Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,695)
- Faculty Publications (292)
- August 2023
- Article
Status and Mortality: Is There a Whitehall Effect in the United States?
By: Tom Nicholas
The influential Whitehall studies found that top-ranking civil servants in Britain experienced lower mortality than civil servants below them in the organizational hierarchy due to differential exposure to workplace stress. I test for a Whitehall effect in the United... View Details
- July 2023
- Article
Design and Analysis of Switchback Experiments
By: Iavor I Bojinov, David Simchi-Levi and Jinglong Zhao
In switchback experiments, a firm sequentially exposes an experimental unit to a random treatment, measures its response, and repeats the procedure for several periods to determine which treatment leads to the best outcome. Although practitioners have widely adopted... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
The Complexity of Economic Decisions
By: Xavier Gabaix and Thomas Graeber
We propose a theory of the complexity of economic decisions. Leveraging a macroeconomic framework of production functions, we conceptualize the mind as a cognitive economy, where a task’s complexity is determined by its composition of cognitive operations. Complexity... View Details
- June 2023
- Case
Investing in the Climate Transition at Neuberger Berman
By: George Serafeim and Benjamin Maletta
By mid-2023, Neuberger Berman (NB), an active asset manager, had grown its assets under management to about half a trillion dollars and took pride in its client centricity and innovative spirit. Responding to client demand for investment products that integrated... View Details
Keywords: Carbon Emissions; Sustainability; Decarbonization; Performance; Risk Assessment; Opportunities; Environmental Sustainability; Carbon Footprint; Business Analysis; Investing; Regulation; Asset Management; Investment Strategy; Climate Change; Transition; Analysis; Product Positioning; Strategy; Investment Portfolio; Financial Services Industry; Energy Industry
- 2023
- Working Paper
Design-Based Confidence Sequences: A General Approach to Risk Mitigation in Online Experimentation
By: Dae Woong Ham, Michael Lindon, Martin Tingley and Iavor Bojinov
Randomized experiments have become the standard method for companies to evaluate the performance of new products or services. In addition to augmenting managers’ decision-making, experimentation mitigates risk by limiting the proportion of customers exposed to... View Details
- January 2023
- Article
The Dark Side of Machiavellian Rhetoric: Signaling in Reward-Based Crowdfunding Performance
By: Goran Calic, Rene Arseneault and Maryam Ghasemaghaei
In this study, we explore the impact of Machiavellian rhetoric on fundraising within the increasingly important context of online crowdfunding. The “all-or-nothing” funding model used by the world’s largest crowdfunding platform, Kickstarter, may be an attractive... View Details
- June 2023
- Article
The Effect of Firms' Information Exposure on Safeguarding Employee Health: Evidence from COVID-19
By: Lisa Yao Liu and Shirley Lu
We show that information exposure through international business networks enables firms to take proactive measures that benefit employees and potentially the local community. Specifically, in the early days of COVID-19, firms that have business networks with China and... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Culture as a Signal: Evidence from a Natural Field Experiment
By: Wei Cai, Dennis Campbell and Jiehang Yu
The importance of culture as an informal management control system is increasingly acknowledged in academia. While prior research mainly focuses on the value of culture on internal stakeholders (e.g., employees), we examine whether culture serves as a credible signal... View Details
- May 2023
- Article
Incentive Effects of Subjective Allocations of Rewards and Penalties
By: Wei Cai, Susanna Gallani and Jee-Eun Shin
We examine the incentive effects of subjectivity in allocating tournament-based rewards and punishments. We use data from a company where reward and punishment decisions are based on a combination of objective metrics and subjective performance assessments. Rankings... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
The Limits of Algorithmic Measures of Race in Studies of Outcome Disparities
By: David S. Scharfstein and Sergey Chernenko
We show that the use of algorithms to predict race has significant limitations in measuring and understanding the sources of racial disparities in finance, economics, and other contexts. First, we derive theoretically the direction and magnitude of measurement bias in... View Details
- March 2023
- Background Note
A Primer on OKRs
By: Suraj Srinivasan and Li-Kuan (Jason) Ni
