Publications
Publications
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(586)
- Faculty Publications (144)
- April 2002 (Revised September 2002)
- Background Note
Capital Controls
By: Rawi E. Abdelal and Laura Alfaro
Only in the waning years of the 20th century did international financial markets begin to enjoy the freedom from government regulation that they had experienced before the first world war. By 2002, international capital markets had grown to be enormous--$1.2 trillion... View Details
- March 2001 (Revised February 2004)
- Case
Power to the States: "Fiscal Wars" for FDI in Brazil
By: Laura Alfaro, Yasheng Huang and Marios S. Kalochoritis
On January 6, 1999, Itamar Franco, the governor of the state of Minas Gerais, the second-largest state in Brazil, declared a 90-day moratorium on its debt payment to the federal government. The announcement triggered a run on the Brazilian currency, the Real, and... View Details
- March 1998 (Revised April 1998)
- Case
Lehigh Steel
By: V.G. Narayanan and Laura Donohue
Lehigh Steel is a specialty steel manufacturer that plummeted from record profits to record losses in less than three years, driven by an inability to distinguish between profitable and unprofitable business. The scale and growth of service activities and overhead... View Details
- Research Summary
Capital Controls, Risk and Liberalization Cycles (joint with Fabio Kanczuk)
By: Laura Alfaro
We construct an Overlapping-Generations model where agents vote on whether to open or close the economy to international capital flows. Political decisions are shaped by the risk over capital and labor returns. In an open economy, the capitalists (old) completely hedge... View Details
- Research Summary
Debt Maturity: Is Long-Term Debt Optimal? (with Fabio Kanczuk)
By: Laura Alfaro
We model and calibrate the arguments in favor and against short-term and long-term debt. These arguments broadly include: maturity-term premium, tax smoothing, rolling over risk and the cost from defaulting. We use a dynamic equilibrium model with tax distortion,... View Details
- Research Summary
Debt Redemption and Reserve Accumulation
By: Laura Alfaro
In the past decade, foreign participation in local-currency bond markets in emerging countries increased dramatically. We revisit sovereign debt sustainability under the assumptions that countries can accumulate reserves and borrow internationally using their own... View Details
- Research Summary
Deregulation, Misallocation, and Size: Evidence from India
By: Laura Alfaro
This paper examines the impact of the deregulation of compulsory industrial licensing in India on firm size dynamics and reallocation of resources within industries. Following deregulation, resource misallocation declines, and the left-hand tail of the firm size... View Details
- Research Summary
Enduring Success
Harvard Business School graduates have achieved many different kinds of success as leaders of businesses, as entrepreneurs and in their public and private lives. After authoring or co-authoring 150 cases, serving on many corporate and non- profit boards, Howard... View Details
- Research Summary
Growth and the Quality of Foreign Direct Investment: Is All FDI Equal? (joint with Andrew Charlton)
By: Laura Alfaro
In this paper we distinguish different qualities of FDI to re-examine the relationship between FDI and growth. Establishing the quality of FDI, however, is a difficult concept. Quality, that is the effect of a unit of FDI on economic growth, is a combination and... View Details
- Research Summary
How Does Foreign Direct Investment Promote Economic Growth? Exploring the Effects of Financial Markets on Linkages (with Areendam Chanda, Sebnem Kalemli-Ozcan and Selin Sayek)
By: Laura Alfaro
The empirical literature finds mixed evidence on the
existence of positive productivity externalities in the host country
generated by foreign multinational companies. We propose a novel
mechanism, which emphasizes the role of local financial markets in
enabling... View Details
- Research Summary
India Transformed? Insights from the Firm Level 1988-2005 (with Anusha Chari)
By: Laura Alfaro
Using firm-level data this paper analyzes, the transformation of India’s economic structure following the implementation of economic reforms. The focus of the study is on publicly-listed and unlisted firms from across a wide spectrum of manufacturing and services... View Details
- Research Summary
Internalizing Global Value Chains: A Firm-Level Analysis
By: Laura Alfaro
In recent decades, advances in information and communication technology and falling trade barriers have led firms to retain within their boundaries and in their domestic economies only a subset of their production stages. A key decision facing firms worldwide is the... View Details
- Research Summary
Intra-Industry Foreign Direct Investment (joint with Andrew Charlton)
By: Laura Alfaro
We identify a new type of vertical foreign direct investment (FDI) made up of multinational subsidiaries producing intermediate inputs, which are of similar skill intensity to the final goods produced by their parents, and which are overwhelmingly located in high skill... View Details
- 2025
- Chapter
Leapfrog Leaders: Accelerating Systems Leadership Skills
By: Laura Cabrera, Derek Cabrera and Hise O. Gibson
We need leaders who can execute at the Strategic, Operational, and Tactical (SOT) levels. But, research shows it takes time for skills to develop at all three levels—too much time. Why does it take too much time? First, because expertise is borne of experience. An... View Details
Keywords: DSRP; VCML; Strategy; Operations; Leadership Development; Decision Making; Organizational Structure
- Research Summary
Nominal versus Indexed Debt: A Quantitative Horse Race (joint with Fabio Kanczuk)
By: Laura Alfaro
There are different arguments in favor and against nominal and indexed debt which broadly include the incentive to default through inflation versus hedging against unforeseen shocks. We model these arguments and calibrate the model to assess the quantitative importance... View Details
- Research Summary
On the Political Economy of Stabilization Programs
By: Laura Alfaro
This paper provides a political economy explanation for temporary exchange-rate-based stabilization programs by focusing on the distributional effects of real exchange-rate appreciation. I propose an economy in which agents are endowed with either tradable or... View Details
- Research Summary
Optimal Reserve Management and Sovereign Debt (with Fabio Kanczuk)
By: Laura Alfaro
Most models currently used to determine optimal foreign reserve holdings take the level of international debt as given. Some of the implications of this analysis, however, may not be generalized once one considers the joint decision to hold debt and reserves by a... View Details
- Research Summary
Selection and Market Reallocation: Productivity Gains from Multinational Production
By: Laura Alfaro
Assessing the productivity gains from multinational production has been a vital topic of economic research and policy debate. Positive aggregate productivity gains are often attributed to within-firm productivity improvement; however, an alternative, less emphasized... View Details
- Research Summary
Selection, Reallocation, and Spillover: Identifying the Sources of Gains from Multinational Production (with Maggie Chen)
By: Laura Alfaro
Quantifying the gains from multinational production has been a vital topic of economic research. Positive productivity gains are often attributed to knowledge spillover from multinational to domestic firms. An alternative, less stressed explanation is firm selection... View Details