Publications
Publications
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(1,929)
- Faculty Publications (463)
- July 2021
- Case
A Close Shave at Squire
In 2020, just after closing a $34 million Series B financing round, Dave Salvant and Songe LaRon consider how to adjust their business, Squire Technologies, to the new realities posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Their barbershop technology, including tools to run a shop... View Details
- June 2021 (Revised October 2021)
- Case
Nissan's Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic
By: Ananth Raman, William Schmidt and Ann Winslow
In January 2020, Ashwani Gupta took over as COO at Nissan Motor Corporation, and several weeks later, the COVID-19 pandemic began. Nissan’s Business Continuity Plan (BCP) had been key to the resilience of Nissan’s supply chain. It had enabled Nissan to recover from... View Details
- 2021
- Article
To Thine Own Self Be True? Incentive Problems in Personalized Law
By: Jordan M. Barry, John William Hatfield and Scott Duke Kominers
Recent years have seen an explosion of scholarship on “personalized law.” Commentators foresee a world in which regulators armed with big data and machine learning techniques determine the optimal legal rule for every regulated party, then instantaneously disseminate... View Details
Keywords: Personalized Law; Regulation; Regulatory Avoidance; Regulatory Arbitrage; Law And Economics; Law And Technology; Law And Artificial Intelligence; Futurism; Moral Hazard; Elicitation; Signaling; Privacy; Law; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Information Technology; AI and Machine Learning
- 2021
- Working Paper
Financial Flexibility and Corporate Employment
By: Rebecca Lester, Ethan Rouen and Braden Williams
We study the role of financial flexibility on COVID-19 employment actions. Using daily data from March through May 2020 for 354 of the largest U.S. employers, we find that firms facing a negative demand shock were 28.8 percentage points more likely to reduce their... View Details
Keywords: Financial Flexibility; COVID-19; Pandemic; Employment; Health Pandemics; System Shocks; Finance
- Spring 2021
- Article
Whose Job Is It Anyway? Co-Ethnic Hiring in New U.S. Ventures
By: Sari Pekkala Kerr and William R. Kerr
We explore co-ethnic hiring among new ventures using U.S. administrative data. Co-ethnic hiring is ubiquitous among immigrant groups, averaging about 22.5% and ranging from <2% to >40%. Co-ethnic hiring grows with the size of the local ethnic workforce, greater... View Details
Keywords: Hiring; Job Creation; E-Verify; Immigration; Selection and Staffing; Ethnicity; Entrepreneurship
- Article
CDS Trading and Nonrelationship Lending Dynamics
By: Jung Koo Kang, Christopher Williams and Regina Wittenberg-Moerman
We investigate how credit default swaps (CDSs) affect lenders’ incentives to initiate new lending relationships. We predict that CDSs reduce adverse selection that nonrelationship lead arrangers face when competing for loans. Consistently, we find that a loan is... View Details
- February 2021
- Supplement
HNA Group: Global Excellence with Chinese Characteristics (C)
By: William C. Kirby, Billy Chan and John P. McHugh
July 2017 was supposed to be a triumphant month for HNA Group. The latest Fortune Global 500 list showed the company had again skyrocketed in its ranking to no. 170, an improvement of over 200 positions from the year prior. Yet earlier that same July, the mysterious... View Details
Keywords: Conglomerate; Airline Industry; Coronavirus; Financial Risk; Debt; Bankruptcy; Global Strategy; Restructuring; Health Pandemics; Financial Markets; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Financial Condition; Globalized Firms and Management; Business and Government Relations; Air Transportation Industry; Financial Services Industry; China
- 2021
- Working Paper
Whose Job Is It Anyway? Co-Ethnic Hiring in New U.S. Ventures
By: Sari Pekkala Kerr and William R. Kerr
We explore co-ethnic hiring among new ventures using U.S. administrative data. Co-ethnic hiring is ubiquitous among immigrant groups, averaging about 22.5% and ranging from <2% to >40%. Co-ethnic hiring grows with the size of the local ethnic workforce, greater... View Details
Keywords: Hiring; Job Creation; E-Verify; Immigration; Selection and Staffing; Ethnicity; Entrepreneurship
- January 2021 (Revised August 2021)
- Case
ByteDance: TikTok and the Trials of Going Viral
By: William C. Kirby and John P. McHugh
In 2020, TikTok became the most valuable start-up ever. The short-form, video-sharing social media platform emerged as the crown jewel of the Chinese technology firm ByteDance, realizing 850 million monthly users and an estimated worth of $180 billion. However, a... View Details
