Publications

November 2017
Technical Note

21st Century Populism

By: George Serafeim and David Freiberg

While the first decade of the 21st century saw a massive financial crisis that led to significant economic downturn, the second decade saw the rise of political leaders, who built their support upon a political message that championed the common person against the... View Details

Keywords: Populism; Market Efficiency; Market Liberalization; Political Influence; Political Instability; Capital Controls; Partnerships; Coalition; Inequality; Role Of Business In Society; Government Intervention In The Markets; Labor Market; Equality and Inequality; Financial Markets; Social Issues; Immigration; Financial Crisis; Capital Markets; Business and Government Relations

Educators

October 2014
Article

Good Cop, Bad Cop: Complementarities Between Debt and Equity in Disciplining Management

By: Alexander Guembel and Lucy White

In this paper we examine how the quantity of information generated about firm prospects can be improved by splitting a firm's cash flow into a "safe" claim (debt) and a "risky" claim (equity). The former, being relatively insensitive to upside risk, provides a... View Details

Keywords: Information; Borrowing and Debt; Equity; Corporate Finance

2008
Working Paper

A Replication Study of Alan Blinder's 'How Many U.S. Jobs Might Be Offshorable?'

By: Troy Smith and Jan W. Rivkin

In a 2007 working paper, Alan Blinder assessed the "offshorability" of hundreds of U.S. occupations and estimated that between 22% and 29% of all U.S. jobs were potentially offshorable. This note reports the results of an exercise in which members of Harvard Business... View Details

Keywords: Job Cuts and Outsourcing; Wages; Research; United States

For decades, U.S. companies have been outsourcing manufacturing in the belief that it held no competitive advantage. That’s been... View Details

11 Apr 2007
Research & Ideas

Adding Time to Activity-Based Costing

To improve any business, managers need to understand how much it costs to produce a profitable product. It seems a simple task, but the process of securing and analyzing the data can be incredibly complex and organizationally taxing. In Time-Driven Activity-Based... View Details

Keywords: by Sarah Jane Gilbert

2024
Working Paper

Open Devices and Slices: Evidence from Wi-Fi Equipment

By: Do Yoon Kim, Roberto Fontana and Shane Greenstein

Prior studies suggest that openness shapes the introduction of new products. This study collects novel data on all routers and subcomponents introduced between 2000 and 2018. We characterize each firm's position in a supply chain as upstream component providers... View Details

Keywords: Open Source Distribution; Product Development; Supply Chain

April 2022
Article

The Past Is Prologue? Venture-Capital Syndicates' Collaborative Experience and Start-Up Exits

By: Dan Wang, Emily Cox Pahnke and Rory M. McDonald

Past research has produced contradictory insights into how prior collaboration between organizations—their relational embeddedness—impacts collective collaborative performance. We theorize that the effect of relational embeddedness on collaborative success is... View Details

Keywords: Inter-organizational Networks; Collaboration; Entrepreneurship; Networks; Organizations; Performance; Venture Capital

2022
Book

A Political Economy of Justice

By: Danielle Allen, Yochai Benkler, Leah Downey, Rebecca Henderson and Joshua Simons

Defining a just economy in a tenuous social-political time.
If we can agree that our current social-political moment is tenuous and unsustainable—and indeed, that may be the only thing we can agree on right now—then how do markets, governments, and people... View Details

Keywords: Political Economy; Social Justice; Capitalism; Business And Society; Economy; Society; Fairness; Economic Systems; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; United States

January 2019
Supplement

Understanding the Brand Equity of Nestlé Crunch Bar (B): Data Analysis

By: Jill Avery and Gerald Zaltman

In early 2018, Nestlé announced the sale of its U.S. candy-making division and a select collection of 20 of its confectionery brands, including the Nestlé Crunch Bar, to Ferrero SpA for $2.8 billion. Luckily, an old consumer research study on the Nestlé Crunch Bar... View Details

Article

The IT Transformation Health Care Needs

By: Nikhil R. Sahni, Robert S. Huckman, Anuraag Chigurupati and David M. Cutler

In recent years, health care organizations have made sizable investments in information technology. They’ve used their IT systems to replace paper records with electronic ones and to improve billing processes, thereby boosting revenue. But so far, IT has been of little... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Information Technology; Performance Improvement; Business Model

Register to Read

2010
Book

The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century

By: Julia Rosenbaum and Sven Beckert

What precisely constitutes an American bourgeoisie? Scholars have grappled with the question for a long time. Economic positions—the ownership of capital, for instance—most obviously defines this group. Control of resources cannot explain, however, the emergence of... View Details

Keywords: Literacy; Income; Identity; Culture; Economics; United States

2010
Chapter

Understanding and Coping with the Increasing Risk of System-Level Accidents

By: Dutch Leonard and Arnold M. Howitt

The world has seen a number of recent events in which major systems came to a standstill, not from one cause alone but from the interaction of a combination of causes. System-level accidents occur when anomalies or errors in different parts of an interconnected system... View Details

Keywords: Economics; Globalization; Risk Management; Boundaries; System Shocks

May 2011
Article

Institutional Stock Trading on Loan Market Information

By: Victoria Ivashina and Zheng Sun

Over the past decade, one of the most important developments in the corporate loan market has been the increasing participation of institutional investors in lending syndicates. As lenders, institutional investors routinely receive private information about borrowers.... View Details

Keywords: Stocks; Financing and Loans; Negotiation; Investment Portfolio; Investment Return

2008
Other Unpublished Work

Are Private Equity Firms Better Managed?

By: Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen

We use an innovative survey tool to collect management practice data from over 4,000 medium sized manufacturing firms across Asia, Europe and the US. These measures of managerial practice are strongly associated with firm-level performance (e.g. productivity,... View Details

Keywords: Private Equity; Management Practices and Processes; Production; Performance Improvement; Manufacturing Industry; Asia; Europe; United States