Publications

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Working Paper

The Long-Run Effects of the Scramble for Africa

By: Stelios Michalopoulos and Elias Papaioannou

We examine the long-run consequences of a neglected aspect of colonization, the artificial drawing of borders during the Scramble for Africa and uncover the following empirical regularities. First, apart from the land mass and water area, no other pre-colonial trait... View Details

Keywords: Africa; Conflict; Development; Ethnicity; War; Development Economics; Geography; Africa

Article

Evolution of Land Distribution in West Bengal 1967–2004: Role of Land Reform and Demographic Changes

By: Pranab Bardhan, Michael Luca, Dilip Mookherjee and Francisco Pino

This paper studies how land reform and population growth affect land inequality and landlessness, focusing particularly on indirect effects owing to their influence on household divisions and land market transactions. Theoretical predictions of a model of household... View Details

Keywords: Inequality; Land Reform; Household Division; Land Markets; Equality and Inequality; Residency; Property; Household; West Bengal

2014
Other Unpublished Work

Evolution of Land Distribution in West Bengal 1967-2004: Role of Land Reform and Demographic Changes

By: Pranab Bardhan, Michael Luca, Dilip Mookherjee and Francisco Pino

This paper examines the indirect effect of land reform and demographic changes on land inequality operating through induced household divisions and land market transactions. We develop an intra-household model of joint production where divisions, out-migration or land... View Details

Keywords: Inequality; Land Reform; Household Division; Land Markets; Equality and Inequality; Property; Household; Change; West Bengal

2009
Working Paper

Input Constraints and the Efficiency of Entry: Lessons from Cardiac Surgery

By: David M. Cutler, Robert S. Huckman and Jonathan T. Kolstad

Prior studies suggest that, with elastically supplied inputs, free entry may lead to an inefficiently high number of firms in equilibrium. Under input scarcity, however, the welfare loss from free entry is reduced. Further, free entry may increase use of high-quality... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Market Entry and Exit; Duopoly and Oligopoly; Government Legislation; Mathematical Methods; Health Industry; Pennsylvania

Article

Local Industrial Conditions and Entrepreneurship: How Much of the Spatial Distribution Can We Explain?

By: Edward L. Glaeser and William R. Kerr

Why are some places more entrepreneurial than others? We use Census Bureau data to study local determinants of manufacturing startups across cities and industries. Demographics have limited explanatory power. Overall levels of local customers and suppliers are only... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Entrepreneurship; Geographic Location; Employment; Market Entry and Exit; Supply Chain; Manufacturing Industry

06 Jul 2020
News

Minor League Baseball as we know it may be gone

March–April 2015
Article

Why We Think We Can't Dance: Theory of Mind and Children's Desire to Perform

By: Lan Nguyen Chaplin and Michael I. Norton

Theory of Mind (ToM) allows children to achieve success in the social world by understanding others' minds. A study with 3–12 year olds, however, demonstrates that gains in ToM are linked to decreases in children's desire to engage in performative behaviors associated... View Details

Keywords: Theory Of Mind; Self-Esteem; Behavior; Attitudes; Performance; Cognition and Thinking

January 2013
Article

Payout Taxes and the Allocation of Investment

When corporate payout is taxed, internal equity (retained earnings) is cheaper than external equity (share issues). If there are no perfect substitutes for equity finance, payout taxes may therefore have an effect on the investment of firms. High taxes will favor... View Details

Keywords: Taxation; Investment; Equity; Growth and Development Strategy; Resource Allocation

2001
Working Paper

The Malleability of Environmentalism

By: Kimberly A. Wade-Benzoni, Min Li, Leigh L. Thompson and M. Bazerman

In this paper, we predict and find that self-perceptions of environmentalism are changed by subtle manipulations of context and, in turn, affect environmental behavior. In Study 1, we found that people exhibit greater positive assessments of their environmental... View Details

Keywords: Perspective; Behavior; Identity; Environmental Sustainability

17 Jun 2015
News

High Yield On Main Street: Investors Earn 12% Lending To Small Business, When Banks Won't

Why You Aren’t Getting More from Your Marketing AI - HBR

Fewer than 40% of companies that invest in AI see gains from it, usually because of one or more of these errors: (1) They don’t ask the right question, and end up directing AI to solve the wrong problem. (2) They don’t recognize the... View Details

Towards an Understanding of the Role of Standard Setters in Standard Setting

Journal of Accounting and Economics Vol. 55, No. 1 (February 2013), pp. 66–90.

We investigate the effect of standard setters in standard setting. We examine how certain professional and political characteristics of FASB members and SEC commissioners... View Details

Payout Taxes and the Allocation of Investment

When corporate payout is taxed, internal equity (retained earnings) is cheaper than external equity (share issues). If there are no perfect substitutes for equity finance, payout taxes may therefore have an effect on the investment of firms. High taxes... View Details

25 Feb 2019
Research & Ideas

How Gender Stereotypes Kill a Woman’s Self-Confidence

predicting their own abilities, women had much less confidence in their scores on the tests they believed men had an advantage in. “Gender stereotypes determine people’s beliefs about themselves and others,” Coffman says. “If I take a... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

2016
Working Paper

Innovating in Science and Engineering or 'Cashing In' on Wall Street? Evidence on Elite STEM Talent

By: Pian Shu

Using data on MIT bachelor's graduates from 1994 to 2012, this paper empirically examines the extent to which the inflow of elite talent into the financial industry affects the supply of innovators in science and engineering (S&E). I first show that finance does not... View Details

Keywords: Higher Education; Engineering; Personal Development and Career; Science; Finance

SSRN

2009
Article

Modeling Expert Opinions on Food Healthfulness: A Nutrition Metric

By: Jolie M. Martin, John Beshears, Katherine L. Milkman, Max H. Bazerman and Lisa Sutherland

Research over the last several decades indicates the failure of existing nutritional labels to substantially improve the healthiness of consumers' food and beverage choices. The difficulty for policy-makers is to encapsulate a wide body of scientific knowledge in a... View Details

Keywords: Judgments; Food; Nutrition; Labels; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Demand and Consumers; Measurement and Metrics; Mathematical Methods

29 Apr 2025
HBS Seminar

Magie Cheng & David Huang

March 2021
Article

International Trade and Social Connectedness

By: Michael Bailey, Abhinav Gupta, Sebastian Hillenbrand, Theresa Kuchler, Robert J. Richmond and Johannes Stroebel

We use de-identified data from Facebook to construct a new and publicly available measure of the pairwise social connectedness between 170 countries and 332 European regions. We find that two countries trade more when they are more socially connected, especially for... View Details

Keywords: Social Connections; International Trade; Trade; Social Media

SSRN

June, 2021
Article

Learning from Deregulation: The Asymmetric Impact of Lockdown and Reopening on Risky Behavior During COVID-19

By: Edward L. Glaeser, Ginger Zhe Jin, Benjamin T. Leyden and Michael Luca

During the COVID-19 pandemic, states issued and then rescinded stay-at-home orders that restricted mobility. We develop a model of learning by deregulation, which predicts that lifting stay-at-home orders can signal that going out has become safer. Using restaurant... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19; Lockdown; Reopening; Impact; Coronavirus; Public Health Measures; Mobility; Health Pandemics; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Consumer Behavior