Publications

April 2021
Case

JPMorgan Chase's Path Forward

By: Joseph L. Bower, Nien-hê Hsieh and Michael Norris

In 2020, JPMorgan Chase announced a $30 billion Commitment to Advance Racial Equity. The Commitment included investments in housing, small businesses, and financial literacy across the U.S., and diversity, equity, and inclusion within the bank. It was part of a broader... View Details

Keywords: Racial Wealth Gap; Diversity; Race; Financial Institutions; Banks and Banking; Leading Change; Banking Industry; New York (city, NY); Chicago

10 May 2021
Research & Ideas

Who Has Potential? For Many White Men, It’s Often Other White Men

the partners worried the high turnover was damaging the firm’s competitive edge, according to research by Robin Ely, the Diane Doerge Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, who studies race View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

13 Dec 2021
Research & Ideas

The Unlikely Upside of Mergers: More Diverse Management Teams

marginalized racial and ethnic groups were 54 percent less likely to be promoted than whites, and women were 36 percent less likely to be promoted than men, despite diversity... View Details

Keywords: by Lane Lambert

28 Jan 2020
Book

Advanced Leadership Requires More Than Outside-The-Box Thinking

innovative new products and services, new commercial ventures, or new approaches that create social impact. These are also the kinds of problems rising leaders care about: climate change, race View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

10 Mar 2020
Research & Ideas

The Little Understood Problem Confronting Diverse Workplaces

struggle was connected to an uncomfortable awareness of race and class differences. “It emerged that race and class mattered, but tutors felt... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna

25 May 2021
Research & Ideas

White Airbnb Hosts Earn More. Can AI Shrink the Racial Gap?

lodging demand. "If other companies invest in building similar race-blind algorithms, that may even the playing field for users." The research results could also have broader implications for promoting racial equity at a wide range of businesses, from financial... View Details

Keywords: by Lane Lambert; Technology; Accommodations

09 Oct 2001
Research & Ideas

Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Organizations

soon becomes self-reinforcing. A spiraling arms race can be created with everyone seeking more and more of a good thing. There seems to never be enough of the good thing—until a crisis breaks up the cycle.... View Details

Keywords: by Paul Lawrence & Nitin Nohria

September–October 2021
Article

Frontiers: Can an AI Algorithm Mitigate Racial Economic Inequality? An Analysis in the Context of Airbnb

By: Shunyuan Zhang, Nitin Mehta, Param Singh and Kannan Srinivasan

We study the effect of Airbnb’s smart-pricing algorithm on the racial disparity in the daily revenue earned by Airbnb hosts. Our empirical strategy exploits Airbnb’s introduction of the algorithm and its voluntary adoption by hosts as a quasi-natural experiment. Among... View Details

Keywords: Smart Pricing; Pricing Algorithm; Machine Bias; Discrimination; Racial Disparity; Social Inequality; Airbnb Revenue; Revenue; Race; Equality and Inequality; Prejudice and Bias; Price; Mathematical Methods; Accommodations Industry

SSRN

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31 May 2023
HBS Case

Why Business Leaders Need to Hear Larry Miller's Story

for business leaders to rethink their hiring practices and start giving the formerly incarcerated more opportunities to prove themselves, say Hise Gibson and coauthors of a Harvard Business School case study... View Details

Keywords: by Jamal Meneide; Entertainment & Recreation; Consumer Products

19 Aug 2009
Working Paper Summaries

The Optimal Taxation of Height: A Case Study of Utilitarian Income Redistribution

Keywords: by N. Gregory Mankiw & Matthew Weinzierl

October 2002 (Revised March 2013)
Case

Intermountain Health Care

By: Richard M.J. Bohmer, Amy C. Edmondson and Laura Feldman

Intermountain Health Care (IHC), an integrated delivery system based in Utah, has adopted a new strategy for managing health care delivery. The approach focuses management attention not only on the facilities where care takes place but also on physician decision making... View Details

Keywords: Ethnicity; Innovation Strategy; Cost Management; Information Technology; Organizational Structure; Technology Adoption; Performance Improvement; Problems and Challenges; Adoption; Change Management; Cost vs Benefits; Health Care and Treatment; Health Industry; Utah

September 2021 (Revised November 2021)
Case

Kwame Owusu-Kesse at the Harlem Children's Zone

By: Jon M. Jachimowicz

Do you—as leader, an individual within an organization, or running your own business—know when to say yes and when to say no? How do you make decisions about your own career and life? How do you counsel others who ask you for career and life insights?... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19 Pandemic; Leadership; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Decisions; Nonprofit Organizations; Personal Development and Career; Growth and Development Strategy; Race; Social Issues; New York (city, NY)

2014
Working Paper

Digital Discrimination: The Case of Airbnb.com

By: Benjamin Edelman and Michael Luca

Online marketplaces often contain information not only about products, but also about the people selling the products. In an effort to facilitate trust, many platforms encourage sellers to provide personal profiles and even to post pictures of themselves. However,... View Details

Keywords: Prejudice and Bias; Internet and the Web; Race; Trust; Renting or Rental; Accommodations Industry; Real Estate Industry

SSRN

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September 2020 (Revised September 2021)
Case

Student Success at Georgia State University (A)

By: Michael W. Toffel, Robin Mendelson and Julia Kelley

Georgia State University had developed a reputation for driving student success by nearly doubling its graduation rate for students of all racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. It did so while growing its student body and the proportion of Black/African... View Details

02 Jul 2013
First Look

First Look: July 2

Publications 2006 pub Matching Firms, Managers, and Incentives By: Bandiera, Oriana, Luigi Guiso, Andrea Prat, and Raffaella Sadun Abstract—We exploit a unique combination of administrative sources View Details

Keywords: Anna Secino

February 2009
Article

Just Because I'm Nice, Don't Assume I'm Dumb

By: Amy Cuddy

We often judge colleagues on the basis of their perceived warmth and competence, finding clues to these qualities in stereotypes rooted in race, gender, or nationality. Many of our decisions about fellow workers are thus premised on faulty data—harming judged and... View Details

Keywords: Prejudice and Bias; Perception; Nationality; Race; Judgments; Competency and Skills; Gender

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11 Jul 2016
HBS Case

Neurodiversity: The Benefits of Recruiting Employees with Cognitive Disabilities

There’s a new frontier in diversity programs focused not on race or gender but on cognitive ability. The growing interest in neurodiversity—hiring people with cognitive disabilities like Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)—is motivated by... View Details

Keywords: by Roberta Holland; Technology

2021
Working Paper

Racial Inequality in Organizations: A Systems Psychodynamic Perspective

By: Sanaz Mobasseri, William Kahn and Robin Ely

This paper uses systems psychodynamic concepts to develop a theory about the persistence of racial inequality in U.S. companies, treating White men as the dominant group and Black people as an illustrative subordinate group. We theorize that this persistence is rooted... View Details

Keywords: Systems Psychodynamics; Organizational Inequality; Masculinity; Equality and Inequality; Race; Gender; Identity; Power and Influence