Economic Performance - Publications - Faculty & Research

March 2012
Article

How to Make Finance Work

By: Robin Greenwood and David S. Scharfstein

Once a sleepy old boys' club, the U.S. financial sector is now a dynamic and growing business that attracts the best and the brightest. It is tempting to declare the industry a roaring success. But its purpose is to serve the needs of U.S. households and firms, and by... View Details

Keywords: Business Ventures; Value; Competitive Advantage; Investment; Performance Evaluation; Household; Financial Crisis; Finance; Financial Services Industry; United States

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29 Jun 2007
First Look

First Look: June 29, 2007

major improvements in economic performance nearly everywhere they were adopted or imposed. Risk Management, Capital Budgeting and Capital Structure Policy for Insurers and Reinsurers Author:K. A. Froot... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

30 Nov 2021
In Practice

What's the Role of Business in Confronting Climate Change?

The 26th annual United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties, also known as COP26, ended with a hard-fought pact that called on businesses and governments to meet their climate change goals faster. The event followed an August report by the Intergovernmental... View Details

Keywords: by Lynn Schenk and Dina Gerdeman

21 Sep 2009
Research & Ideas

Excessive Executive Pay: What’s the Solution?

crescendo last March when insurance conglomerate AIG, kept on life support with up to $183 billion in taxpayers' cash, dished out bonuses totaling $165 million to 400 employees in the London office whose derivatives trading nearly destroyed the company. Lavish pay for... View Details

Keywords: by Roger Thompson

10 Feb 2020
In Practice

6 Ways That Emerging Technology Is Disrupting Business Strategy

Economic Research. 3. Algorithms are changing the pricing game “Firms are increasingly using pricing algorithms to set prices, especially in online markets. Pricing algorithms can enable better-targeted prices, but they also can... View Details

Keywords: by Danielle Kost

2008
Book

Greater Good: How Good Marketing Makes for Better Democracy

By: John A. Quelch and Katherine E. Jocz

Marketing has a greater purpose, and marketers, a higher calling, than simply selling more widgets, according to John Quelch and Katherine Jocz. In "Greater Good", the authors contend that marketing performs an essential societal function—and does so democratically.... View Details

Keywords: Economic Systems; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Government and Politics; Marketing; Practice; Welfare

Citation

07 Jun 2023
Blog Post

My One Case: MBA Class of 2023 Looks Back

how well I did in school. The Peterson case made me realize that career success from a managerial perspective is less about individual contribution and performance and more about team-based collaboration. It made me think about questions... View Details

Summer, 2018
Article

Innovation, Reallocation and Growth

By: Daron Acemoglu, Ufuk Akcigit, Harun Alp, Nicholas Bloom and William R. Kerr

We build a model of firm-level innovation, productivity growth, and reallocation featuring endogenous entry and exit. A new and central economic force is the selection between high- and low-type firms, which differ in terms of their innovative capacity. We estimate the... View Details

Keywords: Entry; Growth; Industrial Policy; Innovation; R＆D; Reallocation; Selection; Market Entry and Exit; Growth and Development; Innovation and Invention; Research and Development; Performance Productivity

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30 Mar 2021
Research & Ideas

Commuting Hurts Productivity and Your Best Talent Suffers Most

Economics article Commuting and Innovation: Are Closer Inventors More Productive? "Commuting hurts both innovative quantity and quality." “It’s amazing how robust the results are. Commuting hurts both innovative quantity and quality,”... View Details

Keywords: by Lane Lambert

11 Mar 2008
First Look

First Look: March 11, 2008

Working PapersTesting Strategy with Multiple Performance Measures Evidence from a Balanced Scorecard at Store24 Authors:Dennis Campbell, Srikant M. Datar, Susan L. Kulp, and V.G. Narayanan Abstract We analyze balanced scorecard data... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

18 Apr 2016
Research & Ideas

The Cost of Leaning In

negotiation situation, it doesn’t necessarily mean that all women will do well in that situation,” says Exley, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, who co-wrote the paper with Muriel Niederle, an economics professor at... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

07 Nov 2017
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New Research and Ideas: November 7, 2017

bridge economic, sociological, and psychological concerns. Nonetheless, a key indicator of this trend is the dominance of the view of organizational economists that hierarchy outperforms non-hierarchical alternatives (including democracy) on grounds of View Details

Keywords: Carmen Nobel

Web

People - Behavioral Finance & Financial Stability

the CFA Institute Investment Management Program for asset managers at HBS. Post Doctoral Jinlin Li Post Doctoral Jinlin Li completed his PhD in Economics at Peking University in 2021. His dissertation examined the behavior and View Details

24 Jan 2012
First Look

First Look: Jan. 24

http://www.people.hbs.edu/mtripsas/articles/Benner%20Tripsas%20SMJ%20forthcoming.pdf Evidence from the Firm: A New Approach to Understanding Corruption Authors:Shawn A. Cole and Anh Tran Publication:In International Handbook on the View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

06 Jun 2018
Research & Ideas

Cut Salaries or Cut People? The Best Way to Survive a Downturn

eugeniek Companies looking to shed costs in an economic downturn rarely cut compensation—typically, they slash jobs instead. New research confirms the wisdom of that decision. The study concludes that when a company cuts employee pay the... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne

24 Jun 2014
First Look

First Look: June 24

instead of participating in negotiated exchange offers. This paper critically examines this claim and argues that the incentives for holdout litigation are limited because of (1) significant constraints on creditor litigation, (2) substantial View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

18 Nov 2008
First Look

First Look: November 18, 2008

publicly traded firms in the United States under scrutiny. This case examines perceived excessive pay and severance packages at several firms implicated in the credit crisis of 2008, the executive compensation provisions in the Emergency View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

2018
Working Paper

Show or Tell? Improving Agent Decision Making in a Tanzanian Mobile Money Field Experiment

By: Jason Acimovic, Chris Parker, David F. Drake and Karthik Balasubramanian

When workers make operational decisions, the firm's global knowledge and the workers’ domain-specific knowledge complement each other. Oftentimes workers have the final decision-making power. Two key decisions a firm makes when designing systems to support these... View Details

Keywords: Employees; Decision Making; Training; Performance Improvement; Money; Mobile Technology; Developing Countries and Economies; Financial Services Industry

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07 Jul 2021
Book

Good News for Disgraced Companies: You Can Regain Trust

its value when it loses trust, at least in the short term. Meanwhile, a 10 percent increase in trust leads to 0.8 percent more economic growth. “People think trust is an airy-fairy concept that’s nice but not essential, and it’s not,”... View Details

Keywords: by Lane Lambert

May 2004
Article

Disclosure Practices of Foreign Companies Interacting with U.S. Markets

By: Tarun Khanna, Krishna G. Palepu and Suraj Srinivasan

We analyze the disclosure practices of companies as a function of their interaction with the U.S. markets for a group of 794 firms from 24 countries in Asia-Pacific and Europe. Our analysis uses the Transparency and Disclosure scores developed recently by Standard &... View Details