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Publications
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(2,340)
- Faculty Publications (462)
- February 2021
- Article
Do Household Wealth Shocks Affect Productivity? Evidence from Innovative Workers During the Great Recession
By: S. Bernstein, T. McQuade and R. Townsend
We investigate how the deterioration of household balance sheets affects worker productivity, and, in turn, economic downturns. Specifically, we compare the output of innovative workers who experienced differential declines in housing wealth during the financial crisis... View Details
- January 2021 (Revised June 2021)
- Case
Hester Pharmaceuticals (A): A Pricing Dilemma
By: Dante Roscini and John Masko
In August 2019, the leadership of Hester Pharmaceuticals (Hester) had a problem. Italy promised to be a key market for their new breakthrough oncology drug Akrozumab, but for almost two years, its single-payer healthcare system had been unable to agree with Hester on a... View Details
Keywords: Macroeconomics; Trade; Price; Global Range; Global Strategy; Globalized Markets and Industries; Health Care and Treatment; Patents; Monopoly; Negotiation; Business and Government Relations; Risk and Uncertainty; Human Needs; Business Strategy; Commercialization; Pharmaceutical Industry; Italy
- January 2021
- Article
Turbulence, Firm Decentralization and Growth in Bad Times
By: Philippe Aghion, Nicholas Bloom, Brian Lucking, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
What is the optimal form of firm organization during “bad times”? We present a model of delegation within the firm to show that the effect is ambiguous. The greater turbulence following macro shocks may benefit decentralized firms because the value of local information... View Details
- December 2020
- Article
The Parable of the Auctioneer: Complexity in Paul R. Milgrom's Discovering Prices
By: Scott Duke Kominers and Alexander Teytelboym
Designing marketplaces in complex settings requires both novel economic theory and real-world engineering, often drawing upon ideas from fields such as computer science and operations research. In Discovering Prices, Milgrom (2017) explains the theory and design... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Party-State Capitalism in China
By: Margaret Pearson, Meg Rithmire and Kellee Tsai
The “state capitalism” model, in which the state retains a dominant role as owner or investor-shareholder amidst the presence of markets and private firms, has received increasing attention, with China cited as the main exemplar. Yet as models evolve, so has China’s... 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–December 2020
- Article
Getting Serious About Diversity: Enough Already with the Business Case
By: Robin Ely and David A. Thomas
Leaders may mean well when they tout the economic payoffs of hiring more women and people of color, but there is no research support for the notion that diversifying the workforce automatically improves a company’s performance. This article critiques the popular... View Details
- October 2020
- Case
Fiscal Responses to COVID-19
For the first half of 2020, the COVID-19 crisis seemed on the verge of spiraling out of control. The business world struggled to figure out what COVID meant for macroeconomics. Extended restrictions limiting human interaction meant an end to normal economic production,... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
An Executive Order Worth $100 Billion: The Impact of an Immigration Ban's Announcement on Fortune 500 Firms' Valuation
By: Dany Bahar, Prithwiraj Choudhury and Britta Glennon
On June 22, 2020, President Trump issued an Executive Order (EO) that suspended new work visas, barring nearly 200,000 foreign workers and their dependents from entering the United States and preventing American companies from hiring skilled immigrants using H-1B or L1... View Details
Keywords: Visa; Foreign Workers; Fortune 500; Immigration; Policy; System Shocks; Business Ventures; Valuation
- Fall 2020
- Article
Sizing Up Corporate Restructuring in the COVID Crisis
By: Robin Greenwood, Benjamin Iverson and David Thesmar
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the financial and legal system will need to deal with a surge of financial distress in the business sector. Some firms will be able to survive, while others will face bankruptcy and thus need to be liquidated or reorganized. Many... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Bankruptcy and the COVID-19 Crisis
By: Jialan Wang, Jeyul Yang, Benjamin Iverson and Raymond Kluender
We examine the impact of the COVID-19 economic crisis on business and consumer bankruptcies in the United States using real-time data on the universe of filings. Historically, bankruptcies have closely tracked the business cycle and contemporaneous unemployment rates.... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 2 Transactions in a Task Network
From the 1930s through today, many economists have conceived of large technical systems for the production of goods and services as a series of transactions. This point of view has led eminent economists to assert that transactions are the fundamental unit of analysis... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 5 Ecosystems and Complementarities
The purpose of this chapter is to introduce two new building blocks to the theory of how technology shapes organizations. The first is a new layer of organization structure: a business “ecosystem.” The second is the economic concept of “complementarity.” Ecosystems are... View Details
- September 2020
- Article
Dignity, Inequality, and the Populist Backlash: Lessons from America and Europe for a Sustainable Globalization
By: Rawi Abdelal
The greatest challenge to the sustainability of our current era of globalization comes from within the United States. Most Americans have come to reject globalization. We must discern the lessons from the parts of the developed world where the backlash is also... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Long-Run Returns to Private Equity in Emerging Markets
By: Shawn Cole, Martin Melecky, Florian Mölders and Tristan Reed
We provide the first evidence on the long-run returns to private equity in emerging and frontier markets using the cash flows from every equity investment made by the International Finance Corporation across 130 countries over 58 years. Risk-adjusted returns are... View Details
- September 2020
- Article
The Rise of the Investor State: State Capital in the Chinese Economy
By: Meg Rithmire and Hao Chen
The nature and extent of the role of the Chinese state in the economy is fundamental to many empirical and theoretical debates about that country’s political economy. We document and explain the rise of a novel form of intervention on the part of the Chinese state: the... View Details
- September 2020
- Case
West Side United: Hospitals Tackle the Racial Health and Wealth Gap
By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Paul Stramaglia
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. David Ansell, Darlene Hightower, and Ayesho Jaco, leaders of West Side United (WSU), a coalition of Chicago hospitals, community residents, banks, and small businesses conceived in 2016, reviewed progress toward WSU’s goal of ending... View Details
Keywords: COVID; COVID-19; Hospital; Coalition; Health Pandemics; Race; Health; Wealth and Poverty; Equality and Inequality; Change; Leadership; Chicago
- 2020
- Working Paper
Of Learning and Forgetting: Centrism, Populism, and the Legitimacy Crisis of Globalization
By: Rawi Abdelal
Every order is a bargain with disappointments and trade-offs. Thus is every order an unstable equilibrium. The first era of globalization, circa 1870–1914, created both international prosperity and domestic instability. That instability was fully realized during the... View Details
- July 2020
- Teaching Note
COVID-19: The Global Shutdown
By: Laura Alfaro and Sarah Jeong
In the first months of 2020, a pandemic overwhelmed the world. COVID-19, commonly known as the coronavirus, spread from China and created a severe public health emergency across countries. While an immediate fear of the disease’s impact on human life permeaacted... View Details
- July 2020
- Article
Higher Economic Inequality Intensifies the Financial Hardship of People Living in Poverty by Fraying the Community Buffer
By: Jon M. Jachimowicz, Barnabas Szaszi, Marcel Lukas, David Smerdon, Jaideep Prabhu and Elke U. Weber
The current research investigates whether higher economic inequality disproportionately intensifies the financial hardship of low-income individuals. We propose that higher economic inequality increases financial hardship for low-income individuals by reducing their... View Details