Publications

March 2019
Technical Note

Control or Flexibility? Structured Empowerment Offers Both—Lessons from Retail & Service Chains (Abridged)

By: Tatiana Sandino

This note explains how several retail and service organizations use a practice described here as “structured empowerment” to balance control and flexibility as they grow. I define structured empowerment as a practice that grants employees both (a) the power to make... View Details

Keywords: Service Operations; Standards; Employees; Service Delivery; Decision Making; Power and Influence; Retail Industry; Service Industry

Educators

2011
Working Paper

From Counting Risk to Making Risk Count: Boundary-Work in Risk Management

By: Anette Mikes

For two decades, risk management has been gaining ground in banking. In light of the recent financial crisis, several commentators concluded that the continuing expansion of risk measurement is dysfunctional (Taleb, 2007; Power, 2009). This paper asks whether the... View Details

Keywords: Forecasting and Prediction; Financial Crisis; Risk Management; Measurement and Metrics; Organizational Culture; Situation or Environment; Banking Industry

September 2009 (Revised December 2009)
Supplement

Genzyme Center (C)

By: Michael W. Toffel and Aldo Sesia

Genzyme Corporation is in the midst of planning its new corporate headquarters, which incorporates many innovative green building features. After learning that the building as planned would likely earn a LEED Silver rating, an intermediate score in the LEED green... View Details

Keywords: Environmental Sustainability; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Standards; Cost vs Benefits; Biotechnology Industry; Construction Industry; Real Estate Industry; Green Technology Industry

November 2009
Article

Finding Missing Markets (and a Disturbing Epilogue): Evidence from an Export Crop Adoption and Marketing Intervention in Kenya

By: Nava Ashraf, Xavier Gine and Dean Karlan

Farmers may grow crops for local consumption despite more profitable export options. DrumNet, a Kenyan NGO that helps small farmers adopt and market export crops, conducted a randomized trial to evaluate its impact. DrumNet services increased production of export crops... View Details

Keywords: Export Crop; Field Experiment; Food Safety Standards; Plant-Based Agribusiness; Trade; Profit; Marketing; Standards; Failure; Non-Governmental Organizations; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Kenya; European Union

fall 1995
Article

Standard Setting Consortia, Antitrust, and High-Technology Industries

By: James J. Anton and Dennis A. Yao

Examines the antitrust treatment of private-sector standard setting in the U.S. Applicability of law and decision-making issues in high technology industries; Examination of cost-based facilitating theory; Approach to evaluate the reasonableness of a standard. View Details

Keywords: Private Sector; Information Technology; Law; Decision Making; Cost; Theory; Performance Evaluation; Standards; United States

24 Sep 2018
Blog Post

Working to Keep Pirates At-Bay: My Summer in Cyber Security

ten weeks in the company, I was able to design an online marketing strategy and create acquisition funnel metrics to test different campaigns and selling pitches to brokers. I was also able to work closely with the product team to review... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship

11 Oct 2022
News

On Balance

renamed and given a broad purview to collect data on equality metrics like composition, pay, policies, and practices from all private-sector employers in Australia with 100 or more employees, criteria that currently cover about 40 percent... View Details

Keywords: April White

2023
Working Paper

Are Hospital Quality Indicators Causal?

By: Amitabh Chandra, Maurice Dalton and Douglas O. Staiger

Hospitals play a key role in patient outcomes and spending, but efforts to improve their quality are hindered because we do not know whether hospital quality indicators are causal or biased. We evaluate the validity of commonly used quality indicators, such as... View Details

Keywords: Quality; Health Care and Treatment; Measurement and Metrics; Outcome or Result; Health Industry

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2021
Working Paper

Accounting for Workforce Impact at Scale

By: Adel Fadhel, Katie Panella, Ethan Rouen and George Serafeim

Using new data on workforce composition and wages, we systematically measure the employment impact at U.S. firms from 2008 to 2020, including 2,682 unique firms and 22,322 firm-year observations. We document significant variation across industries and firms within each... View Details

Keywords: Impact Accounting; ESG; Employee Turnover; Wages; Employment; Measurement and Metrics; Human Capital; Diversity; United States

SSRN

Working Paper

Measuring the Perceived Liquidity of the Corporate Bond Market

By: Sergey Chernenko and Adi Sunderam

We propose a novel measure of bond market liquidity that does not depend on transaction data: the strength of the cross-sectional relationship between mutual fund cash holdings and fund flow volatility. Our measure captures how liquid funds perceive their portfolio... View Details

Keywords: Bond Market; Bonds; Financial Liquidity; Measurement and Metrics

July 2015
Article

Prosocial Norms in the Classroom: The Role of Self-regulation in Following Norms of Giving

By: P. R. Blake, M. Piovesan, N. Montinari, F. Werneken and F. Gino

Children who are prosocial in elementary school tend to have higher academic achievement and experience greater acceptance by their peers in adolescence. Despite this positive influence on educational outcomes, it is still unclear why some children are more prosocial... View Details

Keywords: Behavior; Attitudes; Learning; Standards; Education Industry

April 1994 (Revised November 1998)
Case

Kendall Square Research Corporation (A)

By: William J. Bruns Jr.

Kendall Square Research was a small competitor in the supercomputer industry. As sales grew rapidly in 1992 and early 1993, the company sold stock to the public for the first time and analysts forecast higher earnings for 1993. However, when the company's revenue... View Details

Keywords: Revenue Recognition; Standards; Accounting Audits; Computer Industry

Educators