Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(2,466)
- Faculty Publications (207)
- August 2015
- Article
A Comparative-Advantage Approach to Government Debt Maturity
By: Robin Greenwood, Samuel G. Hanson and Jeremy C. Stein
We study optimal government debt maturity in a model where investors derive monetary services from holding riskless short-term securities. In a setting where the government is the only issuer of such riskless paper, it trades off the monetary premium associated with... View Details
- Article
The Cross Section of Expected Holding Period Returns and Their Dynamics: A Present Value Approach
By: Matthew R. Lyle and Charles C.Y. Wang
We provide a tractable model of firm-level expected holding period returns using two firm fundamentals—book-to-market ratio and ROE—and study the cross-sectional properties of the model-implied expected returns. We find that 1) firm-level expected returns and expected... View Details
- May 2015
- Article
Admitting Mistakes: Home Country Effect on the Reliability of Restatement Reporting
By: Suraj Srinivasan, Aida Sijamic Wahid and Gwen Yu
We study the frequency of restatements by foreign firms listed on U.S. exchanges. We find that the restatement rate of U.S. listed foreign firms is significantly lower than that of comparable U.S. firms and that the difference depends on the firm's home country... View Details
- Article
Entrepreneurship and Urban Growth: An Empirical Assessment with Historical Mines
By: Edward L. Glaeser, Sari Pekkala Kerr and William R. Kerr
We study entrepreneurship and growth through the lens of U.S. cities. Initial entrepreneurship correlates strongly with urban employment growth, but endogeneity bedevils interpretation. Chinitz (1961) hypothesized that coal mines near cities led to specialization in... View Details
- April 2015
- Article
Anxious and Egocentric: How Specific Emotions Influence Perspective Taking
By: Andrew R. Todd, Matthias Forstmann, Pascal Burgmer, Alison Wood Brooks and Adam D. Galinsky
People frequently feel anxious. Although prior research has extensively studied how feeling anxious shapes intrapsychic aspects of cognition, much less is known about how anxiety affects interpersonal aspects of cognition. Here, we examine the influence of incidental... View Details
Keywords: Anxiety; Egocentrism; Emotion; Perspective Taking; Risk and Uncertainty; Perspective; Emotions
- March–April 2015
- Article
Why We Think We Can't Dance: Theory of Mind and Children's Desire to Perform
By: Lan Nguyen Chaplin and Michael I. Norton
Theory of Mind (ToM) allows children to achieve success in the social world by understanding others' minds. A study with 3–12 year olds, however, demonstrates that gains in ToM are linked to decreases in children's desire to engage in performative behaviors associated... View Details
- February 2015
- Article
The Great Recession, Insurance Mandates, and the Use of In Vitro Fertilization Services in the United States
By: Sorapop Kiatpongsan, Robert S. Huckman and Mark D. Hornstein
Objective: To investigate the relationship between economic activities, insurance mandates, and the use of in vitro fertilization (IVF) in the United States.
Design: We examined the correlation between the coincident index (a proxy for overall economic... View Details
Design: We examined the correlation between the coincident index (a proxy for overall economic... View Details
- Article
Waves in Ship Prices and Investment
By: Robin Greenwood and Samuel G. Hanson
We study the link between investment boom and bust cycles and returns on capital in the dry bulk shipping industry. We show that high current ship earnings are associated with high used ship prices and heightened industry investment in new ships, but forecast low... 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
- January 2015
- Article
Are Incentives Without Expertise Sufficient? Evidence from Fortune 500 Firms
By: Emilie R. Feldman and Cynthia A. Montgomery
Agency theory predicts that incentives will align agents' interests with those of principals. However, the resource-based view suggests that to be effective, the incentive to deliver must be paired with the ability to deliver. Using Fortune 500 boards as an... View Details
- Article
Doing Business with Strangers: Reputation in Online Service Marketplaces
By: Antonio Moreno and Christian Terwiesch
Online service marketplaces allow service buyers to post their project requests and service providers to bid for them. To reduce the transactional risks, marketplaces typically track and publish previous seller performance. By analyzing a detailed transactional data... View Details
- December 2014
- Article
The Contaminating Effects of Building Instrumental Ties: How Networking Can Make Us Feel Dirty
By: Tiziana Casciaro, Francesca Gino and Maryam Kouchaki
To create social ties to support their professional or personal goals, people actively engage in instrumental networking. Drawing from moral psychology research, we posit that this intentional behavior has unintended consequences for an individual's morality. Unlike... View Details
Keywords: Networking; Morality; Dirtiness; Power; Networks; Moral Sensibility; Identity; Power and Influence
- 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
- 2014
- Chapter
Technology, Innovation and Economic Growth in Britain Since 1870
By: Tom Nicholas
This chapter examines technological change in Britain over the last 140 years. It analyzes the effects of patent laws and innovation prizes that were designed to promote technical progress. It explores the challenge associated with the changing organizational structure... View Details
- November 2014
- Article
The Dynamics of Firm Lobbying
By: William R. Kerr, William F. Lincoln and Prachi Mishra
We study the determinants of the dynamics of firm lobbying behavior using a panel data set covering 1998–2006. Our data exhibit three striking facts: (i) few firms lobby, (ii) lobbying status is strongly associated with firm size, and (iii) lobbying status is highly... View Details
- October 2014
- Article
Do Analysts Add Value When They Most Can? Evidence from Corporate Spinoffs
By: Emilie Feldman, Stuart C. Gilson and Belen Villalonga
This paper investigates how securities analysts help investors understand the value of diversification. By studying the research that analysts produce about companies that have announced corporate spinoffs, we gain unique insights into how analysts portray diversified... View Details
- July 2014
- Article
Convergence of Position Auctions under Myopic Best-Response Dynamics
By: Matthew Cary, Aparna Das, Benjamin Edelman, Ioannis Giotis, Kurtis Heimerl, Anna Karlin, Scott Duke Kominers, Claire Mathieu and Michael Schwarz
We study the dynamics of multi-round position auctions, considering both the case of exogenous click-through rates and the case in which click-through rates are determined by an endogenous consumer search process. In both contexts, we demonstrate that the dynamic... View Details
- June–July 2014
- Article
Language as a Lightning Rod: Power Contests, Emotion Regulation, and Subgroup Dynamics in Global Teams
By: Pamela J. Hinds, Tsedal Neeley and Catherine Durnell Cramton
Through an ethnographic study comprised of interviews with and observations of 96 globally distributed members in six software development teams, we propose a model that captures how asymmetries in language fluency contribute to an us vs. them dynamic so common in... View Details
- June 2014
- Article
Informal Peer Interaction and Practice Type as Predictors of Physician Performance on Maintenance of Certification Examinations
By: Melissa A. Valentine, S. Barsade, Amy C. Edmondson, A. Gal and R. Rhodes
Context: Physicians can demonstrate mastery of the knowledge that supports continued clinical competence by passing a Maintenance of Certification exam. Exam performance depends on professional learning and development, which may be enhanced by informal routine... View Details
- 2014
- Article
Rainmakers: Why Bad Weather Means Good Productivity
By: Jooa Julia Lee, Francesca Gino and Bradley R. Staats
People believe that weather conditions influence their everyday work life, but to date, little is known about how weather affects individual productivity. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we predict and find that bad weather increases individual productivity and that... View Details