Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,119)
- Faculty Publications (159)
- Article
On Derivatives Markets and Social Welfare: A Theory of Empty Voting and Hidden Ownership
By: Jordan M. Barry, John William Hatfield and Scott Duke Kominers
In the past twenty-five years, derivatives markets have grown exponentially. Large, modern derivatives markets increasingly enable investors to hold economic interests in corporations without owning voting rights, and vice versa. This leads to both empty... View Details
- 2012
- Article
A Field Study on the Acceptance and Use of a New Accounting System
By: V.G. Narayanan, Ranjani Krishnan and Jamshed J. Mistry
This study examines the attitudes, use, and acceptance of a new accounting system in a pharmaceutical corporation that switched from an Activity Based Costing System to the Theory of Constraints System (TOC). Using structuration theory as a framework, we posit that... View Details
- November 2012
- Article
The Organization of Firms Across Countries
By: Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
We argue that social capital as proxied by trust increases aggregate productivity by affecting the organization of firms. To do this we collect new data on the decentralization of investment, hiring, production, and sales decisions from Corporate Headquarters to local... View Details
Keywords: Decentralization; Social Capital; Theory Of The Firm; Firm Objectives, Organization, And Behavior; Business Economics; Management Of Technological Innovation And R＆D; Technological Change: Choices And Consequences; Diffusion Processes; Organizational Structure; Performance Productivity; Trust; Technology Adoption; Multinational Firms and Management
- September 2012
- Article
The Bedside Manner of Homo Economicus: How and Why Priming an Economic Schema Reduces Compassion
By: Andrew Molinsky, Adam M. Grant and Joshua D. Margolis
We investigate how, why and when activating economic schemas reduces the compassion that individuals extend to others in need when delivering bad news. Across three experiments, we show that unobtrusively priming economic schemas decreases the compassion that... View Details
- June 2012 (Revised July 2013)
- Exercise
Competition Simulator Exercise: Instructions
In the Competition Simulator Exercise, students explore through trial and error some important economic foundations of competitive strategy and managerial economics. In particular, the nine simulator exercises let students explore horizontal differentiation with and... View Details
- 2012
- Book
The Rise of the Modern Firm
By: Geoffrey Jones and Walter A. Friedman
This authoritative volume focuses on the rise of modern firms, from their early history to the present day. It considers the role of laws and contracts in shaping the growth and influence of business enterprises. It presents entrepreneurs, executives and the firms they... View Details
- Article
Stability and Competitive Equilibrium in Matching Markets with Transfers
By: John William Hatfield and Scott Duke Kominers
This note surveys recent work in generalized matching theory, focusing on trading networks with transferable utility. In trading networks with a finite set of contractual opportunities, the substitutability of agents’ preferences is essential for the guaranteed... View Details
Keywords: Matching; Networks; Joint Ventures; Stability; Competitive Equilibrium; Core; Efficiency; Economics; Theory
- 2011
- Working Paper
The Institutional Logic of Great Global Firms
Theories of the firm have been dominated by a legacy of ideas from early industrialization that pose zero-sum opposition between capital and labor (or capital and nearly everything else), differentiating the economy from society and often posing irreconcilable... View Details
- January 2011
- Article
Let the Right One In: A Microeconomic Approach to Partner Choice in Mutualisms
By: Marco Archetti, Francisco Ubeda, Drew Fudenberg, Jerry R. Green, Naomi E. Pierce and Douglas W. Yu
One of the main problems impeding the evolution of cooperation is partner choice. When information is asymmetric (the quality of a potential partner is known only to himself), it may seem that partner choice is not possible without signaling. Many mutualisms, however,... View Details
- 2010
- Working Paper
Regulating for Legitimacy: Consumer Credit Access in France and America
Theories of legitimate regulation have emphasized the role of governments either in fixing market failures to promote greater efficiency or in restricting the efficient functioning of markets in order to pursue public welfare goals. In either case, features of markets... View Details
- October 2010
- Article
Culture Clash: The Costs and Benefits of Homogeneity
This paper develops an economic theory of the costs and benefits of corporate culture-in the sense of shared beliefs and values in order to study the effects of "culture clash" in mergers and acquisitions. I first use a simple analytical framework to show that shared... View Details
- September 2010
- Article
How Firms Respond to Being Rated
By: Aaron K. Chatterji and Michael W. Toffel
While many rating systems seek to help buyers overcome information asymmetries when making purchasing decisions, we investigate how these ratings also influence the companies being rated. We hypothesize that ratings are particularly likely to spur responses from firms... View Details
- 2011
- Working Paper
Cyclicality of Credit Supply: Firm Level Evidence
By: Bo Becker and Victoria Ivashina
Theory predicts that there is a close link between bank credit supply and the evolution of the business cycle. Yet fluctuations in bank-loan supply have been hard to quantify in the time-series. While loan issuance falls in recessions, it is not clear if this is due to... View Details
- June 2010
- Article
What Causes Industry Agglomeration? Evidence from Coagglomeration Patterns
By: Glenn Ellison, Edward Glaeser and William R. Kerr
Why do firms cluster near one another? We test Marshall's theories of industrial agglomeration by examining which industries locate near one another, or coagglomerate. We construct pairwise coagglomeration indices for US manufacturing industries from the Economic... View Details
- January 2010
- Article
Clusters of Entrepreneurship
By: Edward L. Glaeser, William R. Kerr and Giacomo A.M. Ponzetto
Employment growth is strongly predicted by smaller average establishment size, both across cities and across industries within cities, but there is little consensus on why this relationship exists. Traditional economic explanations emphasize factors that reduce entry... View Details
- 2010
- Chapter
Measuring and Managing Macrofinancial Risk and Financial Stability: A New Framework
By: Dale F. Gray, Robert C. Merton and Zvi Bodie
This paper proposes a new approach to improve the way central banks can analyze and manage the financial risks of a national economy. It is based on the modern theory and practice of contingent claims analysis (CCA), which is successfully used today at the level of... View Details
- 2010
- Chapter
The Paranoid Style in the Study of American Politics
By: David Moss and Mary Oey
What drives policy making in a democracy? The conventional view is that political actors, like economic actors, pursue their self interest, and that special interest groups dominate the policy making process by satisfying policy makers' need for money and other forms... View Details
Keywords: Policy; Government Legislation; Media; Interests; Power and Influence; Public Opinion; United States
- 2009
- Working Paper
Clusters of Entrepreneurship
By: Edward L. Glaeser, William R. Kerr and Giacomo A.M. Ponzetto
Employment growth is strongly predicted by smaller average establishment size, both across cities and across industries within cities, but there is little consensus on why this relationship exists. Traditional economic explanations emphasize factors that reduce entry... View Details
- 2009
- Working Paper
Culture Clash: The Costs and Benefits of Homogeneity
This paper develops an economic theory of the costs and benefits of corporate culture—in the sense of shared beliefs and values—in order to study the effects of "culture clash" in mergers and acquisitions. I first use a simple analytical framework to show that shared... View Details
- 2009
- Article
Acting Globally but Thinking Locally? The Enduring Influence of Local Communities on Organizations
By: Christopher Marquis and Julie Battilana
We develop an institutionally oriented theory of how and why local communities continue to matter for organizations in a global age. Since globalization has taken center stage in both practitioner and academic circles, research has shifted away from understanding... View Details