Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(293)
- Faculty Publications (80)
- May 2017
- Article
Distracted Shareholders and Corporate Actions
By: Elisabeth Kempf, Alberto Manconi and Oliver Spalt
Investor attention matters for corporate actions. Our new identification approach constructs firm-level shareholder "distraction" measures, by exploiting exogenous shocks to unrelated parts of institutional shareholders' portfolios. Firms with "distracted" shareholders... View Details
- March 2017
- Article
Institutional Ownership and Corporate Tax Avoidance: New Evidence
By: Mozaffar N. Khan, Suraj Srinivasan and Liang Tan
We provide new evidence on the agency theory of corporate tax avoidance (Slemrod, 2004; Crocker and Slemrod, 2005; Chen and Chu, 2005) by showing that increases in institutional ownership are associated with increases in tax avoidance. Using the Russell index... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
Learning by Doing: The Value of Experience and the Origins of Skill for Mutual Fund Managers
By: Elisabeth Kempf, Alberto Manconi and Oliver Spalt
Learning by doing matters for professional investors. We develop a new methodology to show that mutual fund managers outperform in industries where they have obtained experience on the job. The key to our identification strategy is that we look "inside" funds and... View Details
- November 2016 (Revised December 2016)
- Module Note
Strategy Execution Module 13: Identifying Strategic Risk
By: Robert Simons
This module reading begins by describing the three sources of strategic risk—operations risk, asset impairment risk, and competitive risk—and demonstrates how these risks can undermine an entire business. To assist in the identification of these risks, the risk... View Details
- 2016
- Article
Vicarious Contagion Decreases Differentiation—and Comes with Costs
By: Ovul Sezer and Michael I. Norton
Baumeister et al. propose that individual differentiation is a crucial determinant of group success. We apply their model to processes lying in between the individual and the group—vicarious processes. We review literature in four domains—attitudes, emotions, moral... View Details
- 2018
- Working Paper
Bank Risk-Taking and the Real Economy: Evidence from the Housing Boom and Its Aftermath
By: Antonio Falato, Giovanni Favara and David Scharfstein
The short-termism of lenders amplifies boom-bust credit cycles, leading in turn to real costs for the aggregate economy. During the U.S. housing credit boom, publicly-traded banks increased mortgage lending activity and relaxed standards much more than privately-held... View Details
- 2016
- Article
Penalized Fast Subset Scanning
By: Skyler Speakman, Sriram Somanchi, Edward McFowland III and Daniel B. Neill
We present the penalized fast subset scan (PFSS), a new and general framework for scalable and accurate pattern detection. PFSS enables exact and efficient identification of the most anomalous subsets of the data, as measured by a likelihood ratio scan statistic.... View Details
- January 2016
- Article
Zooming In: A Practical Manual for Identifying Geographic Clusters
By: Juan Alcacer and Minyuan Zhao
This paper takes a close look at the reasons, procedures, and results of cluster identification methods. Despite being a popular research topic in strategy, economics, and sociology, geographic clusters are often studied with little consideration given to the... View Details
Keywords: Mathematical Methods
- 2016
- Working Paper
The Search for Peer Firms: When Do Crowds Provide Wisdom?
