Publications

Winter 2020
Article

The Economics of Maps

By: Abhishek Nagaraj and Scott Stern

For centuries, maps have codified the extent of human geographic knowledge and shaped discovery and economic decision-making. Economists across many fields, including urban economics, public finance, political economy, and economic geography, have long employed maps,... View Details

Keywords: Maps; Economic Geography; Geography; Economics; History

August 2021
Article

Crowdsourcing Memories: Mixed Methods Research by Cultural Insiders-Epistemological Outsiders

By: Tarun Khanna, Karim R. Lakhani, Shubhangi Bhadada, Nabil Khan, Saba Kohli Davé, Rasim Alam and Meena Hewett

This paper examines the role that the two lead authors’ personal connections played in the research methodology and data collection for the Partition Stories Project—a mixed-methods approach to revisiting the much-studied historical trauma of the Partition of British... View Details

Keywords: Mixed Methods; Insider-outsiders; Myth Of Informed Objectivity; Hybrid Research; Oral Narratives; Research; Analysis; India

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01 Aug 2008
Research & Ideas

Does Market Capitalism Have a Future?

largely or completely unrelated to capitalism, might challenge it from the outside. And if capitalism is threatened, what can be done to protect it, and by whom? For the colloquium, we compiled a briefing book based primarily on data from... View Details

Keywords: by Garry Emmons

08 Aug 2006
First Look

First Look: August 8, 2006

the predictive value of a theory can be measured in terms of how many pairs of experimental subjects you would have to observe playing a previously unexamined game before the mean of the experimental observations would provide a better... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

October 2008
Article

Organizational Responses to Environmental Demands: Opening the Black Box

By: Magali Delmas and Michael W. Toffel

This paper combines new and old institutionalism to explain differences in organizational strategies. We propose that differences in the influence of corporate departments lead their facilities to prioritize different external pressures and thus adopt different... View Details

Keywords: Environmental Sustainability; Management Practices and Processes; Decisions; Adoption

31 Mar 2014
Research & Ideas

Encouraging Niche Content in an Ad-Driven World

eyeballs affect the quality and subject matter of online content? Bloggers Analyzed For their study, the pair drew on a data set from a leading Chinese media website that offers a range of services,... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna; Information; Publishing; Journalism & News

03 Apr 2006
Research & Ideas

The Competitive Advantage of Global Finance

into how firms structure their worldwide operations given limited disclosure requirements. To crack open the multinational firm and study these decisions, new data sources and nontraditional methods were required. In parallel with my... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Financial Services

2014
Working Paper

What Courses Should Law Students Take?: Harvard's Largest Employers Weigh In

By: John C. Coates, Jesse M. Fried and Kathryn E. Spier

We report the results of an online survey, conducted on behalf of Harvard Law School, of 124 practicing attorneys at major law firms. The survey had two main objectives: (1) to assist students in selecting courses by providing them with data about the relative... View Details

Keywords: Curriculum and Courses; Law; Higher Education

SSRN

2023
Other Article

The Harvard USPTO Patent Dataset: A Large-Scale, Well-Structured, and Multi-Purpose Corpus of Patent Applications

By: Mirac Suzgun, Luke Melas-Kyriazi, Suproteem K. Sarkar, Scott Duke Kominers and Stuart Shieber

Innovation is a major driver of economic and social development, and information about many kinds of innovation is embedded in semi-structured data from patents and patent applications. Though the impact and novelty of innovations expressed in patent data are difficult... View Details

Keywords: USPTO; Natural Language Processing; Classification; Summarization; Patent Novelty; Patent Trolls; Patent Enforceability; Patents; Innovation and Invention; Intellectual Property; AI and Machine Learning; Analytics and Data Science

March 2013
Article

The Client Is King: Do Mutual Fund Relationships Bias Analyst Recommendations?

By: Michael Firth, Chen Lin, Ping Liu and Yuhai Xuan

This paper investigates whether the business relations between mutual funds and brokerage firms influence sell-side analyst recommendations. Using a unique data set that discloses brokerage firms' commission income derived from each mutual fund client as well as the... View Details

Keywords: Prejudice and Bias; Decision Choices and Conditions; Investment Funds

December 2014
Article

The Discipline of Business Experimentation

By: Stefan Thomke and Jim Manzi

The data you already have can't tell you how customers will react to innovations. To discover if a truly novel concept will succeed, you must subject it to a rigorous experiment. In most companies, tests do not adhere to scientific and statistical principles. As a... View Details

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21 May 2012
Research & Ideas

OSHA Inspections: Protecting Employees or Killing Jobs?

Little did the researchers know at the time how difficult it would be to extract the data for analysis. That task fell to Toffel, who was still completing his doctoral studies at Haas when the research began in 2005. "We received all this... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

05 Dec 2005
What Do You Think?

Is Growth Good?

optimistic about the future, possibly as a result of recent improvements in their well-being. He cites this data to suggest that we should be particularly optimistic about the possible development of increasingly moral societies,... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

Article

Measuring the Scientific Effectiveness of Contact Tracing: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

By: Thiemo Fetzer and Thomas Graeber

Contact tracing has for decades been a cornerstone of the public health approach to epidemics, including Ebola, severe acute respiratory syndrome, and now COVID-19. It has not yet been possible, however, to causally assess the method’s effectiveness using a randomized... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19; Contact Tracing; Public Health; Infectious Diseases; Health Pandemics

2023
Working Paper

The Political Economy of a 'Miracle Cure': The Case of Nebulized Ibuprofen and Its Diffusion in Argentina

By: Sebastian Calónico, Rafael Di Tella and Juan Cruz Lopez Del Valle

We document the diffusion of nebulized ibuprofen in Argentina as a treatment for COVID-19. As the pandemic spread, this clinically unsupported drug reached thousands of patients, even some seriously ill, despite warnings by the regulator and medical societies. Detailed... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19; Health Care and Treatment; Health Pandemics; Adoption; Behavior; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Learning

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Forthcoming
Article

On the Economic Origins of Concerns Over Women’s Chastity

By: Anke Becker

This paper studies the origins and function of customs and norms that intend to keep women from being promiscuous. Using large-scale survey data from more than 100 countries, I test the anthropological theory that a particular form of preindustrial... View Details

Keywords: Infibulation; Female Sexuality; Paternity Uncertainty; Concern About Women's Chastity; Pastoralism; Economic Anthropology; History; Gender; Social Issues; Culture

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2021
Article

Designing, Not Checking, for Policy Robustness: An Example with Optimal Taxation

By: Benjamin B. Lockwood, Afras Sial and Matthew C. Weinzierl

Economists typically check the robustness of their results by comparing them across plausible ranges of parameter values and model structures. A preferable approach to robustness—for the purposes of policymaking and evaluation—is to design policy that takes these... View Details

Keywords: Optimal Taxation; Income Tax; Social Welfare; Elasticity; Income; Taxation; Policy

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February 2021
Case

Digital Manufacturing at Amgen

By: Shane Greenstein, Kyle R. Myers and Sarah Mehta

This case discusses efforts made by biotechnology (biotech) company Amgen to introduce digital technologies into its manufacturing processes. Doing so is complicated by the fact that the process for manufacturing biologics—or therapeutics made from living cells—is... View Details