Publications

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January 2000 (Revised October 2002)
Case

Cambridge Hospital Community Health Network - The Primary Care Unit

By: V.G. Narayanan, Lisa Brem and Ryan Moore

The Cambridge Hospital Community Health Network needed to gain a better understanding of its unit-of-service costs, which had been rising at a rate of 10% per year. The network's step-down costing system gave only aggregate costing information, and there was some... View Details

Keywords: Activity Based Costing and Management; Health Care and Treatment; Cost Accounting; Cost; Network Effects; Health Industry; Service Industry; Massachusetts

12 Mar 2006
Research & Ideas

Global Poverty Needs a Global Answer

sustainable—engines of change were in fact corporations. In the province next to Veraguas, for example, the Nestlé company's dairy operation had a very similar effect to that of the bishop's movement. The big difference was that it made a... View Details

Keywords: by Cynthia Churchwell

24 Oct 2012
Research & Ideas

Want People to Save More? Send a Text

Furthermore, a text message coupled with peer pressure by a real-life savings buddy had no larger effect than a text message that simply informed participants of their own achievement and the success rate of... View Details

Keywords: by Kim Girard

2023
Working Paper

Targeting, Personalization, and Engagement in an Agricultural Advisory Service

By: Susan Athey, Shawn Cole, Shanjukta Nath and Jessica Zhu

ICT is increasingly used to deliver customized information in developing countries. We examine whether individually targeting the timing of automated voice calls meaningfully increases engagement in an agricultural advisory service. We define, estimate, and... View Details

Keywords: Developing Countries and Economies; Knowledge Dissemination; Customization and Personalization; Performance Effectiveness

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24 Feb 2009
First Look

First Look: February 24, 2009

improvement collaboration. The results support our hypothesis that learn-how is positively related to organizational performance, as measured by NICUs' risk-adjusted mortality rates for 1,061 infant patients. Moreover, our data reveal... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

September 2020
Article

Medicaid Work Requirements in Arkansas: Two-Year Impacts on Coverage, Employment, and Affordability of Care

By: Benjamin D. Sommers, Lucy Chen, Robert J. Blendon, E. John Orav and Arnold M. Epstein

In June 2018 Arkansas became the first U.S. state to implement work requirements in Medicaid, requiring adults ages 30–49 to work twenty hours a week, participate in “community engagement” activities, or qualify for an exemption to maintain coverage. By April 2019,... View Details

Keywords: Medicaid; Health Care Policy; Health; Health Care and Treatment; Policy; Insurance; Health Industry; Arkansas

January 2001
Case

Valuing Project Achieve

By: Mihir A. Desai and Kathleen Luchs

Project Achieve is a start-up providing information management solutions for schools. Its founders see a need for software both to manage the volumes of information necessary to administer a school and to connect parents, teachers, and students in a more effective way.... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Valuation; Venture Capital; Cost of Capital; Cash Flow; Forecasting and Prediction

26 Aug 2014
First Look

First Look: August 26

Real Rates By: Hanson, Samuel G., and Jeremy C. Stein Abstract—Changes in monetary policy have surprisingly strong effects on forward real rates in the distant future. A 100... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

Research Summary

Competing on a Common Platform

Why have over 100 firms joined the Eclipse Foundation to collectively produce an open source platform and tools for software application development? What are they trying to accomplish? This research analyzes IBMs divestment of the Eclipse Java Integrated Development... View Details

25 Feb 2019
Research & Ideas

How Gender Stereotypes Kill a Woman’s Self-Confidence

be: Let’s find talented women and tell them, ‘Hey, you’re good at math. You got a really good score on this math test,'" she says. “But our results suggest that this feedback is less effective in closing the gender gap than we might hope.... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

June 2025
Case

TfL Pension Fund and the 2022 Gilt Market Crisis

By: Emil N. Siriwardane, Vincent Dessain, Emer Moloney and Carlota Moniz

On September 27, 2022, Padmesh Shukla, CIO of the Transport for London (TfL) Pension Fund, was keeping a careful eye on the turmoil in the U.K. sovereign bond (or gilt) market. When the new government announced the largest tax cuts the U.K. had seen in half a century,... View Details

13 May 2020
Blog Post

Crisis Leadership with Nikhil Patel: The Critical Importance of Trust

urgent challenges. In March, community trust would prove critical. While taking a deep dive into the potential for tax policy to incentivize housing development, “COVID-19 really hit,” Patel says. Virtually overnight, Patel’s housing... View Details

Keywords: Nonprofit / Government; Social Enterprise

30 Aug 2012
Working Paper Summaries

Incentivizing Calculated Risk-Taking: Evidence from an Experiment with Commercial Bank Loan Officers

Keywords: by Shawn Cole, Martin Kanz & Leora Klapper

Rational Habit Formation

Regular handwashing with soap is believed to have substantial impacts on child health in the developing world. Most handwashing campaigns have failed, however, to establish and maintain a regular practice of handwashing. Motivated by scholarship that suggests... View Details

September 2019 (Revised May 2021)
Case

pymetrics: Early Days

By: John R. Wells and Benjamin Weinstock

In 2013, CEO Frida Polli was contemplating the next steps for her start-up business, pymetrics. After receiving her PhD in neuropsychology and MBA from HBS, she was determined to put her scientific and academic knowledge to work to build a business solving real world... View Details

Article

Open to Negotiation: Phenomenological Assumptions and Knowledge Dissemination

By: Corinne Bendersky and Kathleen L. McGinn

Phenomenological assumptions-assumptions about the fundamental qualities of the phenomenon being studied and how it relates to the environment in which it occurs-affect the dissemination of knowledge from subfields to the broader field of study. Micro-process research... View Details

Keywords: Framework; Knowledge Dissemination; Research; Organizations; Negotiation; Information Publishing

18 Nov 2009
Working Paper Summaries

India Transformed? Insights from the Firm Level 1988-2005

Keywords: by Laura Alfaro & Anusha Chari

2012
Chapter

The Confederacy of Heterogeneous Software Organizations and Heterogeneous Developers: Field Experimental Evidence on Sorting and Worker Effort

By: Kevin J. Boudreau and Karim R. Lakhani

Software development occurs in a patchwork or "confederacy" of different types of institutions (universities, small start-ups, multinational enterprises, government agencies, etc.) utilizing varied work approaches. Here we speculate on one possible explanation for this... View Details

Keywords: Innovation and Invention; Applications and Software; Product Development; Organizations; Employees; Behavior; Competition; Cooperation; Creativity; Information Technology Industry

November 2009
Journal Article

A Theory of Growth and Volatility at the Aggregate and Firm Level

By: Diego A. Comin and Sunil Mulani

This paper presents an endogenous growth model that explains the evolution of the first and second moments of productivity growth at the aggregate and firm level during the post-war period. Growth is driven by the development of both (i) idiosyncratic R&D innovations... View Details

Keywords: Volatility; Microeconomics; Innovation and Invention; Growth and Development Strategy; Resource Allocation; Performance Productivity; Mathematical Methods; Research and Development