Publications

2014
Article

Models of Caring, or Acting as if One Cared, About the Welfare of Others

By: Julio J. Rotemberg

This paper surveys the theoretical literature in which people are modeled as taking other people's payoffs into account either because this affects their utility directly or because they wish to impress others with their social-mindedness. Key experimental results that... View Details

Keywords: Motivation and Incentives; Behavior; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving

December 2014
Article

Rethink What You 'Know' about High-Achieving Women

By: Robin Ely, Pamela Stone and Colleen Ammerman

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the admission of women to Harvard Business School's MBA program, the authors, who have spent more than 20 years studying professional women, set out to learn what HBS graduates had to say about work and family and how their... View Details

Register to Read

2022
Working Paper

Values as Luxury Goods and Political Polarization

By: Benjamin Enke, Mattias Polborn and Alex A Wu

Motivated by novel survey evidence, this paper develops a theory of political behavior in which values are a luxury good: the relative weight voters place on values rather than material considerations increases in income. The model predicts (i) voters who are... View Details

Keywords: Political Polarization; Government and Politics; Moral Sensibility; Luxury; Values and Beliefs; Voting

Article

Do Private Equity Firms Have Better Management Practices?

By: Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen

Using an innovative survey measure of management practices on over 15,000 firms, we find private equity firms are better managed than government, family, and privately owned firms, and have similar management to publicly listed firms. This is true both in developed and... View Details

Keywords: Private Equity; Management Practices and Processes

August 26, 2014
Comment

Female Hurricanes Are Not Deadlier than Male Hurricanes

By: Daniel Malter

In a highly contentious study, Jung, Shavitt, Viswanathan and Hilbe (2014) claimed that hurricanes had higher death tolls when they had female rather than male names due to implicit gender bias. Their article includes a study of the death toll of hurricanes that made... View Details

Keywords: United States

November 2003
Article

The Maturity of Debt Issues and Predictable Variation in Bond Returns

By: Malcolm Baker, Robin Greenwood and Jeffrey Wurgler

The maturity of new debt issues predicts excess bond returns. When the share of long-term debt issues in total debt issues is high, future excess bond returns are low. This predictive power comes in two parts. First, inflation, the real short-term rate, and the term... View Details

Keywords: Borrowing and Debt; Bonds; Investment Return; Financial Markets; Forecasting and Prediction

29 Nov 2021
News

How to Create a Culture of Appreciation at Your Office

2018
Working Paper

Corporate Tax Cuts Increase Income Inequality

By: Suresh Nallareddy, Ethan Rouen and Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato

This paper studies the effects of corporate tax changes on income inequality. Using state corporate tax rate changes as a setting, we show that cutting state corporate tax rates leads to increases in income inequality. This result is robust to using regression and... View Details

Keywords: Business Ventures; Taxation; Income; Equality and Inequality; United States

SSRN

2023
Working Paper

Money, Time, and Grant Design

By: Kyle Myers and Wei Yang Tham

The design of research grants has been hypothesized to be a useful tool for influencing researchers and their science. We test this by conducting two thought experiments in a nationally representative survey of academic researchers. First, we offer participants a... View Details

Keywords: Research; Power and Influence; Money

August 1998
Case

Electronic Commerce at Air Products

By: F. Warren McFarlan and Melissa Dailey

In 1998,chief information officers (CIOs) in the highly competitive international gases and chemicals business faced the reality that electronic commerce capability was a strategic necessity. The results of annual surveys of technology officers in the chemical industry... View Details

Keywords: Management Teams; Information Technology; Globalized Markets and Industries; Infrastructure; Internet and the Web; Technology Adoption; Business Strategy; Chemical Industry; United States

18 Apr 2018
First Look

First Look at New Research and Ideas, April 18, 2018

Survey of Business Owners 2007 & 2012 By: Kerr, Sari Pekkala, and William R. Kerr Abstract—We study immigrant entrepreneurship and firm ownership in 2007 and 2012 using the Survey of Business Owners... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

Frank Nagle

Frank Nagle is an assistant professor in the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School. Professor Nagle studies how competitors can collaborate on the creation of core technologies, while still competing on the products and services built on top of them - especially... View Details

November–December 2022
Article

Can AI Really Help You Sell?: It Can, Depending on When and How You Implement It

By: Jim Dickie, Boris Groysberg, Benson P. Shapiro and Barry Trailer

Many salespeople today are struggling; only 57% of them make their annual quotas, surveys show. One problem is that buying processes have evolved faster than selling processes, and buyers today can access a wide range of online resources that let them evaluate products... View Details

Keywords: Sales; AI and Machine Learning; Customers

Register to Read

July 2020 (Revised January 2021)
Case

Pattern Brands

By: Sunil Gupta, Elie Ofek and Julia Kelley

In March 2020, direct-to-consumer (DTC) company Pattern Brands needed to decide how to allocate resources across its different brands. Pattern Co-Founders Nick Ling and Emmett Shine hoped to avoid the pitfalls faced by some DTC companies—such as inability to scale and... View Details