Publications

Spring 2013
Article

Does Mandatory IFRS Adoption Improve the Information Environment?

By: Joanne Horton, George Serafeim and Ioanna Serafeim

We examine the effect of mandatory International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) adoption on firms' information environment. We find that after mandatory IFRS adoption, consensus forecast errors decrease for firms that mandatorily adopt IFRS relative to forecast... View Details

Keywords: International Accounting; Financial Reporting; Standards; Information; Quality; Earnings Management

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2010
Book

Rethinking the MBA: Business Education at a Crossroads

By: Srikant M. Datar, David A. Garvin and Patrick Cullen

"Business Schools Face Test of Faith." "Is It Time to Retrain B-Schools?" As these headlines make clear, business education is at a major crossroads. For decades, MBA graduates from top-tier schools set the standard for cutting-edge business knowledge and skills. Now... View Details

Keywords: Change Management; Transformation; Business Education; Curriculum and Courses; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Problems and Challenges

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25 Feb 2009
Working Paper Summaries

Fear of Rejection? Tiered Certification and Transparency

Keywords: by Emmanuel Farhi, Josh Lerner & Jean Tirole

Network Effects in Countries' Adoption of IFRS

The Accounting Review Vol. 89, No. 4 (July 2014), pp. 1517-1543.

If the differences in accounting standards across countries reflect relatively stable institutional differences, why did several countries rapidly adopt IFRS in the 2003–2008 period?... View Details

18 Sep 2012
First Look

First Look: September 18

J.C. Cuddy, Caroline A. Wilmuth, and Dana R. Carney Abstract The current experiment tested whether changing one's nonverbal behavior prior to a high-stakes social evaluation could improve performance in the evaluated task. Participants... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

Article

Agency Costs, Mispricing, and Ownership Structure

By: Sergey Chernenko, C. Fritz Foley and Robin Greenwood

Standard theories of corporate ownership assume that because markets are efficient, insiders ultimately bear all agency costs that they create and therefore have a strong incentive to minimize conflicts of interest with outside investors. We argue that if equity is... View Details

Keywords: Business and Shareholder Relations; Ownership; Conflict of Interests; Investment; Valuation

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July 2009 (Revised May 2012)
Case

Wareham SC Systems, Inc.

By: David F. Hawkins

CFO tests company's revenue recognition practices against the recently issued SAB 101 requirements and proposes plan for adoption of SAB 101. View Details

Keywords: Revenue Recognition; Standards

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October 2006 (Revised August 2023)
Background Note

Note on Student Outcomes in U.S. Public Education

By: Stacey M. Childress, Stig Leschly and John J-H Kim

Surveys educational outcomes among public school students in the United States. Educational outcomes are categorized as achievement outcomes (measured primarily by students' performance on standardized test results) and attainment outcomes (measured primarily by... View Details

Keywords: Demographics; Education; Outcome or Result; Public Administration Industry; Education Industry; United States

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2018
Working Paper

Is Overconfidence a Motivated Bias? Experimental Evidence

By: Jennifer M. Logg, Uriel Haran and Don A. Moore

Are overconfident beliefs driven by the motivation to view oneself positively? We test the relationship between motivation and overconfidence using two distinct, but often conflated, measures: better-than-average (BTA) beliefs and overplacement. Our results suggest... View Details

Keywords: Self-perception; Overconfidence; Motivation; Better-Than-Average Effect; Specifically; Personal Characteristics; Perception; Motivation and Incentives; Cognition and Thinking

Randomized experiments have become the standard method for companies to evaluate the performance of new products or services. In addition to augmenting managers' decision-making, experimentation mitigates risk by limiting the proportion of customers exposed to... View Details

2021
Working Paper

Quantifying the Value of Iterative Experimentation

By: Iavor I Bojinov and Jialiang Mao

Over the past decade, most technology companies and a growing number of conventional firms have adopted online experimentation (or A/B testing) into their product development process. Initially, A/B testing was deployed as a static procedure in which an experiment was... View Details

Keywords: Product Development; Value Creation; Research

2008
Chapter

The Evidence Does Not Speak for Itself: Expert Witnesses and the Organization of DNA-Typing Companies

By: Arthur A. Daemmrich

During the past 15 years, new biotechnology companies have promoted DNA typing as a sophisticated criminal and paternity identification technique. Private testing laboratories produce results that link individuals with crime scenes and fathers to their children.... View Details

Keywords: Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Courts and Trials; Organizational Structure; Practice; Genetics; Science-Based Business; Trust; Commercialization; Vertical Integration

31 Aug 2009
Research & Ideas

Why Competition May Not Improve Credit Rating Agencies

professor of finance at Washington University in St. Louis, tested the potential problem of raters that compete for business favoring the issuers and providing less reliable ratings. Their HBS working paper "Reputation and... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Financial Services

2024
Working Paper

The Cram Method for Efficient Simultaneous Learning and Evaluation

By: Zeyang Jia, Kosuke Imai and Michael Lingzhi Li

We introduce the "cram" method, a general and efficient approach to simultaneous learning and evaluation using a generic machine learning (ML) algorithm. In a single pass of batched data, the proposed method repeatedly trains an ML algorithm and tests its empirical... View Details

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning

2023
Working Paper

Design-Based Confidence Sequences: A General Approach to Risk Mitigation in Online Experimentation

By: Dae Woong Ham, Michael Lindon, Martin Tingley and Iavor Bojinov

Randomized experiments have become the standard method for companies to evaluate the performance of new products or services. In addition to augmenting managers’ decision-making, experimentation mitigates risk by limiting the proportion of customers exposed to... View Details

Keywords: Performance Evaluation; Research and Development; Analytics and Data Science; Consumer Behavior

2021
Working Paper

Cognitive Biases: Mistakes or Missing Stakes?

By: Benjamin Enke, Uri Gneezy, Brian Hall, David Martin, Vadim Nelidov, Theo Offerman and Jeroen van de Ven

Despite decades of research on heuristics and biases, empirical evidence on the effect of large incentives—as present in relevant economic decisions—on cognitive biases is scant. This paper tests the effect of incentives on four widely documented biases: base rate... View Details

Keywords: Cognitive Biases; Incentives; Motivation and Incentives; Decision Making; Performance

14 Apr 2009
First Look

First Look: April 14, 2009

the standards that people use in making judgments. The authors employed a novel method to test for, and rule out, such scale recalibration in self-reports of well-being. Design: The authors asked patients... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

14 Nov 2011
Research & Ideas

Creating a Global Business Code

The turn of the 21st century has been laden with high-profile corporate scandals, prompting widespread concern about the standards of conduct followed by big business. Intrigued by the complexity of managing corporate behavior in a global... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

2017
Working Paper

Nowcasting the Local Economy: Using Yelp Data to Measure Economic Activity

By: Edward L. Glaeser, Hyunjin Kim and Michael Luca

Can new data sources from online platforms help to measure local economic activity? Government datasets from agencies such as the U.S. Census Bureau provide the standard measures of economic activity at the local level. However, these statistics typically appear only... View Details

Keywords: Economy; Analytics and Data Science; Local Range; Social and Collaborative Networks