Publications

2011
Working Paper

Spatial Determinants of Entrepreneurship in India

By: Ejaz Ghani, William R. Kerr and Stephen O'Connell

We analyze the spatial determinants of entrepreneurship in India in the manufacturing and services sectors. Among general district traits, quality of physical infrastructure and workforce education are the strongest predictors of entry, with labor laws and household... View Details

Keywords: Education; Entrepreneurship; Industry Structures; Infrastructure; Manufacturing Industry; Service Industry; India

21 Jun 2022
News

Government Doesn’t Take Enough Risks. Let’s Change That.

September 1997 (Revised October 1997)
Case

French Pension System, The: On the Verge of Retirement?

By: David A. Moss, Anne Dias and Bertrand O. Stephann

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; Compensation and Benefits; Capital Markets; Economic Growth; Labor; Problems and Challenges; Opportunities; Welfare; Investment; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Public Administration Industry; France

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

Purchase

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

2020
Working Paper

Automation and the Plight of Young Workers: Evidence from the Automation of Telephone Operation in the Early 20th Century

By: Daniel P. Gross and James J. Feigenbaum

Telephone operation was one of the most common jobs for young American women in the early 1900s. Between 1920 and 1940, AT&T adopted dial service in over half of U.S. telephone exchanges, automating away a legion of operators. We show that upon a city's adoption of... View Details

Keywords: Employment; Labor; Gender; Technology Adoption; History; Telecommunications Industry; United States

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

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

Research Summary

Searching for a Corporate Savior: The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs ( Princeton University Press, October 2002)

By: Rakesh Khurana

In this book, I argue that the external CEO labor market was born in a burst of rhetoric about wresting control of corporations away from a group of self-interested insiders, as senior managers in the era of managerial capitalism had come to be portrayed. The rationale... View Details

TeachingInterests

Managing the Future of Work (MBA Education—Elective Curriculum)

By: Christopher T. Stanton

The nature and scope of work is changing rapidly, creating massive business challenges in the shadow of broader political and social shifts. HBS launched a major initiative in 2017 on Managing the Future of Work to define these workplace issues and... View Details

June 1994 (Revised December 1997)
Case

Safeway, Inc.'s Leveraged Buyout (A)

After years of deteriorating financial performance and eroding market position, Safeway, Inc., the largest public grocery store chain in the United States, found itself the target of a hostile takeover offer. Management decided to take the company private in a $4.3... View Details

Keywords: Leveraged Buyouts; Restructuring; Retail Industry; United States

Purchase

2014
Article

Paying It Forward: Generalized Reciprocity and the Limits of Generosity

By: Kurt Gray, Adrian F. Ward and Michael I. Norton

When people are the victims of greed or recipients of generosity, their first impulse is often to pay back that behavior in kind. What happens when people cannot reciprocate, but instead have the chance to be cruel or kind to someone entirely different—to pay it... View Details

Keywords: Moral Sensibility; Behavior; Situation or Environment; Attitudes

Find at Harvard

29 Aug 2017
News

How to Successfully Work Across Countries, Languages, and Cultures

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

Web

Business Economics - Doctoral

Econometrics Economic History Economic Theory Economics of Organization Entrepreneurship Finance Industrial Organization International Economics Labor Economics Macroeconomics Political Economy Public Economics Organizational Economics... View Details

2025
Working Paper

Private Equity and Workers: Modeling and Measuring Monopsony, Implicit Contracts, and Efficient Reallocation

By: Kyle Herkenhoff, Josh Lerner, Gordon M. Phillips, Francisca Rebelo and Benjamin Sampson

We measure the real effects of private equity buyouts on worker outcomes by building a new database that links transactions to matched employer-employee data in the United States. To guide our empirical analysis, we derive testable implications from three theories in... View Details

Keywords: Monopsony; Market Power; Productivity; Private Equity; Employment; Wages; Employees

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

November 2006 (Revised May 2014)
Case

Li Ka-Shing and the Growth of Cheung Kong

By: Nitin Nohria, Anthony J. Mayo and Mark Benson

Events in the history of Cheung Kong's growth reveal how Li Ka-Shing applied his skills as a "first-class noticer" to complex political and socioeconomic environments. While Li's determination to succeed is legendary, so are his skills in reading and responding to the... View Details

Keywords: Mergers and Acquisitions; Competency and Skills; Decision Choices and Conditions; Investment Portfolio; Business History; Leadership; Personal Development and Career; Hong Kong