Publications
Publications
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(1,339)
- Faculty Publications (314)
- July 2016
- Article
Do Prices Determine Vertical Integration?
By: Laura Alfaro, Paola Conconi, Harald Fadinger and Andrew F. Newman
What is the relationship between product prices and vertical integration? While the literature has focused on how integration affects prices, this paper provides evidence that prices can affect integration. Many theories in organizational economics and industrial... View Details
- Article
High School Curriculum and Financial Outcomes: The Impact of Mandated Personal Finance and Mathematics Courses
By: Shawn Cole, Anna Paulson and Gauri Kartini Shastry
Financial literacy and cognitive capabilities are convincingly linked to the quality of financial decision-making. Yet, there is little evidence that education intended to improve financial decision-making is successful. Using plausibly exogenous variation in exposure... View Details
- 2016
- Working Paper
The Great Training Robbery
By: Michael Beer, Magnus Finnstrom and Derek Schrader
In 2012 U.S. corporations spent $164.2 billion on training and education. Overwhelming evidence and experience shows, however, that most companies are unable to transfer employee learning into changes in individual and organization behavior or improved financial... View Details
- Spring 2016
- Article
Risk Neglect in Equity Markets
By: Malcolm Baker
The link between measures of risk and return within the equity market has been very weak over the past 47 years: in the United States, returns on high-risk stocks have cumulatively fallen short of the returns on low-risk stocks, during a period when the equity market... View Details
- March 2016 (Revised March 2022)
- Teaching Note
Evive Health and Workplace Influenza Vaccinations
By: John Beshears
Evive Health is a company that manages communication campaigns on behalf of health insurance plans and large employers. Using big data techniques and insights from behavioral economics, Evive deploys targeted and effective messages that improve individuals' health... View Details
Keywords: Vaccination; Influenza; Flu Shot; Preventive Care; Health Care; Behavioral Economics; Choice Architecture; Nudge; Experimental Design; Randomized Controlled Trial; RCT; Causal Inference; Health Care and Treatment; Insurance; Health; Consumer Behavior; Health Testing and Trials; Communication Strategy; Insurance Industry; Health Industry
- March 2016
- Article
Dividends as Reference Points: A Behavioral Signaling Approach
By: Malcolm Baker, Brock Mendel and Jeffrey Wurgler
We outline a dividend signaling model that features investors who are averse to dividend cuts. Managers with strong unobservable cash earnings separate by paying high dividends but retain enough to be likely not to fall short next period. The model is consistent with a... View Details
Keywords: Investment
- Article
The Perils of Proactive Churn Prevention Using Plan Recommendations: Evidence from a Field Experiment
By: Eva Ascarza, Raghuram Iyengar and Martin Schleicher
Facing the issue of increasing customer churn, many service firms have begun recommending pricing plans to their customers. One reason behind this type of retention campaign is that customers who subscribe to a plan suitable for them should be less likely to churn... View Details
- Article
Behavioral Hazard in Health Insurance
By: Katherine Baicker, Sendhil Mullainathan and Joshua Schwartzstein
A fundamental implication of standard moral hazard models is overuse of low-value medical care because copays are lower than costs. In these models, the demand curve alone can be used to make welfare statements, a fact relied on by much empirical work. There is ample... View Details
- Article
Reaching for Yield in the Bond Market
By: Bo Becker and Victoria Ivashina
Reaching for yield—the propensity to buy riskier assets in order to achieve higher yields—is believed to be an important factor contributing to the credit cycle. This paper analyzes this phenomenon in the corporate bond market. Specifically, we show evidence for... View Details
- August 2015
- Article
Dollar Funding and the Lending Behavior of Global Banks
By: Victoria Ivashina, David S. Scharfstein and Jeremy C. Stein
A large share of dollar-denominated lending is done by non-U.S. banks, particularly European banks. We present a model in which such banks cut dollar lending more than euro lending in response to a shock to their credit quality. Because these banks rely on wholesale... View Details
- April 2015
- Article
Money Creation and the Shadow Banking System
By: Adi Sunderam
Many explanations for the rapid growth of the shadow banking system in the mid-2000s focus on money demand. This paper asks whether the short-term liabilities of the shadow banking system behave like money. We first present a simple model where households demand money... View Details
- Article
The Effect of Providing Peer Information on Retirement Savings Decisions
By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson, Brigitte C. Madrian and Katherine L. Milkman
Using a field experiment in a 401(k) plan, we measure the effect of disseminating information about peer behavior on savings. Low-saving employees received simplified plan enrollment or contribution increase forms. A randomized subset of forms stated the fraction of... 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
- December 2014 (Revised July 2021)
- Case
Discovery Limited
By: Michael E. Porter, Mark R. Kramer and Aldo Sesia
Discovery Ltd. is a South Africa-based insurance company. Started in the early 1990s, Discovery used behavioral economics and data collection to innovate in the health care insurance industry. Its founder Adrian Gore believed that the company's products needed to not... View Details
- 2014
- Working Paper
The Rise and Fall of Demand for Securitizations
By: Sergey Chernenko, Samuel G. Hanson and Adi Sunderam
Collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and private-label mortgage-backed securities (MBS) backed by nonprime loans played a central role in the recent financial crisis. Little is known, however, about the underlying forces that drove investor demand for these... View Details
- 2018
- Working Paper
Patent Trolls: Evidence from Targeted Firms
By: Lauren Cohen, Umit G. Gurun and Scott Duke Kominers
We provide the first large-sample evidence on the behavior and impact of non-practicing entities (NPEs) in the intellectual property space. We find that on average, NPEs appear to behave as opportunistic “patent trolls.” NPEs sue cash-rich firms—and target cash in... View Details
- July 2014
- Article
Smart Money? The Effect of Education on Financial Outcomes
By: Shawn A. Cole, Anna Paulson and Gauri Kartini Shastry
Household financial decisions are important for household welfare, economic growth and financial stability. Yet, our understanding of the determinants of financial decision-making is limited. Exploiting exogenous variation in state compulsory schooling laws in both... View Details
- July 2014
- Article
Winners in the Spotlight: Media Coverage of Fund Holdings as a Driver of Flows
By: David H. Solomon, Eugene F. Soltes and Denis Sosyura
We show that media coverage of mutual fund holdings affects how investors allocate money across funds. Controlling for fund performance, fund holdings with high past returns attract extra flows only if these stocks were recently featured in major newspapers. In... View Details
- June 2014
- Article
Frictions in Shadow Banking: Evidence from the Lending Behavior of Money Market Funds
By: Sergey Chernenko and Adi Sunderam
We document the consequences of money market fund risk taking during the European sovereign debt crisis. Using a novel data set of security-level holdings of prime money market funds, we show that funds with large exposures to risky Eurozone banks suffered significant... View Details
- Article
Currency Unions, Product Introductions, and the Real Exchange Rate
By: Alberto Cavallo, Brent Neiman and Roberto Rigobon
We use a novel dataset of online prices of identical goods sold by four large global retailers in dozens of countries to study good-level real exchange rates and their aggregated behavior. First, in contrast to the prior literature, we demonstrate that the law of one... View Details