Publications
Publications
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(2,683)
- Faculty Publications (567)
Argus
→
- 2023
- Working Paper
Sovereign Default and the Decline in Interest Rates
By: Max Miller, James Paron and Jessica Wachter
Sovereign debt yields have declined dramatically over the last half-century. Standard explanations, including aging populations and increases in asset demand from abroad, encounter difficulties when confronted with the full range of evidence. We propose an explanation... View Details
- May–June 2023
- Article
The High Cost of Neglecting Low-Wage Workers: Six Mistakes That Companies Make—and How They Can Do Better
By: Joseph Fuller and Manjari Raman
Many companies blame outside factors for the trouble they’ve been having in finding and retaining frontline workers: the pandemic, the government’s stimulus checks, the intrinsic nature of low-wage work. The authors argue that in fact the real problem lies in six big... View Details
- May 17, 2023
- Article
Don't Let Passion Lead to Burnout on Your Team
By: Joy Bredehorst, Kai Krautter, Jirs Meuris and Jon M. Jachimowicz
Passion is often heralded as the key to a fulfilling and successful career, but the authors’ recent research suggests that it can also come at a cost: Feeling passionate about work can lead to exhaustion and even burnout. Through studies with more than 700 employees... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
The Politics of Philanthropy in China
By: Geoffrey Jones and Yuhai Wu
This working paper looks historically at business philanthropy in China. In the West, the literature has distinguished between entrepreneurial and customary philanthropy, while the phenomenon of spiritual philanthropy has been identified in many emerging markets. This... View Details
- April 2023
- Case
Twitter: The Freedom to Speak Freely and Be Heard
By: Randolph B. Cohen, Carin-Isabel Knoop and Mel Martin
In April 2022, serial entrepreneur Elon Musk announced that he would be interested in purchasing the social media site Twitter for $44 billion. With more than 100 million twitter followers, Musk had historically leveraged the site to engage with the customers of his... View Details
- March 31, 2023
- Article
What Is the Optimal Pattern of a Customer Journey?
Even though customer experience (CX) leaders are becoming increasingly focused on optimizing their firms’ customer journeys, they face a clear challenge: Which touchpoints along the journey should they invest in? That is, which moments when the customer interacts with... View Details
- 2023
- Article
Bridging the Gap with the ‘New’ Economic History of Africa
By: Ewout Frankema and Marlous van Waijenburg
This review article seeks to build bridges between mainstream African history and the more historically oriented branch of the ‘new’ economic history of Africa. We survey four central topics of the new economic history of Africa—growth, trade, labor, and inequality—and... View Details
Keywords: Economic Growth; Trade; Labor; Equality and Inequality; Development Economics; History; Africa
- 2023
- Working Paper
Networking Frictions: Evidence from Entrepreneurial Networking Events in Lomé
By: Stefan Dimitiadis and Rembrand Koning
Spatial proximity between firms plays a crucial role in entrepreneurship by creating knowledge spillovers, enabling resource sharing, and sparking productivity gains. Building on these insights, research has explored whether institutions and organizations can engineer... View Details
- January–February 2023
- Article
External Interfaces and Internal Processes: Market Positioning and Divergent Professionalization Paths in Young Ventures
By: Alicia DeSantola, Ranjay Gulati and Pavel Zhelyazkov
We explore how the initial market positioning of entrepreneurial ventures shapes how they professionalize over time, focusing specifically on the development of functional roles. In contrast to existing literature, which has presumed a uniform march toward... View Details
- Winter 2023
- Article
Moral Firms?
