Publications
Publications
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(1,116)
- Faculty Publications (221)
- March 2018
- Article
Scraped Data and Sticky Prices
By: Alberto Cavallo
I use daily prices collected from online retailers in five countries to study the impact of measurement bias on three common price stickiness statistics. Relative to previous results, I find that online prices have longer durations, with fewer price changes close to... View Details
- February 2018
- Article
Structural GARCH: The Volatility-Leverage Connection
By: Robert F. Engle and Emil N. Siriwardane
During the financial crisis, financial firm leverage and volatility both rose dramatically. Consequently, institutions are being asked to reduce leverage in order to reduce risk, though the effectiveness depends upon the role of capital structure in volatility. To... View Details
Keywords: Leverage; Credit Risk; Crisis Management; Equity; Volatility; Credit; Risk Management; Financial Crisis
- January 2018
- Technical Note
The Scope of Business at the Base of the Pyramid: Middle and Lower Income Countries
By: V. Kasturi Rangan and Tricia Gregg
Using World Bank data, the note defines the Base of the Pyramid population as the 4.76 billion people living on less than $10/day. It briefly reviews the perspectives of key business articles that address this market, notably C.K. Prahalad’s work on Bottom of the... View Details
- January 2018 (Revised February 2018)
- Technical Note
The Scope of Business at the Base of the Pyramid: Poverty in the U.S. and Other OECD Countries
By: V. Kasturi Rangan and Tricia Gregg
Using data from U.S. Census and OECD, this note defines poverty as those populations who fall below 50% of that country’s median per capita income. It then provides a brief statistical tour of six key challenges facing such populations: Income and Jobs, Healthcare,... 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
Preventing Fairness Gerrymandering: Auditing and Learning for Subgroup Fairness
By: Michael J Kearns, Seth Neel, Aaron Leon Roth and Zhiwei Steven Wu
The most prevalent notions of fairness in machine learning are statistical definitions: they fix a small collection of pre-defined groups, and then ask for parity of some statistic of the classifier (like classification rate or false positive rate) across these groups.... View Details
- Article
Scenario Generation for Long Run Interest Rate Risk Assessment
By: Robert F. Engle, Guillaume Roussellet and Emil N. Siriwardane
We propose a statistical model of the term structure of U.S. treasury yields tailored for long-term probability-based scenario generation and forecasts. Our model is easy to estimate and is able to simultaneously reproduce the positivity, persistence, and factor... View Details
- October 2017 (Revised April 2018)
- Case
Improving Worker Safety in the Era of Machine Learning (A)
By: Michael W. Toffel, Dan Levy, Jose Ramon Morales Arilla and Matthew S. Johnson
Managers make predictions all the time: How fast will my markets grow? How much inventory do I need? How intensively should I monitor my suppliers? Which potential customers will be most responsive to a particular marketing campaign? Which job candidates should I... View Details
- Article
Howard Raiffa: The Art, Science, and Humanity of a Legendary Negotiation Analyst
Rightly known as the “father of negotiation analysis,” Howard Raiffa was my thesis advisor, colleague, and friend for over 30 years. The bulk of this article develops an account of his intellectual trajectory from game theory to statistical decision theory to decision... View Details
- September 2017
- Article
Reexamining Staggered Boards and Shareholder Value
By: Charles C.Y. Wang and Alma Cohen
Cohen and Wang (2013) (CW2013) provide evidence consistent with market participants perceiving staggered boards to be value reducing. Amihud and Stoyanov (2016) (AS2016) contests these findings, reporting some specifications under which the results are not... View Details
- September 2017
- Article
The Real Effects of Capital Controls: Firm-Level Evidence from a Policy Experiment
By: Laura Alfaro, Anusha Chari and Fabio Kanczuk
Emerging-market governments adopted capital control taxes to manage the massive surge in foreign capital inflows in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Theory suggests that the imposition of capital controls can drive up the cost of capital and curb... View Details
- July 31, 2017
- Article
A Commitment Contract to Achieve Virologic Suppression in Poorly Adherent Patients with HIV/AIDS
By: Marcella Alsan, John Beshears, Wendy S. Armstrong, James J. Choi, Brigitte C. Madrian, Minh Ly T. Nguyen, Carlos Del Rio, David Laibson and Vincent C. Marconi
Objective: Assess whether a commitment contract informed by behavioral economics leads to persistent virologic suppression among HIV-positive patients with poor antiretroviral therapy (ART) adherence.
Design: Single-center pilot randomized clinical trial and a... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
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 accounting 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... View Details
- July 2017
- Article
Inflation Expectations, Learning, and Supermarket Prices: Evidence from Survey Experiments
By: Alberto Cavallo, Guillermo Cruces and Ricardo Perez-Truglia
Information frictions play a central role in the formation of household inflation expectations, but there is no consensus about their origins. We address this question with novel evidence from survey experiments. We document two main findings. First, individuals in... View Details
- July 2017
- Article
What Do Measures of Real-Time Corporate Sales Tell Us About Earnings Surprises and Post-announcement Returns?
By: Kenneth A. Froot, Namho Kang, Gideon Ozik and Ronnie Sadka
We develop real-time proxies of retail corporate sales from multiple sources, including approximately 50 million mobile devices. These measures contain information from both the earnings quarter (within quarter) and the period between that quarter's end and the... View Details
- Article
Statistical Physics of Human Cooperation
By: Matjaž Perc, Jillian J. Jordan, David G. Rand, Zhen Wang, Stefano Boccaletti and Attila Szolnoki
Extensive cooperation among unrelated individuals is unique to humans, who often sacrifice personal benefits for the common good and work together to achieve what they are unable to execute alone. The evolutionary success of our species is indeed due, to a large... View Details
- May 2017
- Article
Agent-based Modeling: A Guide for Social Psychologists
By: Joshua Conrad Jackson, David Rand, Kevin Lewis, Michael I. Norton and Kurt Gray
Agent-based modeling is a longstanding but underused method that allows researchers to simulate artificial worlds for hypothesis testing and theory building. Agent-based models (ABMs) offer unprecedented control and statistical power by allowing researchers to... View Details
- Article
Are Online and Offline Prices Similar? Evidence from Large Multi-Channel Retailers
By: Alberto Cavallo
Online prices are increasingly used for measurement and research applications, yet little is known about their relation to prices in physical stores, where most retail transactions occur. I conduct the first large-scale comparison of prices simultaneously collected... View Details
- September 2016
- Case
Hotel Vertu: Analyzing the Opportunity in the Boutique Hotel Industry
By: Howard H. Stevenson and Michael J. Roberts DBA
Two soon-to-be MBA graduates are considering a business opportunity in the boutique hotel industry. Having found a seemingly attractive property in Savannah, Georgia, Yvonne D'Arcy and Elisabeth Whiting face questions about career issues, planning, financing, and the... View Details
- Fall 2016
- Article
The Impact of Supplier Inventory Service Level on Retailer Demand
By: Nathan Craig, Nicole DeHoratius and Ananth Raman
To set inventory service levels, suppliers must understand how changes in inventory service level affect demand. We build on prior research, which uses analytical models and laboratory experiments to study the impact of a supplier’s service level on demand from... View Details