Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,902)
- Faculty Publications (245)
- February 2022
- Module Note
Behavioral Economics and Choice Architecture
By: John Beshears
This module note for instructors describes a module on the design of choice architecture solutions to organizational problems. View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
Electoral Turnovers
By: Benjamin Marx, Vincent Pons and Vincent Rollet
In most national elections, voters face a key choice between continuity and change. Electoral turnovers occur when the incumbent candidate or party fails to win reelection. To understand how turnovers affect national outcomes, we study the universe of presidential and... View Details
- 2022
- Book
The Role of Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Economic Growth
By: Michael J. Andrews, Aaron Chatterji, Josh Lerner and Scott Stern
We live in an era in which innovation and entrepreneurship seem ubiquitous, particularly in regions like Silicon Valley, Boston, and the Research Triangle Park. But many metrics of economic growth, such as productivity growth and business dynamism, have been at best... View Details
- 2022
- Article
Alleviating Time Poverty Among the Working Poor: A Pre-Registered Longitudinal Field Experiment
By: A.V. Whillans and Colin West
Poverty entails more than a scarcity of material resources—it also involves a shortage of time. To examine the causal benefits of reducing time poverty, we conducted a longitudinal feld experiment over six consecutive weeks in an urban slum in Kenya with a sample of... View Details
Keywords: Time; Subjective Well Being; Administrative Costs; Friction; Poverty; Well-being; Money; Perception; Kenya
- January 2022
- Article
Replicating Private Equity with Value Investing, Homemade Leverage, and Hold-to-Maturity Accounting
By: Erik Stafford
The contributions of asset selection and incremental leverage to buyout investment performance are more important than typically assumed or estimated to be. Buyout funds select small firms with distinct value characteristics. Public equities with these characteristics... View Details
- 2021
- Chapter
Business Continuity Insurance in the Next Disaster
By: Samuel Gregory Hanson, Adi Sunderam and Eric Zwick
This article draws lessons from the business support policies pursued in the COVID-19
pandemic to guide policy design for the next disaster. We contrast the performance
of the Paycheck Protection Program to the Main Street Lending Program to illustrate
how design... View Details
- December 2021
- Article
Trade Policy Uncertainty and Stock Returns
By: Marcelo Bianconi, Federico Esposito and Marco Sammon
A recent literature has documented large real effects of trade policy uncertainty (TPU) on trade, employment, and investment, but there is little evidence that investors are compensated for bearing such risk. To quantify the risk premium associated with TPU, we exploit... View Details
- November 2021 (Revised November 2023)
- Case
Hitting Home: Amazon and Mary's Place
By: Paul M. Healy, Debora L. Spar and Amy Klopfenstein
In 2020, Amazon, the $386 billion online retail behemoth, built an eight-story shelter for women and families experiencing homelessness on its expanding headquarters in Seattle, Washington. The shelter, operated in partnership with a non-profit organization known as... View Details
- 2021
- Article
Don't Get It or Don't Spread It: Comparing Self-interested versus Prosocial Motivations for COVID-19 Prevention Behaviors
By: Jillian J. Jordan, Erez Yoeli and David Rand
COVID-19 prevention behaviors may be seen as self-interested or prosocial. Using American samples from MTurk and Prolific (total n = 6,850), we investigated which framing is more effective—and motivation is stronger—for fostering prevention behavior intentions. We... View Details
- October 2021
- Article
Changing Gambling Behavior through Experiential Learning
By: Shawn A. Cole, Martin Abel and Bilal Zia
This paper tests experiential learning as a debiasing tool to reduce gambling in South Africa, through a randomized field experiment. The study implements a simple, interactive game that simulates the odds of winning the national lottery through dice rolling.... View Details
- 2021
- Other Unpublished Work
Computer-Implemented Methods and Systems for Measuring, Estimating, and Managing Economic Outcomes and Technical Debt in Software Systems and Projects: US Patent 11,126,427 B2
By: Daniel J. Sturtevant, Carliss Baldwin, Alan MacCormack, Sunny Ahn and Sean Gilliland
