

Words Can Hurt: How Political Communication Can Change the Pace of an Epidemic

By: Jessica Gagete-Miranda, Lucas Argentieri Mariani and Paula Rettl

While elite-cue effects on public opinion are well-documented, questions remain as to when and why voters use elite cues to inform their opinions and behaviors. Using experimental and observational data from Brazil during the COVID-19 pandemic, we study how leader... View Details

February 2022 (Revised May 2022)
Case

Buddy Valastro: Cake Boss

By: Boris Groysberg, Evan M.S. Hecht and Katherine Connolly Baden

Buddy Valastro, celebrity baker and business owner, inherited his father’s bakery—Carlo’s Bake Shop of Hoboken, New Jersey—at the age of seventeen. He had willed the shop to survive and gone on to fame through his television show, “Cake Boss”—the name most people now... View Details

Educators

December 2023
Article

What Can Stockouts Tell Us About Inflation? Evidence from Online Micro Data

By: Alberto Cavallo and Oleksiy Kryvtsov

We use a detailed micro dataset on product availability and stockouts to construct a direct high-frequency measure of consumer product shortages during the 2020-2022 pandemic. We document a widespread multi-fold rise in stockouts in nearly all sectors early in the... View Details

Keywords: Prices; Stockouts; Inventories; Supply Disruptions; COVID-19 Pandemic; Supply Chain; Product; Demand and Consumers

September 2020
Article

Regulatory Sandboxes: A Cure for mHealth Pilotitis?

By: Abhishek Bhatia, Rahul Matthan, Tarun Khanna and Satchit Balsari

Mobile health (mHealth) and related digital health interventions in the past decade have not always scaled globally as anticipated earlier despite large investments by governments and philanthropic foundations. The implementation of digital health tools has suffered... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19; mHealth; Digital Health; Design Thinking; Regulation; Intervention; Regulatory Sandbox; Health Care and Treatment; Technological Innovation; Design; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; India

Article

Moving Forward from COVID-19: Organizational Dimensions of Effective Hospital Emergency Management

By: Mariam Krikorian Atkinson, Nicholas Cagliuso, John Hick, Sara Singer, Elizabeth Bambury, Tuna Cem Hayirli, Masha Kuznetsova and Paul Biddinger

Federal investment in emergency preparedness has increased notably since the 9/11 attacks, yet it is unclear if and how U.S. hospital readiness has changed in the 20 years since then. In particular, understanding effective aspects of hospital emergency management... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19; Hospital Preparedness/response; Urban/rural Hospitals; Emergency Management; National Strategy; Health Pandemics; Crisis Management; Performance Effectiveness; Governance; Policy; United States

2021
Working Paper

Who Closed the Schools?

By: Joshua D. Coval

This paper examines the differences in characteristics between U.S. public schools that opted for virtual instruction because of COVID-19, and schools that did not. Much of the variation can be explained by measures of the degree to which districts favored teachers... View Details

Keywords: Public Education; COVID-19; Virtual Learning; Education; Health Pandemics; Teaching; Internet and the Web; Policy; Outcome or Result; United States

01 Jun 2020
News

Meal Plan

Holdings, a $300 million fund with investments in several restaurant concepts including Tatte Bakery, CAVA, Life Alive, BJ’s Restaurants and Clover Food Labs. Christian, can you walk me through how the management team at Inspire Brands has responded to the impact of... View Details

Keywords: Julia Hanna; restaurants; COVID-19; pandemic; recovery; Food Services and Drinking Places; Hospitality; Food and Beverage Stores; Retail Trade

22 Nov 2020
News

Kazakh Fintech a Pandemic Bright Spot

Keywords: fintech; IPO; developing markets; COVID-19; Finance

01 Sep 2020
News

Turning Point: Change, Stat

president of the Emergency Medicine Residents’ Association, and was named a 40 under 40 Health Care Innovator by MedTech Boston. After recovering from COVID-19 in early March, he returned to practicing emergency medicine at The Mount... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19; healthcare; medicine; innovation; interpersonal communication; Ambulatory Health Care Services; Health, Social Assistance

September 2022 (Revised January 2023)
Case

York Capital CLOs and WorldStrides International

By: Victoria Ivashina and William Vrattos

The case follows the debt restructuring of WorldStrides International, a travel program provider in the education market, after the onset of COVID-19. The pandemic severely impacted the travel industry, creating challenges for many companies like WorldStrides, which... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19 Pandemic; Debt Restructuring; CLO; Compliance; Debt Securities; Financing and Loans; Decision Making; Travel Industry; Education Industry

Educators

May–June 2023
Article

Unmasking Behaviors During the Pandemic with Video Analytics

By: Shunyuan Zhang, Kaiquan Xu and Kannan Srinivasan

In 2020, as the novel coronavirus spread globally, face masks were recommended in public settings to protect against and slow down viral transmission. People complied to varying extents, and their reactions may have been driven by a variety of psychological factors.... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19 Pandemic; Social Influence; Social Norms; Health Pandemics; Behavior