Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(2,350)
- Faculty Publications (436)
- January 2023
- Article
Inequality Regimes in Sub-Saharan Africa from Precolonial Times to the Present
By: Ewout Frankema, Michiel de Haas and Marlous van Waijenburg
While current levels of economic inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa receive ample attention from academics and policymakers, we know little about the long-run evolution of inequality in the region. Even the new and influential ‘global inequality literature’ that is... View Details
- August 2023
- Article
Taking Stock of the Implementation Gap in Climate Policy
By: Taryn Fransen, Jonas Meckling, Anna Stunzi, Tobias Schmidt, Florian Egli, Nicolas Schmid and Christopher Beaton
A gap persists between the emissions reductions pledged by countries under the Paris Agreement and those resulting from their domestic policies. We argue that this gap in fact contains two parts: one in the policies that countries adopt, and the other in the outcomes... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
Credit and the Family: The Economic Consequences of Closing the Credit Gap of U.S. Couples
By: Olivia S. Kim
Marital property rights strengthen secondary earners’ economic power by giving them access to credit markets. I study how this crucial yet understudied feature of property laws influences household decision-making. The 2013 reversal of the Truth-in-Lending Act... View Details
- Winter 2022
- Article
Distributing a Billion Vaccines: COVAX Successes, Challenges, and Opportunities
By: Eric Budish, Hannah Kettler, Scott Duke Kominers, Erik Osland, Canice Prendergast and Andrew A. Torkelson
By January 2022, the COVAX international vaccine collaboration had allocated over a billion vaccines to over 140 countries. We describe and review the allocation process chosen, which reflected both an objective of equitably distributing vaccines across the world and... View Details
- November 2022 (Revised October 2024)
- Case
'A Marshall Plan for Africa': James Mwangi and Equity Group Holdings
By: Caroline M. Elkins, Debora L. Spar, Zeke Gillman and Julia M. Comeau
Financial Inclusion. Dignity. Trust. These were the core principles driving James Mwangi’s transformation of Equity Building Society, insolvent in 1991, into what is, today, Equity Group Holdings, East and Central Africa’s largest retail banking institution. Raised in... View Details
- November 11, 2022
- Editorial
Finally Companies Have to Be Upfront about Job Pay Ranges
The significance of pay transparency laws is their role in moving American workplaces away from bias and closer to equal opportunity. View Details
Keywords: Pay; Salary; Pay Gap; Transparency; Wages; Compensation and Benefits; Recruitment; Equality and Inequality
- November 2022
- Article
Measuring Inequality beyond the Gini Coefficient May Clarify Conflicting Findings
By: Kristin Blesch, Oliver P. Hauser and Jon M. Jachimowicz
Prior research has found mixed results on how economic inequality is related to various outcomes. These contradicting findings may in part stem from a predominant focus on the Gini coefficient, which only narrowly captures inequality. Here, we conceptualize the... View Details
- November 2022
- Article
Opportunity Neglect: An Aversion to Low-probability Gains
By: Emily Prinsloo, Kate Barasz, Leslie K. John and Michael I. Norton
Seven preregistered studies (N = 2,890) conducted in the field, lab, and online document opportunity neglect: a tendency to reject opportunities with low probability of success, even when they come with little or no objective cost (e.g., time, money,... View Details
- November 2022
- Article
The Psychosocial Value of Employment: Evidence from a Refugee Camp
By: Reshmaan Hussam, Erin M. Kelley, Gregory Lane and Fatima Zahra
Employment may be important to wellbeing for reasons beyond its role as an income source. This paper presents a causal estimate of the psychosocial value of employment in refugee camps in Bangladesh. We involve 745 individuals in a field experiment with three arms: a... View Details
- October 2022
- Case
Afrigen Biologics: Vaccines for the Global South
By: Debora L. Spar and Julia Comeau
The majority of vaccines used on the continent of Africa (99%) are produced offshore. This makes African nations reliant on the West for major health care needs, a problem which was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Afrigen Biologics (in partnership with the WHO)... View Details
- September 2022
- Case
HPP: Tapping the Netherlands’ Potential
By: Brian Trelstad and Idelès Kaandorp
Stichting Het Potentieel Pakken (HPP) was launched to solve a systemic problem in the Dutch Labor Market: gender inequity that was leading to a large number of women to work part-time in fields that were in desperately short supply of labor, like health care, child... View Details
Keywords: COVID-19 Pandemic; Grants; Scaling And Growth; Nonprofit Organizations; Opportunities; Gender; Income; Employment; Health Care and Treatment; Human Capital; Mission and Purpose; Motivation and Incentives; Growth and Development Strategy; Employment Industry; Health Industry; Education Industry; Consulting Industry; Europe; Netherlands
- September 2022
- Article
Regulatory Spillover and Workplace Racial Inequality
By: Letian Zhang
This paper suggests that affirmative action bans in the U.S. public sector may influence racial inequality in the private sector. Since the 1990s, nine states have banned affirmative action practice in public universities and state governments. Though these bans have... View Details
- August 29, 2022
- Other Article
Income Inequality Is Rising. Are We Even Measuring It Correctly?
