Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,459)
- Faculty Publications (244)
- Article
Prosocial Spending and Buying Time: Money as a Tool for Increasing Subjective Well-Being
By: Elizabeth Dunn, A.V. Whillans, Michael I. Norton and Lara B. Aknin
Researchers have long been interested in the relationship between income and happiness, but a newer wave of work suggests that how people use their money also matters. We discuss the three primary areas in which psychologists have explored the relationship... View Details
- January 2020
- Article
Rethinking Measurement of Pay Disparity and Its Relation to Firm Performance
By: Ethan Rouen
I develop measures of firm-level pay disparity and examine their relation to firm performance. Using comprehensive compensation data for a large sample of firms, I find no statistically significant relation between the ratio of CEO-to-mean employee compensation and... View Details
- October 2019
- Article
Does Political Uncertainty Increase External Financing Costs? Measuring the Electoral Premium in Syndicated Lending
By: Olivia S. Kim
This article investigates the impact of political uncertainty on contractual lending terms using a large sample of syndicated loans and a within-firm estimation approach to achieve identification. Firms pay 7 basis points (bps) more on loans originated when their... View Details
- 2020
- Chapter
Ethical Business, Corruption and Economic Development in Comparative Perspective
By: Janet Hunter and G. Jones
This chapter contextualises the drivers of corruption in Turkish business through comparisons with Japan and India in the late 19th century. It identifies the developmental state as a common driver of corruption. Catching up by using extensive state intervention had... View Details
Keywords: Corruption; Crime and Corruption; Economic Growth; Turkey; Middle East; Central Asia; Japan; India
- 2019
- Working Paper
Stewardship Codes and Shareholder Voting on Disputed Ballot Measures
By: Trang T. Nguyen and Charles CY Wang
This study examines the impact of stewardship codes on investor voting behavior in disputed ballot measures-- where ISS's recommendation differs from management's recommendation-- across nine countries. U.S. institutional investors' voting behavior in adopting country... View Details
- 2019
- White Paper
Impact-Weighted Financial Accounts: The Missing Piece for an Impact Economy
By: George Serafeim, T. Robert Zochowski and Jennifer Downing
Reimagining capitalism is an imperative. We need to create a more inclusive and sustainable form of capitalism that works for every person and the planet. Massive environmental damage, growing income and wealth disparity, stress, and depression within developed... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
Bank Boards: What Has Changed Since the Financial Crisis?
By: Shiva Rajgopal, Suraj Srinivasan and Forester Wong
Several government-mandated committees investigating the financial crisis highlighted four key deficiencies in the composition of bank boards before the crisis: (i) group think among bank board members; (ii) absence of prior banking experience of board members; (iii)... View Details
- 2019
- Chapter
Location Fundamentals, Agglomeration Economies, and the Geography of Multinational Firms
By: Laura Alfaro and Maggie Xiaoyang Chen
Multinationals exhibit distinct agglomeration patterns, which have transformed the global landscape of industrial production (Alfaro and Chen, 2014). Using a unique worldwide plant-level dataset that reports detailed location, ownership, and operation information for... View Details
- Article
Business, Governments and Political Risk in South Asia and Latin America since 1970
By: G. Jones and Rachael Comunale
This article contributes to the literature on political risk in business and economic history by examining both new perspectives (risk encountered by companies domestically, rather than risk for foreign investors) and new settings (emerging markets economies in Latin... View Details
- August 2018 (Revised April 2019)
- Case
Fair Value Accounting at Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (A)
By: Jonas Heese, Suraj Srinivasan, Francois Brochet and Christine Johnson
In May 2018, Berkshire Hathaway announced an unprecedented loss of more than $1 billion for the first quarter of 2018. Warren Buffett blamed this loss on the new accounting rules for equity securities which he criticized. In the case ‘Fair Value Accounting at Berkshire... View Details
