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- December 2023
- Case
Robert McNamara: Changing the World
By: Robert Simons and Shirley Sun
This case traces the life of Robert McNamara from Harvard Business School to Ford Motor Company to the U.S. Department of Defense. McNamara excelled in every job along the way: becoming the youngest-ever professor at Harvard Business School, the first non-family... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Estimating Productivity in the Presence of Spillovers: Firm-Level Evidence from the U.S. Production Network
By: Ebehi Iyoha
This paper examines the extent to which productivity gains are transmitted across U.S. firms through buyer-supplier relationships. Many empirical studies measure firm-to-firm spillovers using firm-level productivity estimates derived from control function approaches.... View Details
- 2023
- Article
Balancing Risk and Reward: An Automated Phased Release Strategy
By: Yufan Li, Jialiang Mao and Iavor Bojinov
Phased releases are a common strategy in the technology industry for gradually releasing new products or updates through a sequence of A/B tests in which the number of treated units gradually grows until full deployment or deprecation. Performing phased releases in a... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
The Impact of Unionization on Consumer Perceptions of Service Quality: Evidence from Starbucks
By: Isamar Troncoso, Minkyung Kim, Ishita Chakraborty and SooHyun Kim
The US has seen a rise in union movements, but their effects on service industry marketing outcomes like customer satisfaction and perceptions of service quality remain understudied. In this paper, we empirically study the impact on customer satisfaction and... View Details
- November 2023 (Revised July 2024)
- Case
'Care in Every Drop': Ayala Corporation and Manila Water (A)
By: Debora L. Spar, Paul Healy, Tricia Peralta and Julia M. Comeau
Since 1834, eight generations of the Ayala family have used their conglomerate to fund nation-building projects in the Philippines, including investments in tramcars, telecommunications, hospitals, and schools. In 1997, Ayala’s subsidiary, Manila Water, took control of... View Details
- November 2023
- Supplement
'Care in Every Drop': Ayala Corporation and Manila Water (B)
By: Debora L. Spar, Paul Healy, Tricia Peralta and Julia Comeau
Since 1834, eight generations of the Ayala family have used their conglomerate to fund nation-building projects in the Philippines, including investments in tramcars, telecommunications, hospitals, and schools. In 1997, Ayala’s subsidiary, Manila Water, took control of... View Details
- November 2023 (Revised April 2024)
- Case
BiomX: Bringing Phage Back to the Stage
By: Paul A. Gompers, Elie Ofek, Orna Dan and Emilie Billaud
In the spring of 2023, and following the favorable results of a trial involving its phage cocktail for treating lung infections among cystic fibrosis (CF) patients, the leadership of BiomX had several critical issues to wrestle with. First, given its precarious... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Learning by Investing: Entrepreneurial Spillovers from Venture Capital
By: Josh Lerner, Jinlin Li and Tong Liu
This paper studies how investing in venture capital (VC) affects the entrepreneurial outcomes of individual limited partners (LPs). Using comprehensive administrative data on entrepreneurial activities and VC fundraising and investments in China, we first document that... View Details
- November 2023
- Article
Brokerage House Initial Public Offerings and Analyst Forecast Quality
By: Mark Bradshaw, Michael Drake, Joseph Pacelli and Brady Twedt
We examine how brokerage firm initial public offerings (IPOs) influence the research quality of sell-side analysts employed by the brokerage. Our main results focus on earnings forecast bias and absolute forecast errors as proxies for research quality. Using a... View Details
- November–December 2023
- Article
Keep Your AI Projects on Track
By: Iavor Bojinov
AI—and especially its newest star, generative AI—is today a central theme in corporate boardrooms, leadership discussions, and casual exchanges among employees eager to supercharge their productivity. Sadly, beneath the aspirational headlines and tantalizing potential... View Details
- November–December 2023
- Article
Look the Part? The Role of Profile Pictures in Online Labor Markets
By: Isamar Troncoso and Lan Luo
Profile pictures are a key component of many freelancing platforms, a design choice that can impact hiring and matching outcomes. In this paper, we examine how appearance-based perceptions of a freelancer’s fit for the job (i.e., whether a freelancer "looks the part"... View Details
- November 2023
- Article
When Executives Pledge Integrity: The Effect of the Accountant's Oath on Firms' Financial Reporting
By: Jonas Heese, Gerardo Pérez Cavazos and Caspar David Peter
We study the effect of executives’ pledges of integrity on firms’ financial reporting outcomes by exploiting a 2016 regulation that requires holders of Dutch professional accounting degrees to pledge an integrity oath. We identify chief executive officers (CEOs) and... View Details
- October 2023
- Case
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: A Curriculum Provider Puts Itself on the Hook for Student Outcomes
By: John J-H Kim, Derek C. M. van Bever, Michael Norris and Max Hancock
Jack Lynch, CEO of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) since 2017, was leading the company’s transformation from a legacy textbook publisher to a digital-first student outcomes provider, which earned subscription revenue from digital products and curriculum. In 2023, HMH... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
The Buy-In Effect: When Increasing Initial Effort Motivates Behavioral Follow-Through
By: Holly Dykstra, Shibeal O'Flaherty and A.V. Whillans
Behavioral interventions often focus on reducing friction to encourage behavior change. In
contrast, we provide evidence that adding friction can promote long-term behavior change when
behaviors involve repeated costly efforts over longer time horizons. In... View Details
- October 2023 (Revised June 2024)
- Case
ReUp Education: Can AI Help Learners Return to College?
By: Kris Ferreira, Christopher Thomas Ryan and Sarah Mehta
Founded in 2015, ReUp Education helps “stopped out students”—learners who have stopped making progress towards graduation—achieve their college completion goals. The company relies on a team of success coaches to engage with learners and help them reenroll. In 2019,... View Details
- October 2023 (Revised February 2024)
- Technical Note
Design and Evaluation of Targeted Interventions
By: Eva Ascarza and Ta-Wei (David) Huang
Targeted interventions serve as a pivotal tool in business strategy, streamlining decisions for enhanced efficiency and effectiveness. This note delves into two central facets of such interventions: first, the design of potent decision guidelines, or targeting... View Details
- October 2023 (Revised May 2025)
- Case
Nelson Mandela: Changing the World
By: Robert Simons and Shirley Sun
This case traces the rise of Nelson Mandela from his tribal home in South Africa to president of the country. Rejecting expectations that he would be a tribal leader, Mandela instead dedicates his life to fighting Apartheid. After peaceful approaches fail, he joins... View Details
- October 10, 2023
- Article
10 Reasons Why Inclusion Is a Competitive Advantage
By: Frances X. Frei and Anne Morriss
In their new book, Move Fast and Fix Things, Frances Frei and Anne Morriss outline five strategies to help leaders tackle their hardest problems and quickly make change. Their third strategy is creating an inclusive environment that allows all employees to... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Are Hospital Quality Indicators Causal?
By: Amitabh Chandra, Maurice Dalton and Douglas O. Staiger
Hospitals play a key role in patient outcomes and spending, but efforts to improve their quality are hindered because we do not know whether hospital quality indicators are causal or biased. We evaluate the validity of commonly used quality indicators, such as... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Causal Interpretation of Structural IV Estimands
By: Isaiah Andrews, Nano Barahona, Matthew Gentzkow, Ashesh Rambachan and Jesse M. Shapiro
We study the causal interpretation of instrumental variables (IV) estimands of nonlinear, multivariate structural models with respect to rich forms of model misspecification. We focus on guaranteeing that the researcher's estimator is sharp zero consistent, meaning... View Details
Keywords: Mathematical Methods