The OKR framework is a popular goal-setting and strategy execution tool that uses goal setting through “Objectives” and measuring performance using “Key Results” on a periodic basis to measure and drive performance. The OKR framework has been adopted and practiced at... View Details
Keywords: Business Organization; Talent and Talent Management; Framework; Corporate Governance; Goals and Objectives; Growth and Development; Growth and Development Strategy; Growth Management; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Management Practices and Processes; Management Skills; Management Systems; Measurement and Metrics; Outcome or Result; Performance Effectiveness; Performance Evaluation; Performance Expectations; Performance Productivity; Performance Efficiency
- 2023
- Article
Experimental Evaluation of Individualized Treatment Rules
By: Kosuke Imai and Michael Lingzhi Li
The increasing availability of individual-level data has led to numerous applications of individualized (or personalized) treatment rules (ITRs). Policy makers often wish to empirically evaluate ITRs and compare their relative performance before implementing them in a... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
The Contribution of High-Skilled Immigrants to Innovation in the United States
By: Shai Bernstein, Rebecca Diamond, Abhisit Jiranaphawiboon, Timothy McQuade and Beatriz Pousada
We characterize the contribution of immigrants to US innovation, both through their direct productivity as well as through their indirect spillover effects on their native collaborators. To do so, we link patent records to a database containing the first five digits of... View Details
- September 2022
- Technical Note
Addressing Social Determinants of Health in the American Landscape
By: Susanna Gallani and Jacob Riegler
Social determinants of health (SDOH) have gained significant attention in recent years. A growing body of research shows that a person’s health is influenced by a large number of non-genetic factors, most of which operate outside the realm of health care and are... View Details
- September 2022
- Article
Loneliness Versus Distress: A Comparison of Emotion Regulation Profiles
By: Alyssa J. Tan, Vincent Mancini, James J. Gross, Amit Goldenberg, Johanna C. Badcock, Michelle H. Lim, Rodrigo Becerra, Ben Jackson and David A. Preece
Loneliness, a negative emotion stemming from the perception of unmet social needs, is a major public health concern. Current interventions often target social domains but produce small effects and are not as effective as established emotion regulation (ER)-based... View Details
Keywords: Emotions
- August 29, 2022
- Other Article
Income Inequality Is Rising. Are We Even Measuring It Correctly?
By: Jon M. Jachimowicz, K. Blesch and Oliver P. Hauser
Income inequality is on the rise in many countries around the world, according to the United Nations. What’s more, disparities in global income were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, with some countries facing greater economic losses than others.
Policymakers... View Details
- Article
Early Withdrawal of Pandemic Unemployment Insurance: Effects on Earnings, Employment and Consumption
By: Kyle Coombs, Arindrajit Dube, Calvin Jahnke, Raymond Kluender, Suresh Naidu and Michael Stepner
In June 2021, 22 states ended all supplemental pandemic unemployment insurance (UI) benefits, eliminating benefits entirely for over 2 million workers and reducing benefits by $300 per week for over 1 million workers. Using anonymous bank transaction data and a... View Details
- Article
We Need Better Carbon Accounting. Here's How to Get There.
By: Robert S. Kaplan and Karthik Ramanna
Any effective system of greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting needs to measure each company’s supply-chain carbon impacts accurately. Such information would provide visibility and incentives for the company to make more climate-friendly product-specification and purchasing... View Details
- April 2022
- Article
Does Context Outweigh Individual Characteristics in Driving Voting Behavior? Evidence from Relocations within the U.S.
By: Enrico Cantoni and Vincent Pons
We measure the overall influence of contextual versus individual factors (e.g., voting rules and media as opposed to race and education) on voter behavior, and explore underlying mechanisms. Using a U.S.-wide voter-level panel, 2008–18, we examine voters who relocate... View Details
- 2022
- Article
Social Interactivity in Live Video Experiences Reduces Loneliness
By: Benjamin T. Kaveladze, Robert R. Morris, Rosa Victoria Dimitrova-Gammeltoft, Amit Goldenberg, James J. Gross, Judd Antin, Melissa Sandgren and Melissa C. Thomas-Hunt
Background: Loneliness, especially when chronic, can substantially reduce one's quality of life. However, positive social experiences might help to break cycles of loneliness by promoting more prosocial cognitions and behaviors. Internet-mediated live video... View Details