Publications

01 Feb 2021
What Do You Think?

Has the New Economy Finally Arrived?

Shutterstock/Thomas Barrat Twenty years ago in this column we discussed whether the economic activity of that time actually represented the New Economy that Time magazine first touted in a 1983 cover article. Some economists picked up the... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

2017
Working Paper

Inventory Management for Mobile Money Agents in the Developing World

By: Karthik Balasubramanian, David F. Drake and Douglas Fearing

Mobile money systems, platforms built and managed by mobile network operators to allow money to be stored as digital currency, have burgeoned in the developing world as a mechanism to transfer money electronically. Mobile money agents exchange cash for electronic value... View Details

Keywords: Currency; Mobile Technology; Market Platforms; Developing Countries and Economies

SSRN

February 2021
Article

Do Household Wealth Shocks Affect Productivity? Evidence from Innovative Workers During the Great Recession

By: S. Bernstein, T. McQuade and R. Townsend

We investigate how the deterioration of household balance sheets affects worker productivity, and, in turn, economic downturns. Specifically, we compare the output of innovative workers who experienced differential declines in housing wealth during the financial crisis... View Details

Keywords: Great Recession; Household; Financial Condition; System Shocks; Employees; Performance Productivity

January 2008
Article

The Five Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy

By: Michael E. Porter

This article includes a one-page preview that quickly summarizes the key ideas and provides an overview of how the concepts work in practice along with suggestions for further reading. In 1979, a young associate professor at Harvard Business School published his first... View Details

Keywords: Profit; Five Forces Framework; Industry Growth; Industry Structures; Business and Government Relations; Competitive Strategy

10 Dec 2013
First Look

First Look: December 10

liquidation value is not directly intuitive, since intangibles are highly illiquid assets and have uncertain future cash flows. Can banks reliably secure corporate loans by intellectual property, and how can they alleviate the challenges... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

2014
Chapter

Remapping the Flow of Funds

By: Juliane Begenau, Monika Piazzesi and Martin Schneider

This article argues that quantitative analysis of credit market positions would benefit tremendously if the additional information about the structure of payment streams were more readily available. Most available data on credit market positions, such as the Flow of... View Details

Keywords: Accounting; Credit

Research Summary

"Modeling B2B Exchanges" (with Gabor Fath)

B2B exchanges are revolutionizing the way businesses will buy and sell a variety of intermediary products and services. It is estimated that most of the roughly $7 trillion worth of business transactions are likely to go through these new institutions within the next... View Details

2012
Working Paper

The Determinants of National Competitiveness

By: Mercedes Delgado, Christian Ketels, Michael E. Porter and Scott Stern

We define foundational competitiveness as the expected level of output per working-age individual that is supported by the overall quality of a country as a place to do business. The focus on output per potential worker, a broader measure of national productivity than... View Details

Keywords: Country; Competition; Microeconomics; Macroeconomics

2010
Working Paper

Peronist Beliefs and Interventionist Policies

By: Rafael Di Tella and Juan Dubra

We study the logic of Peronist interventionist polices and the beliefs that support them. Instead of a comprehensive approach, we focus on three elements. First, we study beliefs and values about the economic system present in Peron's speeches during the period... View Details

Keywords: History; Economic Systems; Values and Beliefs; Policy; Business and Government Relations; Argentina

2008
Book

On Competition

By: M. E. Porter

Competition is one of society's most powerful forces for making things better in many ﬁelds of human endeavor. The study of competition and the creation of value, in their full richness, have preoccupied me for several decades. Competition is pervasive, whether it... View Details

Keywords: Leadership; Practice; Competitive Strategy; Theory; Value Creation

February 2009 (Revised June 2019)
Case

Cleveland Clinic: Transformation and Growth 2015

By: Michael E. Porter and Elizabeth O. Teisberg

The Cleveland Clinic's health care services are internationally renowned for quality. In 2008, The Clinic began to restructure the organization into teams defined around patient needs, rather than traditional medical specialties. "Patients First!" takes shape as the... View Details

Keywords: Health; Health Care Operations; Health Care Quality; Health Care; Strategy And Leadership; Strategy Development; Health Care and Treatment; Leading Change; Goals and Objectives; Growth and Development Strategy; Measurement and Metrics; Service Delivery; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Outcome or Result; Health Industry; Cleveland

Educators

Routines shape many aspects of day-to-day consumption. While prior work has established the importance of habits in consumer behavior, little work has been done to understand the implications of routines--which we define as repeated behaviors with recurring, temporal... View Details

August 2017 (Revised December 2017)
Case

Accounting for Nuclear Power Provisions at RWE

By: Paul Healy and Jonas Heese

In early 2016, RWE, a utility that operates nuclear power plants in Germany, came under scrutiny from regulators and the media over the adequacy of its provisions for costs of decommissioning and dismantling (D&D) its nuclear power plants. Accounting standards required... View Details

Keywords: Liabilities; Provisions For Long-term Obligations; Discounting; Accounting; Energy Generation; Energy Industry; Germany

Educators

January 2008
Background Note

Equity Options

By: Joshua Coval and Erik Stafford

The goal of this simulation is to understand the reliance of option values on volatility. When an investor trades an option, they are essentially trading volatility. Therefore, much of the focus in this lesson is on forecasting volatility. Students are able to use two... View Details

Keywords: Volatility; Forecasting and Prediction; Stock Options; Investment Return; Price; Market Transactions; Mathematical Methods; Value

Educators

2023
Report

The 2023 India Cluster Panorama

By: Christian Ketels, Amit Kapoor, Bibek Debroy and Subhanshi Negi

The India Cluster Panorama 2023 provides unique new insights into the cluster structure of the Indian economy. It leverages powerful data from the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), which has comprehensive coverage of the Indian labour force and granular data... View Details

Keywords: Clusters; Industry Clusters; Economic Growth; India