By: Jon M. Jachimowicz, K. Blesch and Oliver P. Hauser
Income inequality is on the rise in many countries around the world, according to the United Nations. What’s more, disparities in global income were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, with some countries facing greater economic losses than others.
Policymakers... View Details
- August 2022 (Revised May 2025)
- Case
Fresh Food Generation
By: Brian Trelstad, Amy Klopfenstein and Mel Martin
This case highlights one of five BIPOC entrepreneurs in the Boston area as part of the HBS Impact Investment Fund. In fall 2021, a team of HBS students reviewed the financial statements of Fresh Food Generation (FFG), a Dorchester, Massachusetts-based food service... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Satisfaction of Workers in Low-Wage Jobs
How did job satisfaction change during the pandemic for workers in low-wage jobs, and how did workers’ experiences compare to those in professional jobs? Using nationally representative survey data, we show that the pandemic increased the dissatisfaction of workers in... View Details
- July 2022
- Article
The Developmental Origins and Behavioral Consequences of Attributions for Inequality
By: Antonya Marie Gonzalez, Lucia Macchia and Ashley V. Whillans
Attributions, or lay explanations for inequality, have been linked to inequality-relevant behavior. In adults and children, attributing inequality to an individual rather than contextual or structural causes is linked to greater support for economic inequality and less... View Details
- 2022
- Article
Values and Inequality: Prosocial Jobs and the College Wage Premium
By: Nathan Wilmers and Letian Zhang
Employers often recruit workers by invoking corporate social responsibility, organizational purpose, or other claims to a prosocial mission. In an era of substantial labor
market inequality, commentators typically dismiss these claims as hypocritical: prosocial... View Details
- May 2022
- Case
Deborah Quazzo at GSV Ventures
By: William A. Sahlman, Michael D. Smith and Nicole Tempest Keller
As COVID-19 swept across the globe in 2020, the education sector faced unprecedented disruption. Schools and colleges worldwide shut down, forcing over a billion students and teachers to move to online learning. Investor interest in the EdTech space exploded as... View Details
- May 2022 (Revised June 2024)
- Case
LOOP: Driving Change in Auto Insurance Pricing
By: Elie Ofek and Alicia Dadlani
John Henry and Carey Anne Nadeau, co-founders and co-CEOs of LOOP, an insurtech startup based in Austin, Texas, were on a mission to modernize the archaic $250 billion automobile insurance market. They sought to create equitably priced insurance by eliminating pricing... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
ESG Performance and Voluntary ESG Disclosure: Mind the (Gender Pay) Gap
By: June Huang and Shirley Lu
We study if firms with better ESG performance are more likely to provide voluntary ESG disclosure, an assumption embedded in many ESG ratings. We focus on gender diversity and proxy for performance using a firm's gender pay gap ("GPG") disclosed under a UK disclosure... View Details