Publications

March 2013
Case

NovaStar Financial: A Short Seller's Battle

By: Suraj Srinivasan and Amy Kaser

The NovaStar case describes the challenges faced by short seller Marc Cohodes of hedge fund Rocker Partners as he tried to expose what he thought was widespread fraud in mortgage lender NovaStar Financial. The case is set in the time period from 2001 to 2007 and tracks... View Details

Educators

2019
Working Paper

Government Technology Policy, Social Value, and National Competitiveness

By: Frank Nagle

This study seeks to better understand the impact that government technology procurement regulations have on social value and national competitiveness. To do this, it examines the impact of a change in France’s technology procurement policy that required government... View Details

Keywords: Social Value; Competitiveness; Government Administration; Information Technology; Acquisition; Policy; Value

SSRN

April 2023
Article

Inattentive Inference

By: Thomas Graeber

This paper studies how people infer a state of the world from information structures that include additional, payoff-irrelevant states. For example, learning from a customer review about a product’s quality requires accounting for the reviewer’s otherwise irrelevant... View Details

Keywords: Cognition and Thinking; Information Types; Behavior; Knowledge Acquisition

July–August 2018
Article

Using Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing to Model the Costs of Various Process-Improvement Strategies in Acute Pain Management

By: Keyuri Popat, Kelly Ann Gracia, Alexis B. Guzman and Thomas W. Feeley

Pain control for patients undergoing thoracic surgery is essential for their comfort and for improving their ability to function after surgery, but it can significantly increase costs. Here, we demonstrate how time-driven activity-based costing (TDABC) can be used to... View Details

Keywords: Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing; Health Care and Treatment; Cost Management; Performance Improvement

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Article

Healthy Buildings in 2070

By: John D. Macomber and Joseph G. Allen

Fifty years seems a very long time in the future for most industries. Not so in buildings and real estate; built structures routinely last decades if not hundreds of years, as long as they are economically competitive. Any discussion of the 50-year future has to... View Details

Keywords: Health ＆ Wellness; Real Estate; Architectural Innovation; Public Health; Health; Buildings and Facilities; Well-being

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) inform medical practice, health care delivery, follow-on research, regulation, and health policy. Yet, many RCTs are inadequately randomized, blinded, and reported. To analyze scientists' and firms' incentives to meet clinical trial... View Details

January 1996 (Revised April 1997)
Case

Deutsche Allgemeinversicherung

Describes the application of statistical process control in a service industry. In this case, Annette Kluck must decide how to adopt manufacturing-based principles to a service process ranging from customer account setup to legal services. View Details

Keywords: Quality; Analysis; Service Operations; Business Strategy; Service Industry

Educators

December 2010
Article

The Case for Professional Boards

By: Robert C. Pozen

When the world's largest financial institutions had to be rescued from insolvency in 2008, many experts laid the blame at the feet of corporate boards. But insufficient board oversight is a problem that had supposedly been solved in 2002. As the United States... View Details

Keywords: Financial Institutions; Insolvency and Bankruptcy; Governing and Advisory Boards; Failure; Accounting Audits; Quality; Behavior; Legal Liability; Experience and Expertise; Corporate Governance; Governance Controls; Performance Effectiveness; United States

May 2017
Case

Pho Hoa Dorchester

By: Leonard A. Schlesinger, Michael Raiche and Roger Zhu

Pho Hoa is a traditional, family-owned Vietnamese restaurant in Dorchester, Massachusetts that opened in 1992. As he approached retirement in recent years, the founder/owner has scaled down his involvement in the day-to-day operations, leading to a number of... View Details

Educators

Connections Education (CE), now part of Pearson’s Online and Blended Learning business, was created in 2001 to develop a new, more flexible, and more personalized type of learning for students for whom the traditional classroom was not a good fit. In early 2017, CE... View Details

July 2014
Article

Second-Opinion Pathologic Review is a Patient Safety Mechanism That Helps Reduce Error and Decrease Waste

By: Lavinia Middleton, Thomas W. Feeley, Heidi W. Albright, Ronald Walters and Stanley Hamilton

We have a crisis in health care delivery, originating from increasing health care costs and inconsistent quality-of-care measures. During the past several years, value-based health care delivery has gained increasing attention as an approach to control costs and... View Details

Keywords: Pathology; Diagnostic Errors; Health Care and Treatment; Health Industry; North and Central America

2019
Working Paper

Biometric Monitoring, Service Delivery and Misreporting: Evidence from Healthcare in India

By: Thomas Bossuroy, Clara Delavallade and Vincent Pons

Developing countries increasingly use biometric identification technology in hopes of improving the reliability of administrative information and delivering social services more efficiently. This paper exploits the random placement of biometric tracking devices in... View Details

Keywords: Biometric Technology; Health Care and Treatment; Technological Innovation; Analytics and Data Science; Quality; Performance Improvement; India

2022
Working Paper

Regulatory Incentives for Innovation: The FDA's Breakthrough Therapy Designation

By: Amitabh Chandra, Jennifer Kao, Kathleen Miller and Ariel D. Stern

Regulators of new products confront a tradeoff between speeding a new product to market and collecting additional product quality information. The FDA’s Breakthrough Therapy Designation (BTD) provides an opportunity to understand if a regulator can use new policy to... View Details

Keywords: Research and Development; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Product Development

Article

Lessons from England's Health Care Workforce Redesign: No Quick Fixes

By: Richard Bohmer and Candace Imison

In 2000 the English National Health Service (NHS) began a series of workforce redesign initiatives that increased the number of doctors and nurses serving patients, expanded existing staff roles and developed new ones, redistributed health care work, and invested in... View Details

Keywords: Health Care; Work Force Management; United Kingdom

30 May 2005
Research & Ideas

Germany’s Pioneering Corporate Managers

loss of control and precision of information). Before the 1920s at least, most German industrial firms did not have an extensive middle management staff. Large German firms remained much more diversified and decentralized than unitary,... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

22 Dec 2015
First Look

December 22, 2015

Ann Leamon Abstract—In the past two decades, patents of inventions related to financial services ("finance patents"), as well as litigation around these patents, have surged. One of the repeated concerns voiced by academics and practitioners alike has been... View Details

Keywords: Carmen Nobel

02 Aug 2004
What Do You Think?

For Greater Transparency, Is Section 404 an Effective Response?

certify (upon penalty of legal action against them for failure to do so) the quality of internal control structures and procedures. You can imagine how this provision has captured the attention of CEOs... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

2012
Working Paper

The Determinants of National Competitiveness

By: Mercedes Delgado, Christian Ketels, Michael E. Porter and Scott Stern

We define foundational competitiveness as the expected level of output per working-age individual that is supported by the overall quality of a country as a place to do business. The focus on output per potential worker, a broader measure of national productivity than... View Details

Keywords: Country; Competition; Microeconomics; Macroeconomics