By: Charles M.C. Lee, Paul Ma and Charles C.Y. Wang
In knowledge-based economies, many business enterprises defy traditional industry boundaries. In this study, we evaluate six "big data" approaches to peer firm identifications and show that some, but not all, "wisdom-of-crowd" techniques perform exceptionally well. We... View Details
- July–August 2013
- Article
Looking Up and Looking Out: Career Mobility Effects of Demographic Similarity among Professionals
By: Kathleen L. McGinn and Katherine L. Milkman
We investigate the role of workgroup sex and race composition on the career mobility of professionals in "up-or-out" organizations. We develop a nuanced perspective on the potential career mobility effects of workgroup demography by integrating the social... View Details
- May 2011
- Case
The Morrison Company
By: Steven C. Wheelwright and Paul Meyers
The Morrison Company develops and manufactures radio frequency identification tags (RFID) known as smart labels for the retail and pharmaceutical industries. RFID technology is a fast-growing and increasingly competitive industry. Sales have risen dramatically over the... View Details
Keywords: Quantitative Analysis; Technology; Operations Management; Product Lines; Manufacturing; Capacity Planning; Production Planning; Information Technology; Strategy; Production; Organizational Structure; Infrastructure; Product Development; Information Infrastructure; Manufacturing Industry; Retail Industry; Pharmaceutical Industry; Electronics Industry
- February 2011
- Article
The Underdog Effect: The Marketing of Disadvantage and Determination Through Brand Biography
By: Neeru Paharia, Anat Keinan, Jill Avery and Juliet B. Schor
We introduce the concept of an underdog brand biography (UBB) to describe an emerging trend in branding in which firms author an historical account of their humble origins, lack of resources, and determined struggle against the odds. We identify two essential... View Details
Keywords: Marketing; Brand Management; Brands; Brand Building; Brand Positioning; Competitive Positioning; Advertising; Marketing Communication; Biography; Brands and Branding; Product Marketing; Emerging Markets; Network Effects; Demand and Consumers; Marketing Communications; Cost vs Benefits; Perspective; Advertising Campaigns; Marketing Strategy; Apparel and Accessories Industry; Advertising Industry; Beauty and Cosmetics Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Fashion Industry; Food and Beverage Industry
- 2011
- Article
Group Size and Incentives to Contribute: A Natural Experiment at Chinese Wikipedia
By: Michael Zhang and Feng Zhu
In this paper, we examine the causal relationship between group size and incentives to contribute in the setting of Chinese Wikipedia, the Chinese language version of an online encyclopedia that relies entirely on voluntary contributions. The group at Chinese Wikipedia... View Details
- Article
Recent Advances in the Empirics of Organizational Economics
By: Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
We present a survey of recent contributions in empirical organizational economics, focusing on management practices and decentralization. Productivity dispersion between firms and countries has motivated the improved measurement of firm organization across industries... View Details
Keywords: Economics; Management Practices and Processes; Performance Productivity; Geographic Location; Motivation and Incentives; Factories, Labs, and Plants; Competition; Human Capital; Markets; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Multinational Firms and Management; India; Brazil; United States
- December 2009 (Revised January 2010)
- Case
Managing Talent at Bertelsmann AG (A)
By: Boris Groysberg, Nitin Nohria, Mark Maletz and Kerry Herman
Bertelsmann's EVP HR Immanuel Hermreck and his team were focused on four key HR issues. Three of these were somewhat discreet: improving Bertelsmann's employer brand; managing Bertelsmann talent across the firm's decentralized businesses; and ensuring early... View Details
- August 2009 (Revised August 2009)
- Case
Intel NBI: Radio-Frequency Identification
By: Willy C. Shih and Thomas Thurston
The Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) group was a start-up that was part of Intel's New Business Initiatives. It sought initially to develop and sell a high performance Rf fast read rate module targeted at fixed position readers that might be found in loading docks... View Details
- 2009
- Chapter
Collaboration Across Knowledge Boundaries within Diverse Teams: Reciprocal Expertise Affirmation as an Enabling Condition
By: Amy C. Edmondson, Kate Roloff and Lucy H. MacPhail
We review research on expertise diversity, psychological safety, team collaboration, and role identity to propose a model in which reciprocal affirmations of expertise identity among team members—a feature of the team environment that we conceptualize as a dimension of... View Details
- November 2008
- Case
The Hong Kong & China Gas Company Ltd.: Negotiating Joint Ventures in China
By: James K. Sebenius, Michael Shih-ta Chen and Medha Samant
To deliver 5-6 major new Chinese joint ventures annually, Hong Kong China Gas executives began extracting cross-border negotiating lessons from their 80 existing Chinese JVs. Chairman Alfred Chan and CEO Peter Wong knew that HKGC's growth strategy required significant... View Details
- 2008
- Working Paper
Financial Development, Bank Ownership, and Growth. Or, Does Quantity Imply Quality?
By: Shawn A. Cole
In 1980, India nationalized its large private banks. This induced different bank ownership patterns across different towns, allowing credible identification of the effects of bank ownership on financial development, lending rates, and the quality of intermediation, as... View Details