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- All HBS Web (572)
- Faculty Publications (80)
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- January 2017 (Revised May 2019)
- Case
Kjell and Company: Motivating Salespeople with Incentive Compensation (A)
By: Doug J. Chung
Kjell & Company was a Swedish retail electronics chain. The company’s products consisted of home electronics and accessories. The company was noted for its excellent customer service and a fair “one-for-all” HR policy. Historically, the salespeople had been compensated... View Details
Keywords: Salesforce Management; Compensation and Benefits; Change; Decision Making; Electronics Industry; Sweden
Chung, Doug J. "Kjell and Company: Motivating Salespeople with Incentive Compensation (A)." Harvard Business School Case 517-090, January 2017. (Revised May 2019.)
- 07 Oct 2024
- Research & Ideas
Election 2024: Why Demographics Won't Predict the Next President
demographics might need to rethink their approach. “After an election, the electorate always seems to just oscillate back to the other party within a pretty short period of time,” explains coauthor Richard Calvo, a former research... View Details
Keywords: by Jay Fitzgerald
- 02 Dec 2013
- Research & Ideas
Companies Choreograph Earnings Calls to Hide Bad News
more advantageous." This trend is so well established that a simulated long-short stock portfolio created by the researchers to take advantage of this fact earned abnormally high returns of up to 101 basis points per month. (In part, the portfolio View Details
- 26 Jun 2018
- First Look
New Research and Ideas, June 26, 2018
but this article shows it has never been true historically. Using longitudinal data on individual firms from the nineteenth century onwards, it reveals evidence of how entrepreneurs and firms with multinational activity faced by market... View Details
Keywords: Dina Gerdeman
- 06 Aug 2024
- Op-Ed
What the World Could Learn from America's Immigration Backlash—100 Years Ago
welfare state. Restricting immigration would require budget cuts that would harm natives by reducing pension benefits or increasing the age of retirement, for example. “It’s thus impossible to conclude that immigration has no economic costs, at least in the View Details
Keywords: by Marco Tabellini
- 05 Sep 2023
- Book
Failing Well: How Your ‘Intelligent Failure’ Unlocks Your Full Potential
In the 1990s, after drugmaker Eli Lilly spent more than a decade and millions of dollars developing the new drug Alimta to treat lung cancer, the medication came up short in effectively treating cancer in expanded trials. While the... View Details
Keywords: by Michael Blanding
- 03 Mar 2011
- Working Paper Summaries
How Firm Strategies Influence the Architecture of Transaction Networks
- 23 May 2011
- Op-Ed
Leading and Lagging Countries in Contributing to a Sustainable Society
months is a short period, the total number of hits was approximately 34 million, so we believe it is a robust measure of investor interest. Of course, we don't know whether investors who actually looked at these View Details
Keywords: by Robert G. Eccles & George Serafeim
- Research Summary
Reinventing State Capitalism: Leviathan in Business, Brazil and Beyond
Part of the fear and misunderstanding of state capitalism in the post-Berlin Wall era stems from the fact that most observers see state-owned enterprises (SOEs) as inefficient soviet companies. In Reinventing State Capitalism: Leviathan in Business, Brazil and... View Details
- 2008
- Working Paper
An Investigation of Earnings Management through Marketing Actions
By: Craig James Chapman and Thomas J. Steenburgh
Prior research hypothesizes managers use "real actions," including the reduction of discretionary expenditures, to manage earnings to meet or beat key benchmarks. This paper examines this hypothesis by testing how different types of marketing expenditures are used... View Details
Keywords: Performance Expectations; Earnings Management; Marketing Strategy; Financial Reporting; Brands and Branding; Food and Beverage Industry
Chapman, Craig James, and Thomas J. Steenburgh. "An Investigation of Earnings Management through Marketing Actions." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 08-073, February 2008. (Revised February 2009, December 2009, June 2010, July 2010.)
- 26 Sep 2017
- First Look
First Look at New Research and Ideas, September 26, 2017
Downsizing? By: Cohen, Lauren, Joshua D. Coval, and Christopher J. Malloy Abstract—While we commend the initiative of Snyder and Welch (2017), we lay out in this short reply why we remain highly confident in our results and our... View Details
Keywords: Sean Silverthorne
- 22 Jan 2013
- First Look
First Look: Jan. 22
and increased employment has attracted increased interest. Yet questions about efficacy and the efficiency with which funds are used is a subject of frequent debate. This paper examines empirical data from the Danish National Advanced... View Details
Keywords: Sean Silverthorne
- 15 Jul 2008
- First Look
First Look: July 15, 2008
distributional issues, and the likely effects of reforms to tax provisions such as the AMT are considered. Download the paper from SSRN.com ($5): http://www.nber.org/papers/w14149 Inexperienced Investors and Bubbles Authors:Robin Greenwood and Stefan Nagel Abstract We... View Details
Keywords: Martha Lagace
- 23 Apr 2007
- Research & Ideas
Are Great Teams Less Productive?
