Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(561)
- Faculty Publications (101)
- June 2020
- Article
How Scheduling Can Bias Quality Assessment: Evidence from Food Safety Inspections
By: Maria Ibanez and Michael W. Toffel
Accuracy and consistency are critical for inspections to be an effective, fair, and useful tool for assessing risks, quality, and suppliers—and for making decisions based on those assessments. We examine how inspector schedules could introduce bias that erodes... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Improving Regulatory Effectiveness Through Better Targeting: Evidence from OSHA
By: Matthew S. Johnson, David I. Levine and Michael W. Toffel
We study how a regulator can best target inspections. Our case study is a US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) program that randomly allocated some inspections. On average, each inspection averted 2.4 serious injuries (9%) over the next five years.... View Details
- 2019
- Chapter
A Claim to Own Productive Property
By: Nien-hê Hsieh
BOOK ABSTRACT: The status of economic liberties remains a serious lacuna in the theory and practice of human rights. Should a minimally just society protect the freedoms to sell, save, profit, and invest? Is being prohibited to run a business a human rights violation?... View Details
- June 2018
- Article
Firm Turnover and the Return of Racial Establishment Segregation
By: John-Paul Ferguson and Rembrand Koning
Racial segregation between American workplaces is greater today than it was a generation ago. This increase has happened alongside the declines in within-establishment occupational segregation on which most prior research has focused. We examine more than 40 years of... View Details
- May 2018
- Article
The Downside of Downtime: The Prevalence and Work Pacing Consequences of Idle Time at Work
By: Andrew Brodsky and Teresa M. Amabile
Although both media commentary and academic research have focused much attention on the dilemma of employees being too busy, this paper presents evidence of the opposite phenomenon, in which employees do not have enough work to fill their time and are left with hours... View Details
- April 2018
- Case
Miami's Tech Future (Abridged): Entrepreneurial Ecosystems and Leadership Challenges
By the middle of the 1990s, Miami’s reputation was changing. An influx of Spanish-speaking immigrants and major investments in the airport and seaport had changed the image of a sleepy southern city to the de facto business center of Latin America, a center for... View Details
- Article
Rethinking the Profession Formerly Known as Advertising: How Data Science Is Disrupting the Work of Agencies
By: John A. Deighton
The article discusses the notion of advertising as a profession in relation to the impact of digital analytics and data-driven marketing. Topics include the history of internet marketing, the investments of the content-driven internet firms Facebook Inc. and Google... View Details
- 2017
- Report
Room to Grow: Identifying New Frontiers for Apprenticeships
By: Joseph B. Fuller and Matthew Sigelman
In the United States, apprentices are employed in just 27 occupations, mostly in skilled, physical trades. An analysis of job postings data shows that extending apprenticeships to more occupations provides an opportunity to expand employment and close the middle skills... View Details
- October 2017 (Revised April 2018)
- Case
Improving Worker Safety in the Era of Machine Learning (A)
By: Michael W. Toffel, Dan Levy, Jose Ramon Morales Arilla and Matthew S. Johnson
Managers make predictions all the time: How fast will my markets grow? How much inventory do I need? How intensively should I monitor my suppliers? Which potential customers will be most responsive to a particular marketing campaign? Which job candidates should I... View Details
- July 2017
- Article
The Four Stages to Becoming an Excellent Front-Line Sales Manager
Sales occupations account for more than 10% of the total U.S. labor force, and that official estimate is almost certainly low: In an increasingly service economy, many people who do business development for a living are not listed as “sales” for reporting purposes.... View Details
Keywords: Salesforce Management
- 2018
- Working Paper
How Scheduling Can Bias Quality Assessment: Evidence from Food Safety Inspections
By: Maria Ibanez and Michael W. Toffel
Many production processes are subject to inspection to ensure they meet quality, safety, and environmental standards imposed by companies and regulators. Inspection accuracy is critical to inspections being a useful input to assessing risks, allocating quality... View Details
- October 2016
- Case
Addicaid: Scaling a Digital Platform for Addiction Wellness and Recovery
By: Robert S. Huckman and Sarah Mehta
In 2013, Sam Frons founded Addicaid—a mobile application (app) that allowed people in addiction recovery to track their progress, check in with counselors, and connect with others in recovery programs. The app was grounded in cognitive behavioral therapy and used the... View Details
- 2016
- Working Paper
Pros vs Joes: Agent Pricing Behavior in the Sharing Economy
By: Jun Li, Antonio Moreno and Dennis J. Zhang
One of the major differences between markets that follow a “sharing economy” paradigm and traditional two-sided markets is that the supply side in the sharing economy often includes individual nonprofessional decision makers, in addition to firms and professional... View Details
- 2016
- Book
Building the Future: Big Teaming for Audacious Innovation
By: Amy C. Edmondson and Susan Salter Reynolds
Machiavelli famously wrote, "There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things." That's what this book is about—innovation far more audacious... View Details
- Article
The Radical Flank Effect and Cross-occupational Collaboration for Technology Development during a Power Shift
By: Emily Truelove and Katherine C. Kellogg
This 12-month ethnographic study of an early entrant into the U.S. car-sharing industry demonstrates that when an organization shifts its focus from developing radical new technology to incrementally improving this technology, the shift may spark an internal power... View Details
- March 2016 (Revised January 2023)
- Teaching Note
Carla Ann Harris at Morgan Stanley
This case follows Carla Ann Harris, an African-American executive on Wall Street, from her childhood to the eve of her 20th year at Morgan Stanley. In addition to her professional identity as an investment banker, Harris is also an accomplished gospel singer, an... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Social Networks, Ethnicity, and Entrepreneurship
By: William R. Kerr and Martin Mandorff
We study the relationship between ethnicity, occupational choice, and entrepreneurship. Immigrant groups in the United States cluster in specific business sectors. For example, Koreans are 34 times more concentrated in self-employment for dry cleaning than other... View Details
- July 2015
- Article
Skilled Immigration and the Employment Structures of U.S. Firms
By: Sari Pekkala Kerr, William R. Kerr and William F. Lincoln
We study the impact of skilled immigrants on the employment structures of U.S. firms using matched employer-employee data. Unlike most previous work, we use the firm as the lens of analysis to account for a greater level of heterogeneity and the fact that many skilled... View Details
Keywords: Firms; Scientists; Engineers; Inventors; H-1B; Age; Employment; Immigration; United States
- 2014
- Contribution
Entrepreneurship in Emerging Markets: Contextual Intelligence for the Study of Two Thirds of the World's Population
By: Tarun Khanna
In this paper, I review the concept of "institutional voids" that provides a way to understand the structure of emerging markets. These voids impede would-be buyers from getting together with would-be sellers, and hence compromise the functioning of markets.... View Details