Publications

Web

Great American Business Leaders of the 20th Century - Leadership

Group, 1974–1995 Elizabeth E. Boit Winship, Boit, & Company, 1888–1928 J. Chadbourn Bolles Chadbourn, 1936–1970 Fred J. Borch General Electric Company, 1963–1972 Lawrence A. Bossidy AlliedSignal, Inc., 1991–1999 Marvin Bower McKinsey & Company, 1950–1967 Horace Bowker... View Details

December 2010
Article

Management and the Financial Crisis (We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us...)

By: William A. Sahlman

The financial crisis of 2008-2009 has revealed that our broad model of corporate governance is broken, independent of the shortcomings in the regulatory system. Managers and boards of directors in scores of systemically important firms failed to protect employees,... View Details

Keywords: Risk Management; Human Capital; Ethics; Policy; Corporate Governance; Financial Crisis; Finance; Business and Shareholder Relations

June 2013 (Revised March 2016)
Case

Estonia: Transition, EU Membership, and the Euro

By: Michael E. Porter, Christian Ketels and Örjan Sölvell

The case discusses the economic development of Estonia, covering specifically the period from regaining independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 until 2015. It tracks the process from the initial transition towards a market economy to becoming an EU member country,... View Details

Keywords: Economy; Macroeconomics; Microeconomics; Policy; Government and Politics; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Strategy; Estonia

October 2001 (Revised November 2001)
Case

Provident Life and Accident Insurance: The Acquisition of Paul Revere

By: Mihir A. Desai, Frank Williamson, Mark Veblen and Yuming Zou

Provident Life & Accident Insurance Co. has made an initial bid to acquire a primary competitor, Paul Revere, from conglomerate, Textron. The due diligence process uncovers a significant block of problematic disability insurance policies. Provident is forced to assess... View Details

Keywords: Insurance; Financial Management; Mergers and Acquisitions; Policy; Investment; Business Strategy; Cash Flow; Price; Bids and Bidding; Financial Reporting; Business Conglomerates; Insurance Industry; Service Industry

February 2022
Case

CityScore: Big Data Comes to Boston

By: Boris Groysberg and Sarah L. Abbott

In 2016, Martin “Marty” Walsh, the Mayor of Boston, introduced CityScore, a data dashboard that measured the city’s progress across a range of metrics. The dashboard was updated daily and publicly available. The mayor frequently discussed the CityScore targets in... View Details

Keywords: Analytics and Data Science; Government Administration; Leadership; Transformation; City; Measurement and Metrics; Public Administration Industry; Boston; United States

June 2022
Case

Business Implications from Regulating Carbon Emissions in the EU

By: George Serafeim and Benjamin Maletta

In the beginning of the 21st century, the European Union (the EU) had led the global fight against climate change with a wide array of policy measures. The EU’s primary approach to climate policy had been taxation via the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU... View Details

Keywords: Regulation; Carbon Emissions; Trade; Sustainability; Decarbonization; Performance; Climate Change; Analysis; Strategy; Taxation; Policy; Environmental Regulation; Industry Structures; European Union

October 1995 (Revised October 1996)
Case

Singapore Unlimited: Building the National Information Infrastructure

By: Lynda M. Applegate, John L. King, Soon-Siong Neo and Carin-Isabel Knoop

Describes the actions taken by the government of Singapore to enable the country to survive and prosper after it achieved independence in the late 1960s. Recognizing that its small size, limited natural resources, but excellent location placed it in a vulnerable... View Details

Keywords: Information Technology; Natural Environment; Expansion; Policy; Infrastructure; Singapore; Southeast Asia

19 Mar 2013
Working Paper Summaries

Carry Trade and Exchange-Rate Regimes

Keywords: by Laura Alfaro & Fabio Kanczuk

29 Oct 2024
HBS Seminar

Lynn Wu, Wharton

17 May 2010
Research & Ideas

What Brazil Teaches About Investor Protection

supposed to be bad, and there was little debate about what companies or managers could do about it. For me this just sounded too simplistic. Moreover, the focus on national laws led to policy recommendations that were sometimes too... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Banking; Financial Services

