Publications

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September 2015
Technical Note

The On-Demand Economy

By: Cynthia A. Montgomery, James Weber and Elizabeth Anne Watkins

This note describes the emerging on-demand economy, also referred to as the sharing economy. The note highlights several companies including Uber and Airbnb that exemplify this new mode of competition, a model that threatens to disrupt traditional firms. Uber provides... View Details

Keywords: Regulation; Reform; Disruption; Disruptive Innovation; Strategy; Technological Innovation; Labor; Employment; Working Conditions; Human Capital; Rights; Organizational Design; Social and Collaborative Networks; Service Industry

Article

Audit Personnel Salaries and Audit Quality

By: Jeffrey L. Hoopes, Kenneth J. Merkley, Joseph Pacelli and Joseph H. Schroeder

This study examines the relation between audit personnel salaries and office-level audit quality. We measure audit personnel salaries at the associate, senior, and manager ranks for Big 4 audit offices from 2004 to 2013, using unique individual-auditor-level data... View Details

Keywords: Audit Personnel Salary; Audit Quality; Salary Determinants; Audit Fees; Accounting Audits; Quality; Wages

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Forthcoming
Article

What's My Employee Worth? The Effects of Salary Benchmarking

By: Zoë B. Cullen, Shengwu Li and Ricardo Perez-Truglia

While U.S. legislation prohibits employers from sharing information about their employees’ compensation with each other, companies are still allowed to acquire and use more aggregated data provided by third parties. Most medium and large firms report using this type... View Details

Keywords: Information Sharing; Wages; Policy; Compensation and Benefits

January 2006 (Revised December 2006)
Case

Wal-Mart's Business Environment

By: Felix Oberholzer-Gee

In 2004, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. proposed to build a new supercenter in Inglewood, a low-income community near Los Angeles. The proposal was a part of Wal-Mart's strategy to bring its supercenter format to California. Introduced in the late 1980s, supercenters added a... View Details

Keywords: Goals and Objectives; Expansion; Market Entry and Exit; Corporate Strategy; Labor Unions; Conflict and Resolution; Retail Industry; Los Angeles

December 1992 (Revised March 1997)
Case

Peoria Engine Plant (A)

By: Robert S. Kaplan and Amy P. Hutton

Describes the cost control system used at an automobile engine plant for labor and overhead costs. The finance staff prepares daily, weekly, and monthly variance reports against budgets. Department supervisors, finance staff, and the plant manager discuss the use and... View Details

Keywords: Cost Management; Cost Accounting; Budgets and Budgeting; Earnings Management; Reports; Financial Reporting; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Performance Improvement; Performance Productivity; Factories, Labs, and Plants; Auto Industry

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September 2003 (Revised October 2005)
Case

Performance Pay for MGOA Physicians (A)

Examines the transition of an orthopedic surgical group at a premier teaching and research hospital from a system in which the surgeons are compensated with flat salaries to a system where they are compensated based on profitability. Allows for an examination of... View Details

Keywords: Value Creation; Motivation and Incentives; Nonprofit Organizations; Health Care and Treatment; Compensation and Benefits; Health Industry

02 Apr 2018
News

Practice Makes Perfect: Why Chinese Manufacturers Have A Production Advantage

25 Oct 2012
HBS Seminar

Andy McAfee, MIT

January 2022 (Revised March 2022)
Case

Chinese Restriction, Violence, and Exclusion in the United States

By: Tom Nicholas, Boyang Han and Tomas Rosales

Many early Chinese immigrants to the United States during the 1850s worked as traditional gold miners, but as gold mining declined in significance, an increasing number were employed as laborers for large scale construction projects such as railroads, roadways, and in... View Details

Keywords: Immigration Acts; Immigration; Labor; Jobs and Positions; Race; Social Issues; Laws and Statutes

26 May 2010
Working Paper Summaries

Unraveling Results from Comparable Demand and Supply: An Experimental Investigation

Keywords: by Muriel Niederle, Alvin E. Roth & M. Utku Unver

December 2024
Case

Yum China: People First

By: David E. Bell, Shu Lin and Nancy Dai

Joey Wat, CEO of Yum China Holdings, Inc., which operated KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell in mainland China, oversaw KFC’s milestone as the first Western quick-service chain in China to surpass 10,000 stores, with Pizza Hut exceeding 3,000 locations. This expansion was... View Details

Keywords: Growth and Development Strategy; Franchise Ownership; Performance Efficiency; Expansion; Employees; Food and Beverage Industry; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; China

February 2013
Article

Institutions and Venture Capital

By: Josh Lerner and Joacim Tag

We survey the literature on venture capital and institutions and present a case study comparing the development of the venture capital market in the United States and Sweden. Our literature survey underscores that the legal environment, financial market development,... View Details

Keywords: Venture Capital; Organizations; Taxation; Entrepreneurship; Financial Markets; United States; Sweden

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August 1993 (Revised August 2002)
Exercise

Work Methods Design Exercise

Teams of students receive identical product design specifications, a sample unit of the product, and a series of assignment questions that entail time and motion studies, which they must both understand and perform before class discussion. In class, teams explain how... View Details

Keywords: Resource Allocation; Product Development

21 Aug 2023
Book

You’re More Than Your Job: 3 Tips for a Healthier Work-Life Balance

grit is going to overcome structural inequality and the lack of growth in real wages. Each of these pieces has made stability harder to achieve individually and collectively.” One of the more telling indicators of the shift in how employees think about their work shows... View Details

Keywords: by Kara Baskin

25 Feb 2019
Research & Ideas

How Gender Stereotypes Kill a Woman’s Self-Confidence

Women make up more than half of the labor force in the United States and earn almost 60 percent of advanced degrees, yet they bring home less pay and fill fewer seats in the C-suite than men, particularly in male-dominated professions... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

April 1999
Case

French Pension System, The: On The Verge Of Retirement? (Abridged)

By: David A. Moss

Surveys the French pension system, its particular institutional characteristics, and some of the critical challenges and opportunities facing French reformers. Like almost every other industrialized country, France has a large pay-as-you-go public pension system that... View Details

Keywords: Retirement; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Policy; Economic Growth; Economics; Capital Markets; Wages; Public Administration Industry; France

2009
Working Paper

Breakthrough Inventions and Migrating Clusters of Innovation

By: William R. Kerr

We investigate the speed at which clusters of invention for a technology migrate spatially following breakthrough inventions. We identify breakthrough inventions as the top one percent of US inventions for a technology during 1975-1984 in terms of subsequent citations.... View Details

Keywords: Geographic Location; Immigration; Disruptive Innovation; Technological Innovation; Patents; Industry Clusters; United States

SSRN

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2010
Chapter

Deferred Acceptance Algorithms: History, Theory, Practice

By: Alvin E. Roth

The deferred acceptance algorithm proposed by Gale and Shapley (1962) has had a profound influence on market design, both directly, by being adapted into practical matching mechanisms, and indirectly, by raising new theoretical questions. Deferred acceptance algorithms... View Details

Keywords: Labor; Market Design; Marketplace Matching; Failure; Mathematical Methods