Keywords: China; Technology; Startup; Start-up; International Strategy; Global Strategy And Leadership; Innovation; Political Risk; Regulations; Trump; Foreign Policy; Foreign Investment; Chinese Internet Market; Global Strategy; Crisis Management; Risk and Uncertainty; Entrepreneurship; Globalized Economies and Regions; Government Legislation; Innovation and Management; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Internet and the Web; Social Media; Technology Industry; China; United States
- January 2021
- Article
Chain Stability in Trading Networks
By: John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers, Alexandru Nichifor, Michael Ostrovsky and Alexander Westkamp
We show that in general trading networks with bilateral contracts, a suitably adapted chain stability concept (Ostrovsky, 2008) is equivalent to stability (Hatfield and Kominers, 2012; Hatfield et al., 2013) if all agents' preferences are fully substitutable and... View Details
- November 2020
- Teaching Note
Unilever's Response to the Future of Work
By: William R. Kerr and Bailey McAfee
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 820-104. View Details
- November 2020 (Revised March 2023)
- Teaching Note
Unrest in Chile
By: Vincent Pons, John Masko, Rafael Di Tella and William Mullins
In 2020, Chileans would head to the ballot box to decide their country’s future. Many international observers credited Chile’s decades of neoliberal governance with turning the country into Latin America’s “Tiger,” a prosperous, diversified economy on its way to... View Details
- November 2020
- Case
Guild Education: Unlocking Opportunity for America's Workforce
By: William A. Sahlman, Michael D. Smith, Nicole Tempest Keller and Alpana Thapar
Founded in 2015, Guild Education is an education marketplace that connects employers and universities to provide employees with ‘education as a benefit.’ The Denver-based company is transforming traditional tuition assistance programs by facilitating direct payment by... View Details
- October 29, 2020
- Article
How to Build a Digital Brand That Lasts
By: William Collis and David Collis
What makes a brand durable even as business models, technology and consumer behavior radically change? The key is that durable brands are adaptable brands—even legacy ones. To create durability, apply the MACE framework: 1) Mastery: Give your consumers... View Details
- October 2020
- Article
Collusion in Markets with Syndication
By: John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers, Richard Lowery and Jordan M. Barry
Markets for IPOs and debt issuances are syndicated, in the sense that a bidder who wins a contract may invite losing bidders to join a syndicate that together fulfills the contract. We show that in markets with syndication, standard intuitions from industrial... View Details
Keywords: Collusion; Antitrust; IPO Underwriting; Syndication; ＂Repeated Games＂; Markets; Game Theory
- July 2020 (Revised September 2020)
- Case
MobSquad
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, William R. Kerr and Susie L. Ma
Irfhan Rawji (MBA 2004) launched MobSquad in October 2018 to help American tech start-ups retain hard-to-find talent, many of whom struggled with U.S. work visa issues, such as software engineers with experience in artificial intelligence, machine learning, or data... View Details
- Summer 2020
- Article
Tech Clusters
By: William R. Kerr and Frederic Robert-Nicoud
Tech clusters like Silicon Valley play a central role for modern innovation, business competitiveness, and economic performance. This paper reviews what constitutes a tech cluster, how they function internally, and the degree to which policy makers can purposefully... View Details
- June 2020
- Case
Agile Consumer Product Innovation with Alibaba's Tmall Innovation Center
By: William R. Kerr, Daniel O'Connor and James Palano
Consumer products companies were beset by changes on all sides during the 2010s. Customers were increasingly turning to ecommerce platforms rather than shopping in-store. Meanwhile, nimble, digitally-savvy competitors were gaining market share by capitalizing on the... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Global Talent and U.S. Immigration Policy
By: William R. Kerr
Talent is a critical resource for today’s knowledge economy. The United States has benefited substantially from high-skilled migration since the 1970s, especially with respect to innovation and entrepreneurship. This chapter reviews data on these immigrant... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Immigration Policy Levers for U.S. Innovation and Startups
By: William R. Kerr and Sari Pekkala Kerr
Immigrants account for about a quarter of U.S. invention and entrepreneurship despite a policy environment that is not well suited for these purposes. This chapter reviews the U.S. immigration policy environment that governs how skilled migrants move to America for... View Details