An interrelated set of tools and methods is disclosed for: (1) measuring the relationship between software source code attributes (such as code quality, design quality, test quality, and complexity metrics) and software economics outcome metrics (such as... View Details
- July 2021
- Article
Discovering Auctions: Contributions of Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson
By: Alex Teytelboym, Shengwu Li, Scott Duke Kominers, Mohammad Akbarpour and Piotr Dworczak
The 2020 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was awarded to Paul R. Milgrom and Robert B. Wilson for “improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats.” In this survey article, we review the contributions of the... View Details
- June 2021
- Article
The Role of Beliefs in Driving Gender Discrimination
By: Katherine B. Coffman, Christine L. Exley and Muriel Niederle
While there is ample evidence of discrimination against women in the workplace, it can be difficult to understand what factors contribute to discriminatory behavior. We use an experiment to both document discrimination and unpack its sources. First, we show that, on... View Details
- Article
Variety of Innovation in Global Value Chains
By: Giulio Buciuni and Gary P. Pisano
This article analyzes how the geography and organization of pre- and production stages in Global Value Chains (GVC) contribute to lead firms' innovation development. A novel approach in GVC studies is introduced based on transaction cost economics (TCE) and the... View Details
- January–February 2021
- Article
Compensation Packages That Actually Drive Performance
By: Boris Groysberg, Sarah Abbott, Michael R. Marino and Metin Aksoy
By aligning executives’ financial incentives with company strategy, a firm can inspire its management to deliver superior results. But it can be hard to get pay packages right. In this article four experts break down the key elements of compensation and explain how to... View Details
- June 2021
- Article
From Predictions to Prescriptions: A Data-driven Response to COVID-19
By: Dimitris Bertsimas, Léonard Boussioux, Ryan Cory-Wright, Arthur Delarue, Vassilis Digalakis Jr, Alexander Jacquillat, Driss Lahlou Kitane, Galit Lukin, Michael Lingzhi Li, Luca Mingardi, Omid Nohadani, Agni Orfanoudaki, Theodore Papalexopoulos, Ivan Paskov, Jean Pauphilet, Omar Skali Lami, Bartolomeo Stellato, Hamza Tazi Bouardi, Kimberly Villalobos Carballo, Holly Wiberg and Cynthia Zeng
The COVID-19 pandemic has created unprecedented challenges worldwide. Strained healthcare providers make difficult decisions on patient triage, treatment and care management on a daily basis. Policy makers have imposed social distancing measures to slow the disease, at... View Details
- January 2021
- Article
Turbulence, Firm Decentralization and Growth in Bad Times
By: Philippe Aghion, Nicholas Bloom, Brian Lucking, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
What is the optimal form of firm organization during “bad times”? We present a model of delegation within the firm to show that the effect is ambiguous. The greater turbulence following macro shocks may benefit decentralized firms because the value of local information... View Details
- December 2020
- Article
The Parable of the Auctioneer: Complexity in Paul R. Milgrom's Discovering Prices
By: Scott Duke Kominers and Alexander Teytelboym
Designing marketplaces in complex settings requires both novel economic theory and real-world engineering, often drawing upon ideas from fields such as computer science and operations research. In Discovering Prices, Milgrom (2017) explains the theory and design... View Details
- November 2020
- Article
Tackling Youth Unemployment: Evidence from a Labor Market Experiment in Uganda
By: Livia Alfonsi, Oriana Bandiera, Vittorio Bassi, Robin Burgess, Imran Rasul, Munshi Sulaiman and Anna Vitali
We design a labor market experiment to compare demand- and supply-side policies to tackle youth unemployment, a key issue in low-income countries. The experiment tracks 1700 workers and 1500 firms over four years to compare the effect of offering workers either... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 6 The Value Structure of Technologies, Part 1: Mapping Functional Relationships
Organizations are formed in a free economy because an individual or group perceives value in carrying out a technical recipe that is beyond the capacity of a single person. Technology specifies what must be done, what resources must be assembled, what actions taken in... View Details