Financial Incentives - Publications - Faculty & Research

28 Feb 2011
Research & Ideas

The Importance of ‘Don’t’ in Inducing Ethical Employee Behavior

inside of you, and you want to keep it balanced." Eventually, Gino and Margolis plan to work within several companies to discover particular ways to incorporate a prevention focus into their bottom line, while still encouraging View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

01 Dec 2020
News

Invest in the New Abnormal

Edited by Julia Hanna and Jen McFarland Flint; illustrations by Rose Wong The novel coronavirus did more than disrupt jobs, supply chains, and financial markets, says HBS professor Rohit Deshpandé. The pandemic has also upended how... View Details

01 Apr 1999
News

Spirit at Work

practices to lead some 150 consultants and employees in the building of the aquarium against almost impossible financial odds. "I started the early design meetings with a nondenominational prayer," says Stuart, an Episcopalian who also... View Details

Keywords: Marguerite Rigoglioso

19 Apr 2018
Blog Post

Policy, Practice, Leadership & Impact: Making a Difference with the HBS/HKS Joint Degree

felt incredibly passionate about the work and strongly believed in its impact, I also began to observe the risks, limitations, and skewed incentives foreign aid creates within local governments. I began taking a longer-term view of the... View Details

25 Aug 2022
News

The Exchange: The Road Ahead for Crypto

want to sell you. Cryptocurrencies have not yet reached that state. Digital financial transactions are commonplace now, but cryptocurrency, per se, is not something very large numbers of individuals or businesses are willing to trade for... View Details

Keywords: Jen McFarland Flint; Securities, Commodities, and Other Financial Investments; Securities, Commodities, and Other Financial Investments

04 Apr 2011
Research & Ideas

Attention Medical Shoppers: What Health Care Can Learn from Walmart and Amazon

that the system isn't set up to incentivize health care workers to do that. "The reason it's never done is that nobody gets paid to do it .there's no incentive to do anything," Cutler said. Services Not Emphasized In terms of... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Health

03 Dec 2008
What Do You Think?

Can Housing and Credit be “Nudged” Back to Health?

"greed and corruption helped create the crisis, ... simple human frailty played a vital role." They suggest providing incentives to make financial products easier, not more difficult, to... View Details

Keywords: by Jim Heskett

Student-Profile

Anastassia Fedyk

am trying to better understand how psychological biases affect decision-making in organizations and financial markets. I have been long interested in optimal incentive design for employees subject to... View Details

01 Jun 2011
News

What’s after Fannie and Freddie?

Scharfstein: “Whenever you mix government guarantees with private, for-profit entities, those private entities put the government at risk.” Reforming the U.S. housing finance system remains perhaps the largest piece of unfinished business from the 2008–2009 View Details

Keywords: Roger Thompson; Credit Intermediation and Related Activities; Finance

13 Aug 2021
Blog Post

Exploring Racial Justice with the Scaling Minority Businesses Course

a general management skillset that transcended sectors – private, non-profit, and public. Our most urgent social issues require a multi-faceted approach that spans these sectors because those with the financial and other resources to... View Details

01 Sep 2016
News

The Big Business of Little Loans

the US Small Business Administration and now on the faculty at HBS. The situation worsened during the 2008 financial crisis, and lending to the sector has never really recovered. Armed with proprietary algorithms and can-do attitudes,... View Details

Keywords: Nancy Miller

18 Sep 2018
First Look

New Research and Ideas, September 18, 2018

under-provision of innovation. Firms have clear incentives to engage in strategic behavior because policymakers use market outcomes as a benchmark in designing regulation. This study examines a unique energy efficiency standard for... View Details

Keywords: Dina Gerdeman

29 Feb 2024
Blog Post

IFC India: JSW Steel and Cement and the Quest to Capture Carbon in Hard to Abate Sectors

across the country. How to juggle the challenge of developing a country of 1.4 billion people while being pressured to achieve a net zero target? As we explored India during our ten days for our Immersive Field Course, from its Financial... View Details

05 Mar 2013
First Look

First Look: March 5

pricing in quarters where they have a financial incentive to close a deal, resulting in mispricing that costs the vendor 6%-8% of revenue. Robustness checks demonstrate that price discrimination by the... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

August 2006
Article

Investor Sentiment and the Cross Section of Stock Returns

By: Malcolm Baker and Jeffrey Wurgler

We examine how investor sentiment affects the cross-section of stock returns. Theory predicts that a broad wave of sentiment will disproportionately affect stocks whose valuations are highly subjective and are difficult to arbitrage. We test this prediction by... View Details

Keywords: Behavioral Finance; Stocks; Investment Return; Forecasting and Prediction; Motivation and Incentives; Risk and Uncertainty; Volatility

Citation

Find at Harvard

Read Now

09 Mar 2010
First Look

First Look: March 9

legal event as a natural experiment to examine equity-debt conflicts in the vicinity of financial distress. A 1991 Delaware bankruptcy ruling changed the nature of corporate directors' fiduciary duties in that state. This change limited... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

01 Apr 2001
News

Big Deals: Project Finance Helps Mitigate Risk in Large-Scale Investments

high leverage and its effects on managerial incentives and firm performance,” says Esty. “The projects I currently study are financed with 65 to 90 percent debt, compared with 25 to 35 percent for the typical industrial firm.” Both the... View Details

18 Jul 2005
Research & Ideas

Time to Rethink the Corporate Tax System?

characterize profits to tax authorities and capital markets separately). There is also much anecdotal evidence on the profusion of tax shelters and compensation incentives for managing effective tax rates. Managers appear to have become... View Details

Keywords: by Ann Cullen

10 Mar 2009
First Look

First Look: March 10, 2009

Combining supermarket scanner data with firm-level financial data, we find evidence that differs from prior literature. Instead of reducing expenditures to boost earnings, soup manufacturers roughly double the frequency of marketing... View Details