Publications

February 2016
Article

Positive and Normative Judgments Implicit in U.S. Tax Policy, and the Costs of Unequal Growth and Recessions

By: Benjamin B. Lockwood and Matthew Weinzierl

Calculating the welfare implications of changes to economic policy or shocks to the economy requires economists to decide on a normative criterion. One way to make that decision is to elicit the relevant moral criteria from real-world policy choices, converting a... View Details

Keywords: Judgments; Taxation

Article

Behavioral Hazard in Health Insurance

By: Katherine Baicker, Sendhil Mullainathan and Joshua Schwartzstein

A fundamental implication of standard moral hazard models is overuse of low-value medical care because copays are lower than costs. In these models, the demand curve alone can be used to make welfare statements, a fact relied on by much empirical work. There is ample... View Details

Keywords: Insurance; Consumer Behavior; Health Care and Treatment; Insurance Industry

25 Jan 2020
News

HBS Online Will Keep Changing the Game. Here’s How

24 Jan 2020
News

Lawmakers Weighing Options on Handgun Waiting Period

Research Summary

Physician vs. Patient Incentives in Prescription Drug Choice

The market for medical care involves interactions among patients, providers, and the insurers who pay for the care of their enrollees. The division of responsibilities creates scope for agency costs and moral hazard in the physician's treatment choice.... View Details

2020
Working Paper

Dog Eat Dog: Balancing Network Effects and Differentiation in a Digital Platform Merger

By: Chiara Farronato, Jessica Fong and Andrey Fradkin

Digital platforms are increasingly the subject of regulatory scrutiny. In comparison to multiple competitors, a single platform may increase consumer welfare if network effects are large or may decrease welfare due to higher prices or reduction in platform variety. We... View Details

Keywords: Platform Differentiation; Digital Platforms; Network Effects; Measurement and Metrics; Mergers and Acquisitions; Outcome or Result

Article

Value of Information with Sequential Futures Markets

By: Jerry R. Green

The effects of an improvement in information on the efficiency of risk-bearing are studied under various systems of incomplete markets. With sequential futures markets for uncontingent delivery, the welfare effects are indeterminate in sign, except under special... View Details

Keywords: Information; Financial Markets; Mathematical Methods

July 2012
Article

Discrete Choice Cannot Generate Demand That Is Additively Separable in Own Price

By: Sonia Jaffe and Scott Duke Kominers

We show that in a unit demand discrete choice framework with at least three goods, demand cannot be additively separable in own price. This result sharpens the analogous result of Jaffe and Weyl (2010) in the case of linear demand and has implications for testing of... View Details

Keywords: Discrete Choice; Unit Demand; Separable Demand; Linear Demand; Demand and Consumers; Market Design; Mathematical Methods; Economics

2014
Working Paper

SOX after Ten Years: A Multidisciplinary Review

By: John C. Coates and Suraj Srinivasan

We review and assess research findings from 120 papers in accounting, finance, and law to evaluate the impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. We describe significant developments in how the Act was implemented and find that despite severe criticism, the Act and institutions... View Details

Keywords: Laws and Statutes

SSRN

Article

SOX after Ten Years: A Multidisciplinary Review

By: Suraj Srinivasan and John C. Coates IV

We review and assess research findings from 120+ papers in accounting, finance, and law to evaluate the impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. We describe significant developments in how the Act was implemented and find that despite severe criticism, the Act and... View Details

Keywords: Financial Reporting; Laws and Statutes; United States

SSRN

November 2013 (Revised March 2014)
Technical Note

Tax Havens

By: Eric Werker, Sebastian Berardi, Stelios Elia, Omar Muakkassa and James Zumberge

Multinational corporations and wealthy individuals often use so-called tax havens to establish subsidiaries or holding companies in order to rebalance profits across borders with the primary purpose of lowering their effective tax rate. This note describes the use of... View Details

Keywords: Tax Havens; Saving; Taxation

Educators

Research Summary

Institutions and Markets

Alexander Dyck's academic articles, case studies and course development show how incentive policies, ownership structures, regulatory agencies and corporate governance institutions determine whether hopes for value creation through private sector expansion will be met.... View Details

18 May 2006
News

They'd Sooner Fix Medicaid

"Behavioral Hazard in Health Insurance"

A fundamental implication of standard moral hazard models is overuse of low-value medical care because copays are lower than costs. In these models, the demand curve alone can be used to make welfare statements, a fact relied on by much empirical work. There is... View Details

2019
Working Paper

Fiscal Rules and Sovereign Default

By: Laura Alfaro and Fabio Kanczuk

Recurrent concerns over debt sustainability in emerging and developed nations have prompted renewed debate on the role of fiscal rules. Their optimality, however, remains unclear. We provide a quantitative analysis of fiscal rules in a standard model of sovereign debt... View Details

Keywords: Sovereign Debt; Hyperbolic Discounting; Fiscal Rules; Sovereign Finance

September 2019
Article

Optimizing Reserves in School Choice: A Dynamic Programming Approach

By: Franklyn Wang, Ravi Jagadeesan and Scott Duke Kominers

We introduce a new model of school choice with reserves in which a social planner is constrained by a limited supply of reserve seats and tries to find an optimal matching according to a social welfare function. We construct the optimal distribution of reserves via a... View Details

Keywords: Matching; Reserves; Dynamic Programming; Marketplace Matching; Mathematical Methods

May 2016 (Revised October 2016)
Case

Agricultural Revolution without a Land Revolution: the Megafarms of CP Group

By: William C. Kirby and Nancy Hua Dai

This case describes the megafarm model launched by the CP group as part of their efforts to ensure the safety and quality of their supply chain of agricultural products (particularly, eggs) in China while also promoting the welfare of Chinese farmers. This model was... View Details

Keywords: China; Poultry; Public-private Partnership; Animal-Based Agribusiness; Family Business; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; China

Educators

Article

Multilateral Matching

By: John William Hatfield and Scott Duke Kominers

We introduce a matching model in which agents engage in joint ventures via multilateral contracts. This approach allows us to consider production complementarities previously outside the scope of matching theory. We show analogues of the first and second welfare... View Details

Keywords: Matching; Stability; Competitive Equilibrium; Core; Networks; Competition; Joint Ventures; Balance and Stability; Groups and Teams; Entrepreneurship

2023
Working Paper

Interest-Rate Risk and Household Portfolios

By: Sylvain Catherine, Max Miller, James Paron and Natasha Sarin

How are households exposed to interest-rate risk? When rates fall, households face lower future expected returns but those holding long-term assets—disproportionately the wealthy and middle-aged—experience capital gains. We study the hedging demand for long-term assets... View Details

Keywords: Portfolio Choice; Social Security; Interest Rates; Investment Portfolio; Equality and Inequality; Welfare