Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,950)
- Faculty Publications (243)
- 2015
- Working Paper
Staggered Boards and Shareholder Value: A Reply to Amihud and Stoyanov
By: Alma Cohen and Charles C.Y. Wang
In a paper published in the Journal of Financial Economics in 2013, we provided evidence that market participants perceive staggered boards to be on average value-reducing. In a recent response paper, Amihud and Stoyanov (2015) “contest” our results. They... View Details
- January 2016
- Article
Making Do with Less: Working Harder During Recessions
By: Edward P. Lazear, Kathryn L. Shaw and Christopher Stanton
Why did productivity rise during recent recessions? One possibility is that average worker quality increased. A second is that each incumbent worker produced more. The second effect is termed "making do with less." Using data from 2006 to 2010 on individual worker... View Details
- October 26, 2015
- Article
Measuring and Communicating Health Care Value with Charts
By: Robert S. Kaplan, Robin P. Blackstone, Derek A. Haas and Nikhil G. Thaker
The goal of a health care system should be to deliver the most value to patients: the outcomes achieved for treating a medical condition relative to the costs incurred over a complete care cycle. We have found that a radar (spider web) chart is an effective means to... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
Discretionary Task Ordering: Queue Management in Radiological Services
By: Maria Ibanez, Jonathan R. Clark, Robert S. Huckman and Bradley R. Staats
Work scheduling research typically prescribes task sequences implemented by managers. Yet employees often have discretion to deviate from their prescribed sequence. Using data from 2.4 million radiological diagnoses, we find that doctors prioritize similar tasks... View Details
Keywords: Discretion; Scheduling; Queue; Healthcare; Learning; Experience; Decentralization; Delegation; Behavioral Operations; Operations; Service Operations; Service Delivery; Performance; Performance Effectiveness; Performance Efficiency; Performance Improvement; Performance Productivity; Decisions; Time Management; Cost vs Benefits; Health Industry
- Article
Visualizing and Measuring Software Portfolio Architecture: A Power Utility Case
By: Robert Lagerström, Carliss Y. Baldwin and Alan MacCormack
In this paper, we test a Design Structure Matrix (DSM) based method for visualizing and
measuring software portfolio architectures. Our data is drawn from a power utility company, comprising 192 software applications with 614 dependencies between them. We
show that the... View Details
- 2015
- Book
Economic Analysis of the Digital Economy
By: Avi Goldfarb, Shane Greenstein and Catherine Tucker
As the cost of storing, sharing, and analyzing data has decreased, economic activity has become increasingly digital. But while the effects of digital technology and improved digital communication have been explored in a variety of contexts, the impact on economic... View Details
- 2015
- Working Paper
Crowdsourced Digital Goods and Firm Productivity: Evidence from Open Source Software
By: Frank Nagle
As firms increasingly rely on crowdsourced digital goods, understanding their impact on productivity becomes critical. This study measures the firm-level productivity impact of one such good, non-pecuniary (free) open source software (OSS). The results show a... View Details
- Article
Time-driven Activity-based Costing of Multivessel Coronary Artery Bypass Grafting across National Boundaries to Identify Improvement Opportunities: Study Protocol
By: F. Erhun, B. Mistry, T. Platcheck, A. Milstein, V.G. Narayanan and R. S. Kaplan
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery is a common treatment for coronary artery disease—a disease that affects over 10% of US adults and is a major cause of morbidity and mortality. In 2005, the mean cost for a CABG procedure among Medicare beneficiaries in the... View Details
- December 2014
- Article
The Distinct Effects of Information Technology and Communication Technology on Firm Organization
By: Nicholas Bloom, Luis Garicano, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
Empirical studies on information communication technologies (ICT) typically aggregate the "information" and "communication" components together. We show theoretically and empirically that this is problematic. Information and communication technologies have very... View Details
- Article
Teaming: An Approach to the Growing Complexities in Health Care: AOA Critical Issues
By: Haseeb Nawaz, Amy C. Edmondson, Tony H. Tzeng, Jamal K. Saleh, Kevin J. Bozic and Khaled J. Saleh
Confronted with rising costs and patients who often have multiple comorbidities, the orthopaedic surgeon needs to face the challenge of providing high-quality health care. One solution is to increase and improve coordination, communication, and teamwork. The... View Details
- 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
- August 2014 (Revised March 2016)
- Case
Thomas Cook Group on the Brink (A)
By: Benjamin C. Esty, Stuart C. Gilson and Aldo Sesia
Harriett Green, the newly appointed CEO of Thomas Cook Group, faces a daunting set of business and financial challenges at the 171-year old UK travel services company. The company has lost almost £600 million in the last three quarters; has seen its stock price fall... View Details
Keywords: Turnaround; Corporate Restructuring; Change Leadership; Female Ceo; Change Management; Communication Strategy; Borrowing and Debt; Cash Flow; Cost Management; Financial Liquidity; Financial Management; Executive Compensation; Leading Change; Crisis Management; Value Creation; Travel Industry; United Kingdom
- August 2014
- Article
What Makes Annuitization More Appealing?
By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson, Brigitte C. Madrian and Stephen P. Zeldes
We conduct and analyze two large surveys of hypothetical annuitization choices. We find that allowing individuals to annuitize a fraction of their wealth increases annuitization relative to a situation where annuitization is an "all or nothing" decision. Very few... View Details
- July 2014
- Article
Diasporas and Outsourcing: Evidence from oDesk and India
By: Ejaz Ghani, William R. Kerr and Christopher Stanton
This study examines the role of the Indian diaspora in the outsourcing of work to India. Our data are taken from oDesk, the world's largest online platform for outsourced contracts, where India is the largest country in terms of contract volume. We use an ethnic name... View Details
- Article
Better Accounting Transforms Health Care Delivery
By: Robert S. Kaplan and Mary L. Witkowski
The paper describes the theory and preliminary results for an action research program that explores the implications from better measurements of health care outcomes and costs. After summarizing Porter's outcome taxonomy (Porter 2010), we illustrate how to use process... View Details
- May 2014
- Article
Incorporating Field Data into Archival Research
By: Eugene F. Soltes
I explore the use of field data in conjunction with archival evidence by examining Iliev, Miller, and Roth's (2014) analysis of an amendment to the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. This regulatory amendment allowed depositary banks to cross-list firms without the... View Details
- 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
- April 2014
- Article
Golden Parachutes and the Wealth of Shareholders
By: Lucian A. Bebchuk, Alma Cohen and Charles C.Y. Wang
Golden parachutes (GPs) have attracted substantial attention from investors and public officials for more than two decades. We find that GPs are associated with higher expected acquisition premiums and that this association is at least partly due to the effect of GPs... View Details
- 2014
- Working Paper
The Cost of Friendship
By: Paul A. Gompers, Vladimir Mukharlyamov and Yuhai Xuan
We investigate how personal characteristics affect people's desire to collaborate and whether this attraction enhances or detracts from performance in venture capital. We find that venture capitalists who share the same ethnic, educational, or career background are... View Details
- 2014
- Working Paper
Management Practices, Relational Contracts and the Decline of General Motors
By: Susan Helper and Rebecca Henderson
General Motors was once regarded as one of the best managed and most successful firms in the world, but between 1980 and 2009 its share of the US market fell from 62.6 to 19.8 percent, and in 2009 the firm went bankrupt. In this paper we argue that the conventional... View Details