to recognize and deal with. For example, an organization that has just completed a learning initiative may see a drop in productivity, at least in the short term. Edmondson and doctoral student Sara Singer explore the problematic... View Details
Keywords: by Sarah Jane Gilbert
- 22 Nov 2023
- Research & Ideas
Humans vs. Machines: Untangling the Tasks AI Can (and Can't) Handle
write a short note to the company’s CEO outlining the rationale for their suggestions. Instructions told the consultants to be creative and to “feel free to rely on your own business judgement” when making their recommendations. Here,... View Details
- May 2008
- Article
Coerced Confessions: Self-Policing in the Shadow of the Regulator
By: Jodi L. Short and Michael W. Toffel
As part of a recent trend toward more cooperative relations between regulators and industry, novel government programs are encouraging firms to monitor their own regulatory compliance and voluntarily report their own violations. In this study, we examine how regulatory... View Details
Keywords: Governance Compliance; Law Enforcement; Corporate Disclosure; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Environmental Sustainability; Programs; Power and Influence; Organizations; Decisions; Business and Government Relations; United States
Short, Jodi L., and Michael W. Toffel. "Coerced Confessions: Self-Policing in the Shadow of the Regulator." Journal of Law, Economics & Organization 24, no. 1 (May 2008): 45–71.
- September 2011
- Article
Political Instability: Effects on Financial Development, Roots in the Severity of Economic Inequality
By: Mark J. Roe and Jordan I. Siegel
We here bring forward strong evidence that political instability impedes financial development, with its variation a primary determinant of differences in financial development around the world. As such, it needs to be added to the short list of major determinants of... View Details
Keywords: Financial Development; Political Instability; Government and Politics; Finance; Growth and Development; Economics; Equality and Inequality
Roe, Mark J., and Jordan I. Siegel. "Political Instability: Effects on Financial Development, Roots in the Severity of Economic Inequality." Journal of Comparative Economics 39, no. 3 (September 2011): 279–309. (We here bring forward strong evidence that political instability impedes financial development, with its variation a primary determinant of differences in financial development around the world. As such, it needs to be added to the short list of major determinants of financial development. First, structural conditions first postulated by
Engerman and Sokoloff (2002) as generating long-term inequality are shown here empirically to be exogenous determinants of political instability. Second, that exogenously-determined political instability in turn holds back financial development, even when we control for factors prominent in the last decade's cross-country studies of
financial development. The findings indicate that inequality-perpetuating conditions that result in political instability are fundamental roadblocks for international organizations like the World Bank that seek to promote financial development. The evidence here includes country fixed effect regressions and an instrumental model inspired by Engerman and Sokoloff's (2002) work, which to our knowledge has not yet been used in finance and which is consistent with current tests as valid instruments. Four conventional measures of national political instability — Alesina and Perotti's (1996) well-known index of instability, a subsequent index derived from Banks' (2005) work,
and two indices of managerial perceptions of nation-by-nation political instability — persistently predict a wide range of national financial development outcomes for recent decades. Political instability's significance is time consistent in cross-sectional regressions back to the 1960's, the period when the key data becomes available, robust
in both country fixed-effects and instrumental variable regressions, and consistent across multiple measures of instability and of financial development. Overall, the results indicate the existence of an important channel running from structural inequality to political instability, principally in nondemocratic settings, and then to financial
backwardness. The robust significance of that channel extends existing work demonstrating the importance of political economy explanations for financial development and financial backwardness. It should help to better understand which policies will work for financial development, because political instability has causes, cures, and effects quite distinct from those of many of the key institutions most studied in the past decade as explaining financial backwardness.)
- 05 Dec 2006
- First Look
First Look: December 5, 2006
success contrast with anecdotes where the diffusion of CRM into organizations continues to be a slow process and/or where CRM implementation outcomes have fallen short of expectations. Successful implementation depends on a number of... View Details
Keywords: Sean Silverthorne
- 12 Oct 1999
- Research & Ideas
Rapid Response: Inside the Retailing Revolution
knowledge of what sells and what doesn't, flexible manufacturing capabilities that can respond appropriately to demand, lean rather than fat and costly inventories, and the rapid replenishment of stock. "The old way was to gear planning... View Details
- 13 Mar 2007
- First Look
First Look: March 13, 2007
paradox by considering the enabling role of actors' social position. Adopting a relational view of human agency, I model the impact of their social position on the likelihood that actors will initiate changes that diverge from the existing institutions. I test this... View Details
Keywords: Martha Lagace