Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(460)
- Faculty Publications (152)
- 2021
- Working Paper
Issue Salience and Political Stereotypes
By: Pedro Bordalo, Marco Tabellini and David Yang
U.S. voters exaggerate the differences in attitudes held by Republicans and Democrats on a range of socioeconomic and political issues, and higher perceived polarization is associated with greater political engagement and affective polarization. In this paper, we... View Details
- March 24, 2020
- Article
Delayed Negative Effects of Prosocial Spending on Happiness
By: Armin Falk and Thomas Graeber
Does prosocial behavior promote happiness? We test this longstanding hypothesis in a behavioral experiment that extends the scope of previous research. In our Saving a Life paradigm, every participant either saved one human life in expectation by triggering a targeted... View Details
- March 2020
- Article
The Politics of M&A Antitrust
By: Mihir N. Mehta, Suraj Srinivasan and Wanli Zhao
Antitrust regulators play a critical role in protecting market competition. We examine whether firms can use the political process to opportunistically influence antitrust reviews of corporate merger transactions. We exploit the fact that in some mergers, acquirers... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
A General Theory of Identification
By: Iavor Bojinov and Guillaume Basse
What does it mean to say that a quantity is identifiable from the data? Statisticians seem to agree
on a definition in the context of parametric statistical models — roughly, a parameter θ in a model
P = {Pθ : θ ∈ Θ} is identifiable if the mapping θ 7→ Pθ is injective.... View Details
- 2019
- Article
Time Series Experiments and Causal Estimands: Exact Randomization Tests and Trading
By: Iavor I Bojinov and Neil Shephard
We define causal estimands for experiments on single time series, extending the potential outcome framework to dealing with temporal data. Our approach allows the estimation of a broad class of these estimands and exact randomization based p-values for testing causal... View Details
- April 2019
- Article
Shooting the Messenger
By: Leslie John, Hayley Blunden and Heidi Liu
Eleven experiments provide evidence that people have a tendency to “shoot the messenger,” deeming innocent bearers of bad news unlikeable. In a preregistered lab experiment, participants rated messengers who delivered bad news from a random drawing as relatively... View Details
- Article
Handshaking Promotes Deal-Making by Signaling Cooperative Intent
By: Juliana Schroeder, Jane L. Risen, Francesca Gino and Michael I. Norton
We examine how a simple handshake—a gesture that often occurs at the outset of social interactions—can influence deal-making. Because handshakes are social rituals, they are imbued with meaning beyond their physical features. We propose that during mixed-motive... View Details
- Article
Optimality Bias in Moral Judgment
By: Julian De Freitas and Samuel G.B. Johnson
We often make decisions with incomplete knowledge of their consequences. Might people nonetheless expect others to make optimal choices, despite this ignorance? Here, we show that people are sensitive to moral optimality: that people hold moral agents accountable... View Details
- Article
The Critical Role of Second-order Normative Beliefs in Predicting Energy Conservation
By: Jon M. Jachimowicz, Oliver P. Hauser, Julia D. O'Brien, Erin Sherman and Adam D. Galinsky
Sustaining large-scale public goods requires individuals to make environmentally friendly decisions today to benefit future generations. Recent research suggests that second-order normative beliefs are more powerful predictors of behaviour than first-order personal... View Details
- 2018
- Working Paper
Status Inconsistency: Variance in One's Status Across Groups Harms Well-being but Improves Perspective-taking
By: Catarina Fernandes and Alison Wood Brooks
Most people belong to many different groups. While some people experience consistently high or low status across all of their groups, others experience wildly different levels of status in each group. In this research, we examine how status inconsistency – the degree... View Details
- July–August 2018
- Article
The Other Diversity Dividend
By: Paul Gompers and Silpa Kovvali
Researchers have struggled to establish a causal relationship between diversity and financial performance—especially at large companies, where decision rights and incentives can be murky, and the effects of any given choice can be tough to pin down. So the authors... View Details
- June 2018
- Article
Deviations from Covered Interest Rate Parity
By: Wenxin Du, Alexander Tepper and Adrien Verdelhan
We find that deviations from the covered interest rate parity (CIP) condition imply large, persistent, and systematic arbitrage opportunities in one of the largest asset markets in the world. Contrary to the common view, these deviations for major currencies are not... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Efficient Discovery of Heterogeneous Quantile Treatment Effects in Randomized Experiments via Anomalous Pattern Detection
By: Edward McFowland III, Sriram Somanchi and Daniel B. Neill
In the recent literature on estimating heterogeneous treatment effects, each proposed method makes its own set of restrictive assumptions about the intervention’s effects and which subpopulations to explicitly estimate. Moreover, the majority of the literature provides... View Details
- Article
Your Visual System Provides All the Information You Need to Make Moral Judgments about Generic Visual Events
By: Julian De Freitas and George A. Alvarez
To what extent are people's moral judgments susceptible to subtle factors of which they are unaware? Here we show that we can change people’s moral judgments outside of their awareness by subtly biasing perceived causality. Specifically, we used subtle visual... View Details
- December 2017
- Article
Discordant vs. Harmonious Selves: The Effects of Identity Conflict and Enhancement on Sales Performance in Employee-Customer Interactions
By: Lakshmi Ramarajan, Nancy Rothbard and Steffanie Wilk
Across multiple studies, we examine how identity conflict and enhancement within people affect performance in tasks that involve interactions between people through two mechanisms: role-immersion, operationalized as intrinsic motivation, and role-taking,... View Details
- 2017
- Article
Handgun Waiting Periods Reduce Gun Deaths
By: Michael Luca, Deepak Malhotra and Christopher Poliquin
Handgun waiting periods are laws that impose a delay between the initiation of a purchase and final acquisition of a firearm. We show that waiting periods, which create a “cooling off” period among buyers, significantly reduce the incidence of gun violence. We estimate... View Details
- August 8, 2017
- Article
Buying Time Promotes Happiness
By: A.V. Whillans, Elizabeth W. Dunn, Paul Smeets, Rene Bekkers and Michael I. Norton
Around the world, increases in wealth have produced an unintended consequence: a rising sense of time scarcity. We provide evidence that using money to buy time can provide a buffer against this time famine, thereby promoting happiness. Using large, diverse samples... View Details
- Article
Kill or Die: Moral Judgment Alters Linguistic Coding of Causality
By: Julian De Freitas, Peter DiScioli, Jason Nemirow, Maxim Massenkoff and Steven Pinker
What is the relationship between the language people use to describe an event and their moral judgments?
We test the hypothesis that moral judgment and causative verbs rely on the same underlying mental
model of people’s actions. Experiment 1a finds that participants... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
Homophily in Entrepreneurial Team Formation
By: Paul A. Gompers, Kevin Huang and Sophie Q. Wang
We study the role of homophily in group formation. Using a unique dataset of MBA students, we observe homophily in ethnicity and gender increases the probability of forming teams by 25%. Homophily in education and past working experience increases the probability of... View Details
- May 2017
- Article
Behavioral Processes in Long-Lag Interventions
By: Dale T. Miller, Jennifer E. Dannals and Julian Zlatev
We argue that psychologists who conduct experiments with long lags between the manipulation and the outcome measure should pay more attention to behavioral processes that intervene between the manipulation and the outcome measure. Neglect of such processes, we contend,... View Details