Publications

June 2011
Case

Fighting a Dangerous Financial Fire: The Federal Response to the Crisis of 2007-2009

By: David Moss and Cole Bolton

By the summer of 2009, many observers concluded that a catastrophic financial collapse- which seemed all but imminent the previous fall and winter - had been averted. Although the recession had still yet to be declared over and the economy's footing remained far from... View Details

Keywords: Business Cycles; Economic Slowdown and Stagnation; Financial Crisis; Financial Institutions; Financial Markets; Financial Strategy; Policy; Knowledge Acquisition

February 2007 (Revised March 2007)
Case

UBS and Climate Change--Warming Up to Global Action?

By: Felix Oberholzer-Gee, Forest L. Reinhardt and Elizabeth Raabe

Marco Suter, Executive Vice-Chairman, UBS Board of Directors, carefully studied the chart on his desk. It showed the public commitment of major financial institutions to help mitigate global warming. Evidently, UBS lagged behind its competitors. The graph was part of a... View Details

Keywords: Climate Change; Energy Conservation; Cost vs Benefits; Law; Financial Institutions; Environmental Sustainability; Corporate Accountability; Financial Services Industry

01 Dec 2023
News

3-Minute Briefing: Nathaniel Fick (MBA/MPA 2008)

As a Marine, I led some of the first units in Afghanistan and Iraq. What I loved about that experience was the intersection of a mission with building and leading teams. I came to HBS to develop the tools around that work, but in a very different context. On the... View Details

Keywords: Julia Hanna

Article

The Baby Benefits Club

By: Debora L. Spar

This past summer several prominent firms seemed to be competing for the title of America's most family-friendly company. In August, Netflix announced plans to offer new mothers and fathers "unlimited leave". Microsoft countered quickly, promising to increase its own... View Details

Keywords: Parental Leave; Maternity Leave; Employees; Compensation and Benefits; Policy; Gender; Equality and Inequality

February 2010 (Revised March 2012)
Case

U.S. Healthcare Reform: International Perspectives

By: Arthur A. Daemmrich and Elia Cameron

The national economic implications of rising healthcare costs were poorly understood, even as the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom instituted reforms in early 2010. Presenting opportunities for cross-national policy learning, this case describes the... View Details

Keywords: Macroeconomics; Insurance; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Health Care and Treatment; Laws and Statutes; Business and Government Relations; Health Industry; Public Administration Industry; Germany; United Kingdom; United States

September 1992 (Revised March 1993)
Case

Empresas ICA and the Mexican Road Privatization Program

By: Willis M. Emmons III and Monica Brand

Mexico's largest construction company, Empresas ICA, makes an initial public offering to international equity investors in April 1992 to help fund its participation in an ambitious new private-sector approach to highway development. Under the new program, launched by... View Details

Keywords: Construction; Transportation Networks; Infrastructure; Privatization; Private Equity; Investment; Initial Public Offering; Private Sector; Government and Politics; Policy; Construction Industry; Mexico

September 15, 2022
Article

Work-From-Anywhere as a Public Policy: 3 Findings from the Tulsa Remote Program

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Evan Starr and Thomaz Teodorovicz

The adoption of work-from-anywhere by organizations might help smaller towns and communities across the country attract talent and reverse brain drain, by incentivizing remote workers to migrate to such locations. We evaluate how the Tulsa Remote program, which... View Details

Keywords: Remote Work; Grants; Labor; Government Administration; Tulsa

Read Now

Thomas R. Eisenmann is the Howard H. Stevenson Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School; Peter O. Crisp Faculty Chair, Harvard Innovation Labs; and Unit Head of the HBS Entrepreneurial... View Details

April 2011 (Revised May 2013)
Case

South Africa (A): Stuck in the Middle?

By: Richard H. K. Vietor and Diego Comin

Fifteen years after ending apartheid, formal unemployment in South Africa was still at 24%. While the country had grown at 4 to 5% annually during the 2000s, the financial crisis set it back by 1 million more unemployed. Moreover, it seemed as if the nation were stuck... View Details

Keywords: Financial Crisis; Inflation and Deflation; Policy; Employment; Wages; Competition; South Africa

Research Summary

Overview

ECONOMICS OF THE ADVERTISING AND MARKETING SERVICEC INDUSTRY

Professor Silk’s recent research has been focused on the economics of the advertising and marketing services industry. He has conducted econometric studies of the effects of scale and scope on the... View Details

2017
Working Paper

Knowledge Flows within Multinationals—Estimating Relative Influence of Headquarters and Host Context Using a Gravity Model

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Mike Horia Teodorescu and Tarun Khanna

From the perspective of a multinational subsidiary, we employ the classic gravity equation in economics to model and compare knowledge flows to the subsidiary from the MNC headquarters and from the host country context. We also generalize traditional economics gravity... View Details

Keywords: Multinationals; Knowledge Flows; Cosine Similarity; Gravity Model; Multinational Firms and Management; Knowledge Dissemination; Business Headquarters; Immigration

12 Dec 2023
Research & Ideas

COVID Tested Global Supply Chains. Here’s How They’ve Adapted

2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the paper notes. Government policy has played a leading role. The Biden Administration has continued former President Trump’s tariff View Details

Keywords: by Scott Van Voorhis

October 2017
Article

Progress In Interoperability: Measuring US Hospitals' Engagement In Sharing Patient Data

By: A Jay Holmgren, Vaishali Patel and Julia Adler-Milstein

Achieving an interoperable health care system remains a top US policy priority. Despite substantial efforts to encourage interoperability, the first set of national data in 2014 suggested that hospitals’ engagement levels were low. With 2015 data now available, we... View Details

Keywords: Health; Technology; Electronic Health Records; Health Care and Treatment; Data and Data Sets; Technology Networks; Policy; United States

Web

General Management - Faculty & Research

General Management Overview Faculty Curriculum Awards & Honors Doctoral Students September 2025 Article Sticky Capital Controls By: Miguel Acosta-Henao, Laura Alfaro and Andrés Fernández There is much ongoing debate on the merits of capital controls as effective View Details

November 2021
Article

A Salient Sugar Tax Decreases Sugary Drink Buying

By: Grant E. Donnelly, Paige Guge, Ryan Howell and Leslie John

Many governments have introduced sugary drink excise taxes to reduce purchasing and consumption of such drinks; however, they do not typically stipulate how such taxes should be communicated at point-of-purchase. Historical, field, and experimental data entailing over... View Details

Keywords: Decision-making; Open Data; Open Materials; Preregistered; Health; Policy; Taxation; Consumer Behavior; Decision Making