Publications

2016
Working Paper

Meet the Oligarchs: Business Legitimacy, State Capacity and Taxation

By: Rafael Di Tella, Juan Dubra and Alejandro Lagomarsino

We analyze the role of people’s beliefs about the rich in the determination of public policy in the context of a randomized online survey experiment. A question we study is the desirability of government-private sector meetings, a variable we argue is connected to... View Details

Keywords: Business Legitimacy; State Capacity; Meetings; Taxes; Top 1%; Regulation; Prejudice and Bias; Values and Beliefs; Taxation; Business and Government Relations

SSRN

2013
Comment

Fairness and Redistribution: Comment

By: Rafael Di Tella and Juan Dubra

In an influential paper, Alesina and Angeletos (2005)—henceforth, AA—argued that a preference for fairness could lead two identical societies to choose different economic systems. In particular, two equilibria might arise: one with low taxes and a belief that the... View Details

Keywords: Taxes; Beliefs; Economic Systems; Values and Beliefs; Fairness; Taxation

05 Aug 2011
Working Paper Summaries

An Exploration of Optimal Stabilization Policy

Keywords: by N. Gregory Mankiw & Matthew C. Weinzierl

August 30, 2022
Article

School Choice Increases Racial Segregation Even When Parents Do Not Care About Race

By: Kalinda Ukanwa, Aziza C. Jones and Broderick L. Turner Jr.

This research examines how school choice impacts school segregation. Specifically, this work demonstrates that even if parents do not take the racial demographics of schools into account, preference differences between Black and White parents for other school... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Race; Policy; Early Childhood Education; Middle School Education; Secondary Education

March 2007 (Revised August 2009)
Case

Grupo Bimbo

By: Jordan I. Siegel

In 2007 Grupo Bimbo, a leading global player in the baking industry, expands into China while at the same time undertaking initiatives to make its U.S. and South American operations more profitable. Allows students to analyze the company's entire global strategy.... View Details

Keywords: Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Global Strategy; Multinational Firms and Management; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Business and Government Relations; Food and Beverage Industry; China; Mexico; United States; South America

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Article

Popular Acceptance of Inequality Due to Innate Brute Luck and Support for Classical Benefit-based Taxation

By: Matthew C. Weinzierl

U.S. survey respondents' views on distributive justice differ in two specific, related ways from what is conventionally assumed in modern optimal tax research. When expressing their preferences over allocations in stylized, hypothetical scenarios meant to isolate key... View Details

Keywords: Optimal Taxation; Welfarism; Luck; Benefit-based Taxation; Taxation; Equality and Inequality; Attitudes

08 Jul 2009
Working Paper Summaries

Truth in Giving: Experimental Evidence on the Welfare Effects of Informed Giving to the Poor

Keywords: by Christina Fong & Felix Oberholzer-Gee

March 2021
Article

Deliberately Prejudiced Self-driving Vehicles Elicit the Most Outrage

By: Julian De Freitas and Mina Cikara

Should self-driving vehicles be prejudiced, e.g., deliberately harm the elderly over young children? When people make such forced-choices on the vehicle’s behalf, they exhibit systematic preferences (e.g., favor young children), yet when their options are unconstrained... View Details

Keywords: Moral Judgment; Autonomous Vehicles; Driverless Policy; Moral Outrage; Moral Sensibility; Judgments; Transportation; Policy

26 Jul 2004
Research & Ideas

A Better Way to Negotiate: Backward

with others, Barnevik generated an irreversible commitment to a preferred deal. This high-risk sequence sought to prevent factions such as unions and the Swedish government from blocking the deal. Had he... View Details

Keywords: by James K. Sebenius

07 Jul 2008
Research & Ideas

Innovation Corrupted: How Managers Can Avoid Another Enron

or fail to analyze the utter breakdown in board governance and Enron's internal controls, and the failure of credit rating agencies to blow the whistle," he says. "They also overlook the collusion of investment banks in... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Energy; Utilities

10 Aug 2015
Research & Ideas

Why a Federal Rule on CEO Pay Disclosure May Get You In Trouble With Customers

Here's a tip for companies looking to woo customers away from the competition: Besides advertising fair prices for your products, try advertising fair wages for your employees. Recent research from Harvard Business School indicates that shoppers View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Retail

October 1993 (Revised June 1997)
Case

Champion International

By: David F. Hawkins

Management must decide which first quarter's earnings numbers to report. The company is classified by its securities market as a "growth" company. The corporate controller prefers a quarterly earnings figure that represents a decline in earnings. View Details

Keywords: Problems and Challenges; Financial Reporting; Judgments; Leadership; Management Teams; Corporate Disclosure

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September 2022
Article

The Power and Limits of Expertise: Swiss–Swedish Linking of Vehicle Emission Standards in the 1970s and 1980s

By: Mattias Näsman and Sabine Pitteloud

Recent decades have witnessed increased public concern about vehicle emissions and growing frustration with political inaction and business preferences for the status quo. This article provides historical perspective on such regulatory dynamics by analyzing the Swiss... View Details

Keywords: Business And The Environment; Business And Society; Emission Reduction; Automobiles; Standard Setting; Norm-enforcement; Regulation; Expertise; Experts; Business and Government Relations; Environmental Regulation; Standards; Auto Industry; Switzerland; Sweden

October 2014
Article

The Promise of Positive Optimal Taxation: Normative Diversity and a Role for Equal Sacrifice

By: Matthew Weinzierl

A prominent assumption in modern optimal tax research is that the objective of taxation is Utilitarian. I present new survey evidence that most people disagree with this assumption, preferring tax policies based at least in part on a classic alternative objective: the... View Details

Keywords: Taxation; Theory

1999
Chapter

Multinational Cross-Investment between Switzerland and Britain 1914-1945

By: G. Jones

This chapter examines multinational cross-investment between Switzerland and Great Britain between 1914 and 1945. While Great Britain and Switzerland were both major home economies for multinationals,few companies from either country were interested in investing in the... View Details

Keywords: History; Multinational Firms and Management; International Relations; Investment; Great Britain; Switzerland

2010
Working Paper

Employee Selection as a Control System

By: Dennis Campbell

Theories from the economics, management control, and organizational behavior literatures predict that when it is difficult to align incentives by contracting on output, aligning preferences via employee selection may provide a useful alternative. This study... View Details

Keywords: Accounting; Decision Making; Governance Controls; Employees; Selection and Staffing; Management Systems; Financial Services Industry

15 Jan 2014
Research & Ideas

Managing the Family Business: It Takes a Village

ultimate leader of the business, ownership, and family is the natural choice for most families (and most nonfamily groups) around the world. The preference for one leader seems only slightly culturally driven; it's very common in Italy,... View Details

2022
Working Paper

How Do Investors Value ESG?

By: Malcolm Baker, Mark Egan and Suproteem K. Sarkar

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) objectives have risen to near the top of the agenda for corporate executives and boards, driven in large part by their perceptions of shareholder interest. We quantify the value that shareholders place on ESG using a revealed... View Details

Keywords: Investment; Investment Portfolio; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Business and Shareholder Relations; Environmental Sustainability; Governance; Financial Services Industry; United States

July 1990 (Revised September 1995)
Case

Singapore TradeNet: A Tale of One City

Describes the development of a new information technology-based trade document administration environment for the city-state of Singapore. A considerable effort, involving many governmental and private sector organizations, results in a new set of practices and... View Details

Keywords: Leadership; Information Technology; Emerging Markets; Policy; Public Administration Industry; Singapore