Population - Publications - Faculty & Research

Research Summary

Profitable Souls: Foreign Investment and the Fate of Human Rights

This is a project about foreign investment, about what happens when big multinational firms invest in small, poor, and often nasty places. Typically, most observers assume that this is a largely negative relationship: that multinationals exploit the local population,... View Details

2015
Report

Clusters and Regional Economies: Implications for the Great Lakes - St. Lawrence Region

By: Christian H.M. Ketels

The Great Lakes – St. Lawrence Region, covering eight U.S. states and two Canadian provinces located around the lakes and waterways that have given this region its name, is what economic developers call a 'macro region'. It is an area of intensive economic interaction... View Details

Keywords: Clusters; Regional Policy; Great Lakes; Economic Development; Industry Clusters; Economy; Canada; United States

Citation

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09 Jun 2021
Research & Ideas

How Tennis, Golf, and White Anxiety Block Racial Integration

purchased data related to thousands of tennis and golf clubs across the country and matched the data with demographic information based on ZIP codes. They found that clubs located near more racially diversely populated areas tended to be... View Details

Keywords: by Jay Fitzgerald

09 Jan 2014
Working Paper Summaries

Economic Transition and Private-Sector Labor Demand: Evidence from Urban China

Keywords: by Lakshmi Iyer, Xin Meng, Nancy Qian & Xiaoxue Zhao

20 Oct 2010
Op-Ed

Export Competitiveness: Reversing the Logic

Foreign investment introduced capital and provided jobs for people previously occupied in agriculture. At an aggregate level, capital intensity rose, productivity grew, and prosperity improved, and poverty levels dropped dramatically. With close to half of the working... View Details

Keywords: by Christian Ketels

13 Jun 2011
HBS Case

Mobile Banking for the Unbanked

low-cost handsets and the opportunity to buy airtime in advance. "A subscription model doesn't appeal to the poor at all," Rangan says. "They don't want to pay a fee for something they might not use." Moreover, more than half of South Africa's View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Banking; Communications; Telecommunications

08 Sep 2008
HBS Case

The Value of Environmental Activists

There are many methods, most financial, to measure the success of companies in meeting goals. But the question becomes a lot harder at Harvard Business School when MBAs are challenged to measure the efforts of environmental organizations like Greenpeace and the World... View Details

Keywords: by Sarah Jane Gilbert; Energy; Utilities

11 Oct 2006
What Do You Think?

How Do We Respond to the “Dependency Ratio” Dilemma?

suggests a more complex approach that would involve pooling employee populations among consortiums of companies, presumably some growing rapidly (with low dependency ratios now but higher ones later) and some growing more slowly.... View Details

Keywords: by Jim Heskett

06 Dec 2017
What Do You Think?

Is It Time To Break Up Amazon, Apple, Facebook, or Google?

it has acquired Whole Foods, the market value of US big name retailers selling foods immediately drops 10 to 20 percent. The exchange of information and news, fake or fact, among large segments of the world’s population is controlled by... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett; Technology; Web Services

30 Jun 2021
In Practice

The Harvard Business School Faculty Summer Reader 2021

club on Twitter populated by nerdy economists of science on #EconTwitter, and The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin, an amazing author with an incredible imagination and sweet prose. Since Ada Palmer has a new book coming out in the Terra... View Details

Keywords: by Kathryn Haviland

21 Feb 2019
Research & Ideas

Voter ID Laws Don't Work (But They Don't Hurt Anything, Either)

1.3-billion-observations panel. We find that fears that strict ID requirements would disenfranchise ethnic minorities and other disadvantaged populations have not materialized. We do not find any significant effect of the laws on... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

2018
Working Paper

Zig-Zagging Your Way to Transformative Impact

By: V. Kasturi Rangan and Tricia Gregg

Achieving transformative impact has been much discussed by social entrepreneurs, funders, and consultants. These discussions have focused on issues of increasing impact and scale, but often with no clear distinction between the two terms. In order to provide clarity,... View Details

Keywords: Social Entrepreneurship; Performance Efficiency; Growth and Development; Outcome or Result; Strategy

Citation

01 Dec 2014
Research & Ideas

The Big Influence of Small Countries in the United Nations Secretariat

a back seat when it comes to solving international conflicts” Finally, Werker and Novosad compared the percentage of officials from each country to the percentage of that country's world population in order to determine the amount to... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

27 Oct 2002
Research & Ideas

Want a Happy Customer? Coordinate Sales and Marketing

Down The final two items are very important, but very subtle: the informal social system and the people who populate the organization. Typically the field force is made up of more independent, free-spirited people who idealize a... View Details

Keywords: by Benson Shapiro

19 Sep 2016
Research & Ideas

Why Isn't Business Research More Relevant to Business Practitioners?

journals. “Academic research can be helpful, but it tends to be overly complex, hard to digest, and not backed by real quantitative insights from customer populations or engagements,” says Neale-May, executive director of the Chief... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Education

18 Oct 2017
Research & Ideas

How Economic Clusters Drive Globalization

transition from the rubber to the palm oil industry, the local population was able to take advantage of a situation that initially wasn’t so positive,” says Giacomin. With that said, she acknowledges, it can be argued that the palm oil... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna; Agriculture & Agribusiness

Teaching Interest

Managing Human Capital

By: Ethan S. Bernstein

The Managing Human Capital course has been specifically designed to teach practical skills for the future general manager (not just the human resource practitioner) who seeks to manage both other people and her or his own career with optimal... View Details

Research Summary

Overview

By: Iavor I. Bojinov

Over the last decade, technology companies like Amazon, Google, and Netflix have pioneered data-driven research and development processes centered on massive experimentation. However, as companies increase the breadth and scale of their experiments to millions of... View Details

07 Oct 2015
What Do You Think?

What is the Best Immigration Model for the US?

countries like the US and Germany is that immigration has a tendency to attract those with the strongest motivation to form a new life, learn new skills, and obey the law (especially if illegal entry puts them at special risk of deportation). Typically, it lowers the... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

08 Mar 2017
Op-Ed

Op-Ed: Can the Proposed American Health Care Act Improve on 'Obamacare'?

their patient populations need, and workers and families can have the freedom and flexibility to make their own health care choices." This statement speaks to a strong attachment to personal freedom and choice in American... View Details

Keywords: by John Quelch, Dr. Gordon Moore, and Emily Boudreau

Publications