Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(794)
- Faculty Publications (156)
- 2016
- Working Paper
The Empirical Economics of Online Attention
By: Andre Boik, Shane Greenstein and Jeffrey Prince
In several markets, firms compete not for consumer expenditure but instead for consumer attention. We model and characterize how households allocate their scarce attention in arguably the largest market for attention: the Internet. Our characterization of household... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
Fiscal Rules and Sovereign Default
By: Laura Alfaro and Fabio Kanczuk
Recurrent concerns over debt sustainability in emerging and developed nations have prompted renewed debate on the role of fiscal rules. Their optimality, however, remains unclear. We provide a quantitative analysis of fiscal rules in a standard model of sovereign debt... View Details
- Article
Learning from Potentially Biased Statistics: Household Inflation Perceptions and Expectations in Argentina
By: Alberto Cavallo, Guillermo Cruces and Ricardo Perez-Truglia
When forming expectations, households may be influenced by perceived bias in the information they receive. In this paper, we study how individuals learn from potentially biased statistics using data from both a natural experiment and a survey experiment during a... View Details
- 2016
- Book
Revolutionizing Innovation: Users, Communities, and Open Innovation
By: Dietmar Harhoff and Karim R. Lakhani
The last two decades have witnessed an extraordinary growth of new models of managing and organizing the innovation process, which emphasize users over producers. Large parts of the knowledge economy now routinely rely on users, communities, and open innovation... View Details
- August 2015 (Revised March 2017)
- Case
Planters Nuts
By: Robert J. Dolan and Donald K. Ngwe
In 2012 Planters had about $1 billion in U.S. annual revenues, but had experienced declining unit sales and household penetration over the past six years. The snack nuts category was growing overall, but household spending was shifting away from peanuts, cashews, and... View Details
- Article
Liquidity in Retirement Savings Systems: An International Comparison
By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, Joshua Hurwitz, David Laibson and Brigitte C. Madrian
We compare the liquidity that six developed countries have built into their employer-based defined contribution (DC) retirement schemes. In Germany, Singapore, and the UK, withdrawals are essentially banned no matter what kind of transitory income shock the household... View Details
Keywords: Saving; Financial Liquidity; Retirement; Canada; Germany; Australia; United Kingdom; United States; Singapore
- April 2015
- Article
Money Creation and the Shadow Banking System
By: Adi Sunderam
Many explanations for the rapid growth of the shadow banking system in the mid-2000s focus on money demand. This paper asks whether the short-term liabilities of the shadow banking system behave like money. We first present a simple model where households demand money... View Details
- Winter 2014
- Article
Does Service Bundling Reduce Churn?
By: Jeff Prince and Shane Greenstein
We examine whether bundling in telecommunications services reduces churn using a series of large, independent cross sections of household decisions. To identify the effect of bundling, we construct a pseudo-panel dataset and utilize a linear, dynamic panel-data model,... View Details
- Article
Spatial Determinants of Entrepreneurship in India
By: Ejaz Ghani, William R. Kerr and Stephen O'Connell
We analyze the spatial determinants of entrepreneurship in India in the manufacturing and services sectors. Among general district traits, quality of physical infrastructure and workforce education are the strongest predictors of entry, with labor laws and household... View Details
- July 2014
- Article
Smart Money? The Effect of Education on Financial Outcomes
By: Shawn A. Cole, Anna Paulson and Gauri Kartini Shastry
Household financial decisions are important for household welfare, economic growth and financial stability. Yet, our understanding of the determinants of financial decision-making is limited. Exploiting exogenous variation in state compulsory schooling laws in both... View Details
- February 2014 (Revised December 2016)
- Case
Aldi: The Dark Horse Discounter
By: Eric Van den Steen and David Lane
In 2013, Aldi—the world's 8th largest retailer—planned to accelerate its US expansion. Aldi was a German-based hard discounter that sold a limited assortment of private-label groceries and household items in barebones stores. Despite its presence with 1200 stores in 32... View Details
- April 2013
- Case
Sterling Household Products Company
By: William E. Fruhan and Craig Stephenson
Sterling Household Products manufactures and markets a broad line of consumer goods from laundry soap and cosmetics to cleaning, disinfecting, and sanitizing products. The company has many highly regarded brand names and consistently reports impressive sales and... View Details
- April 2013
- Teaching Note
Sterling Household Products Company (Brief Case)
By: William E. Fruhan and Craig Stephenson
- April 2013
- Supplement
Sterling Household Products Company, Spreadsheet for Instructors (Brief Case)
By: William E. Fruhan and Craig Stephenson
- April 2013
- Supplement
Sterling Household Products Company, Spreadsheet for Students (Brief Case)
By: William E. Fruhan and Craig Stephenson
- Spring 2013
- Article
The Growth of Finance
By: Robin Greenwood and David S. Scharfstein
The U.S. financial services industry grew from 4.9% of GDP in 1980 to 7.9% of GDP in 2007. A sizeable portion of the growth can be explained by rising asset management fees, which in turn were driven by increases in the valuation of tradable assets, particularly... View Details
- Article
Does the Classic Microfinance Model Discourage Entrepreneurship Among the Poor? Experimental Evidence from India
By: Erica Field, Rohini Pande, John Papp and Natalia Rigol
Do the repayment requirements of the classic microfinance contract inhibit investment in high-return but illiquid business opportunities among the poor? Using a field experiment, we compare the classic contract which requires that repayment begin immediately after loan... View Details
- January 2013
- Article
Barriers to Household Risk Management: Evidence from India
By: Shawn A. Cole, Xavier Gine, Jeremy Tobacman, Petia Topalova, Robert M. Townsend and James Vickery
Why do many households remain exposed to large exogenous sources of non-systematic income risk? We use a series of randomized field experiments in rural India to test the importance of price and non-price factors in the adoption of an innovative rainfall insurance... View Details
- Article
Happiness on Tap: Piped Water Adoption in Urban Morocco
By: Florencia Devoto, Esther Duflo, Pascaline Dupas, William Pariente and Vincent Pons
Connecting private dwellings to the water main is expensive and typically cannot be publicly financed. We show that households' willingness to pay for a private connection is high when it can be purchased on credit, not because a connection improves health but because... View Details
- September 2012
- Case
BASIX (Abridged)
By: Shawn Cole and Peter Tufano
BASIX, an Indian microfinance corporation, must decide whether to continue to sell weather insurance to its clients. A brand-new financial product, weather insurance pays if measured rainfall during the growing season falls below a pre-specified limit. Mr. Sattaiah,... View Details
Keywords: Cost vs Benefits; Microfinance; Household; Risk Management; Insurance; Banking Industry; India