- May 2018 (Revised October 2018)
- Case
Argentina Power—Don't Cry for Me Argentina
By: Nori Gerardo Lietz and Sayiddah Fatima McCree
In 2016, Bruce Wayne, Managing Director of Energy Finance Corporation (“EFC”), was refining the Investment/Credit Committee materials for the development of up to 10 power generating plants in Argentina. As a subsidiary of the much larger International Conglomerate... View Details
Keywords: Cross Border; Energy Markets; Infrastructure Finance; Infrastructure Development; Business Subsidiaries; Business Cycles; Macroeconomics; Energy Generation; International Finance; Project Finance; Government and Politics; Demand and Consumers; Infrastructure; Utilities Industry; Energy Industry; Financial Services Industry; Argentina; Latin America
- 2018
- Chapter
New Prospects for Organizational Democracy?: How the Joint Pursuit of Social and Financial Goals Challenges Traditional Organizational Designs
By: Julie Battilana, Michael Fuerstein and Michael Lee
For an extended period during the first half of the 20th century, industrial democracy was a vibrant movement, with ideological and organizational ties to a thriving unionism. In 2015, however, things look different. While there are instances of democracy in the... View Details
- Article
The Asymmetric Experience of Positive and Negative Economic Growth: Global Evidence Using Subjective Well-being Data
By: Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, George Ward, Femke De Keulenaer, Bert Van Landeghem, Georgios Kavetsos and Michael I. Norton
Are individuals more sensitive to losses than gains in terms of economic growth? We find that measures of subjective well-being are more than twice as sensitive to negative as compared to positive economic growth. We use Gallup World Poll data from over 150 countries,... View Details
- May 2018
- Article
U.S. Treasury Premium
By: Wenxin Du, Joanne Im and Jesse Schreger
We quantify the difference in the convenience yield of U.S. Treasuries and government bonds of other developed countries by measuring the deviation from covered interest parity between government bond yields. We call this wedge the “U.S. Treasury Premium.” We document... View Details
- May 2018
- Article
Using Online Prices for Measuring Real Consumption Across Countries
By: Alberto Cavallo, Erwin Diewert, Robert C. Feenstra, Robert Inklaar and Marcel P. Timmer
We show that online prices can be used to construct quarterly purchasing power parities (PPPs) with a closely matched set of goods and identical methodologies in a variety of developed and developing countries. Our results are close to those reported by the... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
The Impact of CEOs in the Public Sector: Evidence from the English NHS
By: Katharina Janke, Carol Propper and Raffaella Sadun
Abstract
Governments worldwide have sought to reform the delivery of public services by mimicking private sector governance models that grant CEOs greater autonomy and give them responsibility for meeting key government targets. We examine the effectiveness of this... View Details
- February 2018 (Revised June 2021)
- Case
New Constructs: Disrupting Fundamental Analysis with Robo-Analysts
By: Charles C.Y. Wang and Kyle Thomas
This case highlights the business challenges associated with a financial technology firm, New Constructs, that created a technology that can quickly parse complicated public firm financials to paint a clearer economic picture of firms, remove accounting distortions,... View Details
- January 2018
- Technical Note
Business at the Base of the Pyramid: Understanding Impact and Impact Evaluations
By: V. Kasturi Rangan and Tricia Gregg
Unlike financial success, there is no clear consensus regarding how best to define and measure social impact. This HBS Technical Note written for students of the HBS MBA course Business at the Base of the Pyramid (BBOP), offers readers pragmatic perspectives on how the... View Details
- October 2017
- Article
The Size of the LGBT Population and the Magnitude of Anti-Gay Sentiment Are Substantially Underestimated
By: Katherine Baldiga Coffman, Lucas C. Coffman and Keith M. Marzilli Ericson
We demonstrate that widely used measures of anti-gay sentiment and the size of the LGBT population are misestimated, likely substantially. In a series of online experiments using a large and diverse but non-representative sample, we compare estimates from the standard... View Details