March 2011
Article

Cheaper Patents

By: Tom Nicholas

The 1883 Patents Act in Britain provides perspective for modern patent policy reforms because it radically changed incentives for inventors by reducing filing fees by 84 percent. Patents increased 2.5 fold after the reform, which was evenly distributed across the... View Details

Keywords: Patents; Global Range; Distribution; Demand and Consumers; Organizational Structure; Business Processes; Innovation and Invention; Innovation and Management; Policy; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Fluctuation; Motivation and Incentives; Distribution Industry; United States; Great Britain

March 2010
Article

Female Empowerment: Further Evidence From a Commitment Savings Product in the Philippines

By: Nava Ashraf, Dean Karlan and Wesley Yin

Female "empowerment" has increasingly become a policy goal, both as an end to itself and as a means to achieving other development goals. Microfinance in particular has often been argued, but not without controversy, to be a tool for empowering women. Here, using a... View Details

Keywords: Goals and Objectives; Product; Microfinance; Decision Making; Policy; Welfare or Wellbeing; Gender; Power and Influence; Philippines

November 3, 2020
Article

Gender Differences in COVID-19 Attitudes and Behavior: Panel Evidence from Eight Countries

By: Vincenzo Galasso, Vincent Pons, Paola Profeta, Michael Becher, Sylvain Brouard and Martial Foucault

Using original data from two waves of a survey conducted in March and April 2020 in eight OECD countries (N = 21,649), we show that women are more likely to see COVID-19 as a very serious health problem, to agree with restraining public policy measures adopted in... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19; Health Pandemics; Attitudes; Behavior; Gender; Policy; Governance Compliance

Forthcoming
Article

Regulatory Incentives for Innovation: The FDA's Breakthrough Therapy Designation

By: Amitabh Chandra, Jennifer Kao, Kathleen L. Miller and Ariel Dora Stern

Regulators of new products confront a tradeoff between speeding a product to market and collecting additional product quality information. The FDA's Breakthrough Therapy Designation (BTD) provides an opportunity to understand if regulators can use new policy to... View Details

Keywords: Innovation and Invention; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Government Administration; Research and Development; Pharmaceutical Industry

Register to Read

February 2016
Case

Banking and Politics in Antebellum New York

By: David Moss and Colin Donovan

After a long period of solid Democratic control, Whigs secured a majority of seats in the New York State Assembly in 1837, the same year that a major financial panic had crippled the banking system and shaken public confidence in the state's governance. The next year,... View Details

Keywords: Governance; Central Banking; Ethics; Laws and Statutes; Business and Government Relations; Government and Politics; History; New York (state, US)

09 Jan 2024
Research & Ideas

Could Clean Hydrogen Become Affordable at Scale by 2030?

Hydrogen is poised to move from the sidelines of global clean energy as the industry learns to produce it more efficiently and at lower cost, according to newly published research led by Gunther Glenk, a climate fellow with Harvard Business School's Institute for the... View Details

Keywords: by Desmond Dodd; Energy; Green Technology

2008
Report

Survey Questionnaire on Environmental Management Practices: Summary of Results by Industry and Practices

By: Magali Delmas and Michael W. Toffel

This document provides a summary of the results of a survey on Environmental Management Practices (EMP) conducted by the University of California at Santa Barbara during October and November 2003. The survey was sent to 3255 facilities in 8 industrial sectors: pulp,... View Details

Keywords: Economic Sectors; Surveys; Management Practices and Processes; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Business and Government Relations; Environmental Sustainability; Non-Governmental Organizations

2009
Working Paper

Labor Regulations and European Private Equity

By: Ant Bozkaya and William R. Kerr

European nations substitute between employment protection regulations and labor market expenditures (e.g., unemployment insurance benefits) for providing worker insurance. Employment regulations more directly tax firms making frequent labor adjustments than other labor... View Details

Keywords: Employment; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Taxation; Insurance; Investment; Venture Capital; Private Equity; Europe