Publications

October 2009
Article

Influence and Inefficiency in the Internal Capital Market

By: Julie Wulf

I model inefficient resource allocations in M-form organizations due to influence activities by division managers that skew capital budgets in their favor. Corporate headquarters receives two types of signals about investment opportunities: private signals that can be... View Details

Keywords: Capital Markets; Resource Allocation; Business Processes; Capital Budgeting; Business Headquarters; Investment; Opportunities; Cost; Value; Motivation and Incentives; Equity

Research Summary

Information and Control in Modern Manufacturing

Ratna Sarkar's research in management accounting focuses on the effect of information and incentives on performance. She has investigated the role of worker empowerment, training and inventory in modern manufacturing settings and her findings suggest that these... View Details

2025
Working Paper

The Invention of Corporate Governance

By: Yueran Ma and Andrei Shleifer

The analysis of corporate governance begins with a central feature of modern capitalism—the separation of ownership and control in large corporations—first empirically documented by Berle and Means (1932). Such separation entails several agency problems reflecting... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Governance; Law; Business and Shareholder Relations

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April–May 2021
Article

Labor Mobility and Antitakeover Provisions

By: Aiyesha Dey and Joshua White

How do firms protect their human capital? We test whether firms facing an increased threat of being acquired strengthen their antitakeover provisions (ATPs) in order to bond with their employees. We use the adoption of the Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine (IDD) by U.S.... View Details

Keywords: Labor Mobility; Antitakeover Provisions; Trade Secrets; Implicit Contracting; Employee Bonding; Corporate Governance; Acquisition; Human Capital; Strategy; Innovation and Invention; Intellectual Property; Safety

06 Oct 2017
News

Making Patients and Doctors Happier — The Potential of Patient-Reported Outcomes

23 Jan 2024
Research & Ideas

How to Keep Employees Productive: Support Caregivers

report guides organizations in supporting work-life balance for caregivers. Fuller finds that there are strong incentives to support these employees with benefits; payoffs include lower turnover and less absenteeism. Instead of urging... View Details

Keywords: by Kara Baskin

Raffaella Sadun

Raffaella Sadun is Charles E. Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and is a Co-Chair of Harvard Business School’s Project on Managing the Future of Work and co-PI of the Digital Reskilling Lab. Sadun received her PhD in Economics... View Details

06 Jul 2010
Research & Ideas

Renewable Energy: Winds at Our Back?

When American energy entrepreneur Jim Gordon envisioned the first offshore wind farm lining the horizon a few miles off the coast of the eastern United States, he perhaps did not factor in blowback from almost every angle. Gordon's nearly 10-year battle to gain... View Details

Keywords: by Sarah Jane Gilbert; Energy; Utilities

December 2001 (Revised June 2002)
Case

Compensation at Level 3 Communications

Level 3's unique compensation plan rewarded managers for the firm's performance only if the firm's stock price movement exceeded that of the market. This design was intended to maximize shareholder value by tying manager's performance more closely to that of the firm,... View Details

Keywords: Motivation and Incentives; Compensation and Benefits; Telecommunications Industry

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fall 2010
Article

Lawsuits and Empire: On the Enforcement of Sovereign Debt in Latin America

By: Faisal Z. Ahmed, Laura Alfaro and Noel Maurer

The re-occurring phenomenon of sovereign default has prompted an enormous theoretical and empirical literature. Most of this research has focused on why countries ever chose to pay their debts (or why private creditors ever expected repayment). The problem originates... View Details

Keywords: Lawsuits and Litigation; Insolvency and Bankruptcy; Sovereign Finance; Borrowing and Debt; Debt Securities; Motivation and Incentives; Markets; Equity; Banking Industry; Latin America

2020
Working Paper

Consumers Punish Firms That Cut Employee Pay in Response to COVID-19

By: Bhavya Mohan, Serena Hagerty and Michael Norton

Two experiments, including one incentive compatible study, examine the impact of cutting pay for executives versus employees in response to COVID-19 on consumer behavior. Study 1 explores the effect of announcing cuts or no cuts to CEO and employee pay, and shows that... View Details

Keywords: Employee Furloughs; CEO Pay Cuts; Pay Ratios; Purchase Intention; Health Pandemics; Employees; Wages; Executive Compensation; Consumer Behavior

SSRN

April 2009 (Revised June 2010)
Case

Supply Chain Partners: Virginia Mason and Owens & Minor (A)

By: V.G. Narayanan and Lisa Brem

Virginia Mason Medical Center (VM) hired Owens & Minor (O&M) as its alpha vendor for medical/surgical supplies in 2004. By 2005, O&M was performing Just-in-Time and Low Unit of Measure services for VM, but they believed the pricing model in the industry was outdated.... View Details

Keywords: Activity Based Costing and Management; Price; Distribution; Supply Chain Management; Medical Devices and Supplies Industry

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This work leverages the strengths of expert human assessments of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) included in Cochrane reviews with data science techniques to build a comprehensive database on biomedical research quality. The data links the full-text and... View Details

28 Jan 2019
Research & Ideas

Forget Cash. Here Are Better Ways to Motivate Employees

With unemployment at near historic lows in the United States, employers report that their single greatest challenge is recruiting and retaining talent. The answer for many companies is to throw money at the problem: Bonuses, incentive... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

October 1994 (Revised March 1997)
Case

Privatization of Rhone-Poulenc 1993, The

In mid-1993, representatives of Rhone-Poulenc, a leading nationalized French firm, worked with the French government to plan the imminent privatization of the firm. One aspect of the privatization was to create incentives for employees to buy and hold shares in the... View Details

Keywords: Privatization; Employee Stock Ownership Plan; France

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August 2017
Article

Tort Reform and Innovation

By: Alberto Galasso and Hong Luo

Current academic and policy debates focus on the impact of tort reforms on physicians’ behavior and medical costs. This paper examines whether these reforms also affect incentives to develop new technologies. We develop a theoretical model that predicts that the impact... View Details

Keywords: Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Health Care and Treatment; Technological Innovation; Legal Liability; Medical Devices and Supplies Industry

winter 1988
Article

Management Buyouts and Managerial Efforts

By: Robert F. Bruner and Lynn S. Paine

Management buyouts, which have played an important role in the recent wave of corporate restructurings, have been criticized from several directions. This article addresses the problems created by management's conflict of interest. As members of the buyout team,... View Details

Keywords: Buyout; Ethical Decision Making; Management; Leveraged Buyouts; Ethics; Decision Making

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