Building a new political economy requires transforming our markets, our institutions, and our policy and regulatory regimes. In this essay, I argue that it also requires transforming the purpose of the firm: from a singular focus on maximizing financial returns to the... View Details
- Working Paper
Diversification as an Adaptive Learning Process: An Empirical Study of General-Purpose and Market-Specific Technological Know-How in New Market Entry
By: Dominika Kinga Randle and Gary P. Pisano
An enduring trait of modern corporations is their propensity to diversify into multiple lines of business. Penrosian theories conceptualize diversification as a strategy to exploit a firm’s fungible, yet “untradeable,” resources and point to redeployment of... View Details
- 2022
- Article
Before Plagiarism: Lawyers and Copynorms in Europe, 1300–1600
By: Robert Fredona and Sophus A. Reinert
This essay uses the concept of 'copynorms', social norms about copying expressive works that can be distinct from legal norms about the same, in order to understand the meaning of intellectual property among Roman law and canon law jurists from the fourteenth through... View Details
- 2022
- Article
Pills in a World of Activism and ESG
By: Guhan Subramanian and Caley Petrucci
Easterbrook and Fischel’s The Economic Structure of Corporate Law advances their now famous passivity thesis, which posits that managers should remain passive in the face of an unsolicited tender offer for the company’s shares. Consistent with the broader... View Details
- December 2022
- Article
Social Skills Improve Business Performance: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial with Entrepreneurs in Togo
By: Stefan Dimitriadis and Rembrand Koning
Recent field experiments demonstrate that advice, mentorship, and feedback from randomly assigned peers improve entrepreneurial performance. These results raise a natural question: what is preventing entrepreneurs and managers from forming these peer connections... View Details
- December 2022
- Article
The Emotional Rewards of Prosocial Spending Are Robust and Replicable in Large Samples
By: Lara B. Aknin, Elizabeth W. Dunn and Ashley V. Whillans
Past studies show that spending money on other people—prosocial spending—increases a person’s happiness. However, foundational research on this topic was conducted prior to psychology’s credibility revolution (or “replication crisis”), so it is essential to ask... View Details
- 2022
- Chapter
Buying Time? The Vietnam War and Southeast Asia
By: Mattias Fibiger
This article examines the “buying time thesis”—the idea that the American war in Vietnam bought time for the rest of Southeast Asia to build up political, economic, military, and diplomatic defenses against communism. It finds that there is some truth to claims that... View Details
Keywords: Vietnam War; Impact; Legacy; Geopolitics; War; History; Government and Politics; Southeast Asia
- 13 Oct 2022
- Other Presentation
4 Business Ideas That Changed the World: Disruptive Innovation
By: Amy Bernstein, Rita McGrath, Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Derek van Bever
A roundtable conversation takes stock of Clayton Christensen’s influential theory. This first in a series of roundtable conversations assessing the origins and impact of four breakthrough ideas.
In the 1980s, Clayton Christensen cofounded a startup that... View Details
In the 1980s, Clayton Christensen cofounded a startup that... View Details
Keywords: Disruptive Innovation
- 20 Oct 2022
- Other Presentation
4 Business Ideas That Changed the World: Shareholder Value
By: Adi Ignatius, Lynn Paine, Mihir Desai and Carola Frydman
A roundtable conversation appraises the 50-year reign of shareholder primacy and the growing backlash against it today.
The idea that maximizing shareholder value takes legal and practical precedence above all else first came to prominence in the 1970s. The... View Details
The idea that maximizing shareholder value takes legal and practical precedence above all else first came to prominence in the 1970s. The... View Details
- October 14, 2022
- Editorial
Is Agenda Theater Ruining Your Meetings?
By: A.V. Whillans, Dave Feldman and Damian Wisniewski
Like triaging our inboxes, clearing our Slack messages, or managing our to-do lists, preparing an agenda can make us feel like we’ve accomplished something. And when we go through our detailed, bulleted agendas with our colleagues before or during a meeting, it sure... View Details
Keywords: Management Practices and Processes
- 2022
- Article
Indonesia and the Third Indochina War: The End of Containment
By: Mattias Fibiger
The Third Indochina War called forth dramatic changes in the international relations of Southeast Asia. Foremost among these changes was a shift in the geopolitical orientation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The organization’s founders... View Details