Publications

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2016
Working Paper

College Tuition, Public Finance and New Business Starts

By: Gareth Olds

A growing public discourse cites the rising cost of education and student debt overhang as a contributor to slow economic growth. A parallel discussion explores the causes of the secular decline in business dynamism and entrepreneurship rates in the United States over... View Details

Keywords: Cost; Higher Education; Entrepreneurship

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26 Oct 2021
Research & Ideas

What Companies Want Most in a CEO: A Good Listener

basic social capabilities are perceived to play a key role for the success of complex and information intensive organizations. It is unclear, however, whether the supply of social skills in the managerial labor market has been able to... View Details

Keywords: by Jay Fitzgerald

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Tata Hall | About

great-grandson of Tata Group founder Jamsetji Tata, began working at the century-old company in 1962, after graduating from Cornell University with a degree in architecture and structural engineering. Starting his career as a laborer on... View Details

July 2019 (Revised May 2020)
Case

AT&T, Retraining, and the Workforce of Tomorrow

By: William R. Kerr, Joseph B. Fuller and Carl Kreitzberg

By the late 2000s, rapid changes in the telecommunications industry forced AT&T’s management team to take on a task that CEO Randall Stephenson called the “biggest logistical challenge” they had ever seen: retraining 100,000 workers by 2020. In 2012, internal company... View Details

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Curriculum - Business & Environment

the source of societal ills that range from inequality and systemic racism to climate change and labor market disruption. The goal of CATS is both to examine these criticisms and, more importantly, to interrogate the deep and fundamental... View Details

18 Apr 2016
Research & Ideas

The Cost of Leaning In

between men and women, there’s also a persistent belief that women could close that gap if only they’d negotiate more frequently. In April 2012, the US Department of Labor hosted the Equal Pay App Challenge, in which students competed to... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

01 Feb 1999
News

Too Much of a Good Thing?

voluntary or involuntary. Salter explains that, on a global scale, overcapacity is linked to demographics. "From Asia alone, there will soon be over one billion laborers earning less than $4 a day dominating the world's workforce," he... View Details

Keywords: Garry Emmons

March 2023 (Revised September 2023)
Case

Patagonia: 'Earth Is Now Our Only Shareholder'

By: Brian Trelstad, Nien-hê Hsieh, Michael Norris and Susan Pinckney

In September 2022, Yvon Chouinard, the iconoclastic founder of outdoor apparel company Patagonia, announced a new ownership model for his company. Chouinard and his family had held complete control of the company's voting and non-voting stock since its founding 50... View Details

07 Jul 2021
Book

Good News for Disgraced Companies: You Can Regain Trust

labor protests and a federal law to prevent a repeat of “L’affaire Michelin.” Generations of trust evaporated. The company regained it with a 10-year turnaround and a commitment to closely collaborating with workers at every step. "Trust... View Details

Keywords: by Lane Lambert

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Accounting & Management Awards & Honors - Faculty & Research

Corporate Governance Society (ICGS) Annual Conference Best Paper Award for “Does Information Technology Reduce Corporate Misconduct?” with Jonas Heese. Joseph Pacelli : Winner of the Best Paper Award at the 2022 MIT Asia Conference in Accounting for "Communicating... View Details

22 Aug 2005
Research & Ideas

Restoring a Global Economy, 1950–1980

proportion of Latin Americans rose from 18 percent to 47 percent, and the proportion of Asians from 4 percent to 37 percent.4 By 1980, the integration of worldwide capital, commodity, and labor markets remained limited compared to the... View Details

Keywords: by Geoffrey Jones

01 Mar 2024
News

In My Humble Opinion: Role Model

the businesspeople, and I could also speak to the engineers. I applied to HBS with the thought that someday I’d like to be director of NASA,” she says. But here’s the thing: Qarnain also loved to act and sing. When she graduated with her MBA into a less-than-welcoming... View Details

Keywords: Julia Hanna; acting; theater; diversity; career path; Performing Arts, Spectator Sports, and Related Industries; Arts, Entertainment

October 2013 (Revised November 2021)
Case

Cynthia Carroll at Anglo American (A)

By: Gautam Mukunda, Lisa Mazzanti and Aldo Sesia

In 2007, Cynthia Carroll, the newly-appointed chief executive of mining giant Anglo American, was considering shutting down mines in South Africa for safety reasons, namely worker fatalities. No company had ever done so before. Carroll felt that operating a company... View Details

Keywords: Culture; Leadership; Gender; Safety; Working Conditions; Business Exit or Shutdown; Organizational Culture; Change Management; Mining; Mining Industry; South Africa

September 2015
Case

GovDelivery

By: Mitchell Weiss

Is government the biggest, worst customer in the world? And is that a reason for venture investors to back companies that sell to government or to stay away? It had been seven years since Scott Burns joined his friend Zach Stabenow to get a company called GovDocs off... View Details

Keywords: GovDelivery; Public Entrepreneurship; B2G; Business-to-Government; Scott Burns; Entrepreneurship; Government Administration; Venture Capital; Information Technology Industry; Public Administration Industry; Web Services Industry; Minnesota; United States

28 Jun 2021
Research & Ideas

Keep or Cut Workers? How Companies Reacted to the COVID-19 Crisis

companies’ finances and worker treatment gives job seekers a new card to play. “That’s going to inform employee decisions when the labor market is tight,” he says. “The data is becoming more and more available. It’s easy to find, and it... View Details

Keywords: by Lane Lambert

17 Nov 2020
Research & Ideas

Why a Blended Workforce May Be Key to Lasting Competitive Advantage

In recent years, companies have been anxious about the lack of skilled workers to fill pivotal jobs. But then came COVID-19 and a subsequent recession. The ensuing business turmoil and record-high unemployment may have temporarily distracted companies from their... View Details

Keywords: by Joseph B. Fuller

May 2022
Case

Timnit Gebru: 'SILENCED No More' on AI Bias and The Harms of Large Language Models

By: Tsedal Neeley and Stefani Ruper

Dr. Timnit Gebru—a leading artificial intelligence (AI) computer scientist and co-lead of Google’s Ethical AI team—was messaging with one of her colleagues when she saw the words: “Did you resign?? Megan sent an email saying that she accepted your resignation.” Heart... View Details

Keywords: Ethics; Employment; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Technological Innovation