Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,081)
- Faculty Publications (319)
- Article
Weak Corporate Insolvency Rules: The Missing Driver of Zombie Lending
By: Bo Becker and Victoria Ivashina
"Zombie lending"—lending to less-productive firms at subsidized rates—can help banks with misaligned incentives in the short run, but it prolongs economic downturns. We propose that inefficient resolution of insolvency is a significant contributor to this problem. We... View Details
- April–June 2022
- Other Article
Commentary on 'Causal Decision Making and Causal Effect Estimation Are Not the Same... and Why It Matters'
There has been a substantial discussion in various methodological and applied literatures around causal inference; especially in the use of machine learning and statistical models to understand heterogeneity in treatment effects and to make optimal decision... View Details
- March 2022
- Article
Learning to Rank an Assortment of Products
By: Kris Ferreira, Sunanda Parthasarathy and Shreyas Sekar
We consider the product ranking challenge that online retailers face when their customers typically behave as “window shoppers”: they form an impression of the assortment after browsing products ranked in the initial positions and then decide whether to continue... View Details
- January–February 2022
- Article
Operational Disruptions, Firm Risk, and Control Systems
By: William Schmidt and Ananth Raman
Operational disruptions can impact a firm's risk, which manifests in a host of operational issues, including a higher holding cost for inventory, a higher financing cost for capacity expansion, and a higher perception of the firm's risk among its supply chain partners.... View Details
- January 2022
- Article
Pushed into a Crowd: Repositioning Costs, Resources, and Competition in the RTE Cereal Industry
By: Young Hou and Dennis Yao
This paper exploits a natural experiment involving self-regulation in the ready-to-eat (RTE) breakfast cereal industry to evaluate the performance impact of product repositioning. It then examines how a product's brand equity value declines with repositioning distance... View Details
- Article
The Translucent Hand of Managed Ecosystems: Engaging Communities for Value Creation and Capture
By: Elizabeth J. Altman, Frank Nagle and Michael Tushman
Management research has increasingly explored the domains of ecosystems, platforms, and open/user/distributed innovation—governance structures focused on engaging with external communities. While these research areas include substantial empirical and theoretical work... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Threat and Assimilation: Evidence from Refugees in Germany
By: Philipp Jaschke, Sulin Sardoschau and Marco Tabellini
This paper studies the effects of local threat on the cultural assimilation and economic integration of refugees, exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in their allocation across German regions between 2013 and 2016. We use representative survey data and... View Details
Keywords: Assimilation; Threat Hypothesis; Migration; Cultural Change; Refugees; Culture; Identity; Germany
- Article
A Prescriptive Analytics Framework for Optimal Policy Deployment Using Heterogeneous Treatment Effects
By: Edward McFowland III, Sandeep Gangarapu, Ravi Bapna and Tianshu Sun
We define a prescriptive analytics framework that addresses the needs of a constrained decision-maker facing, ex ante, unknown costs and benefits of multiple policy levers. The framework is general in nature and can be deployed in any utility maximizing context, public... View Details
- December 2021
- Article
Cash-for-Information Whistleblower Programs: Effects on Whistleblowing and Consequences for Whistleblowers
By: Aiyesha Dey, Jonas Heese and Gerardo Pérez Cavazos
We study the effect of financial incentives on whistleblowing and the consequences for whistleblowers under the cash-for-information program of the False Claims Act (FCA). Exploiting appeals-court decisions that increase financial incentives for whistleblowing, we find... View Details
- Article
Core Earnings: New Data and Evidence
By: Ethan Rouen, Eric C. So and Charles C.Y. Wang
Using a novel dataset, we show that components of firms' GAAP earnings stemming from ancillary business activities or transitory shocks are significant in frequency and magnitude. These components have grown over time and are dispersed across various sections of the... View Details
- December 2021
- Article
The Evolutionary Nature of Breakthrough Innovation: An Empirical Investigation of Firm Search Strategies
By: Dominika Kinga Randle and Gary P. Pisano
Breakthrough innovation has been an important topic of study for generations of scholars. Previous research in this domain has focused on exploring the way breakthroughs emerge from cumulative combination and recombination of prior technologies and knowledge components... View Details
- December 2021
- Article
Trade Policy Uncertainty and Stock Returns
By: Marcelo Bianconi, Federico Esposito and Marco Sammon
A recent literature has documented large real effects of trade policy uncertainty (TPU) on trade, employment, and investment, but there is little evidence that investors are compensated for bearing such risk. To quantify the risk premium associated with TPU, we exploit... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Omnia Juncta in Uno: Foreign Powers and Trademark Protection in Shanghai's Concession Era
By: Laura Alfaro, Cathy Bao, Maggie X. Chen, Junjie Hong and Claudia Steinwender
We investigate how firms and markets adapt to trademark protection, an extensively utilized but under-examined form of IP protection to address asymmetric information, by exploring a historical precedent: China’s 1923 trademark law. Exploiting unique, newly digitized... View Details
- September–October 2021
- Article
Frontiers: Can an AI Algorithm Mitigate Racial Economic Inequality? An Analysis in the Context of Airbnb
By: Shunyuan Zhang, Nitin Mehta, Param Singh and Kannan Srinivasan
We study the effect of Airbnb’s smart-pricing algorithm on the racial disparity in the daily revenue earned by Airbnb hosts. Our empirical strategy exploits Airbnb’s introduction of the algorithm and its voluntary adoption by hosts as a quasi-natural experiment. Among... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
The Luck of the Draw: The Causal Effect of Physicians on Birth Outcomes
By: Arlen Guarin, Christian Posso, Estefania Saravia and Jorge Tamayo
Identifying the effect of physicians’ skills on health outcomes is a challenging task due to the nonrandom sorting between physicians and hospitals. We overcome this challenge by exploiting a Colombian government program that randomly assigned 2,126 physicians to 618... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
The Pay of Finance Professors
By: Claire Célérier, Boris Vallée and Alexey Vasilenko
This paper documents the existence of a significant wage finance premium in academia, and investigates its underlying mechanism. By exploiting an extensive dataset covering wages, publications and socio-demographics for 60,000 public-university faculty from all fields,... View Details
- 2021
- Book
Time for Reparations: A Global Perspective
By: Jaqueline Bhabha, Margareta Matache and Caroline M. Elkins
In this sweeping international perspective on reparations, Time for Reparations makes the case that past state injustice—be it slavery or colonization, forced sterilization or widespread atrocities—has enduring consequences that generate ongoing harm, which... View Details
- Article
Measuring the Scientific Effectiveness of Contact Tracing: Evidence from a Natural Experiment
By: Thiemo Fetzer and Thomas Graeber
Contact tracing has for decades been a cornerstone of the public health approach to epidemics, including Ebola, severe acute respiratory syndrome, and now COVID-19. It has not yet been possible, however, to causally assess the method’s effectiveness using a randomized... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
Going to Extremes: Crucibles, Multiple Sensitive Periods, and Career Progression
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Sunasir Dutta, Hise O. Gibson and Eric Lin
We study the effects of crucible experiences along multiple sensitive periods on career progression. While prior literature has hinted that individuals can be imprinted during multiple sensitive periods, not just during the early career, there has been scant attention... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
Multi-location Workers in Multinational Firms? Tradeoffs in Contextual Specialization of Employees and Organizational Outcomes
By: Hise O. Gibson, Ryan W. Buell and Prithwiraj Choudhury
We study how “contextual specialization,” the act of focusing workers’ organizational tasks within a particular locational context, and “contextual non-specialization,” the practice of diversifying workers’ organizational tasks among multiple locational contexts,... View Details