Publications
Publications
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(6,032)
- Faculty Publications (1,627)
Policy
→
- February 2023
- Article
A Different Framework to Achieve Universal Coverage in the U.S.
By: Katherine Baicker, Amitabh Chandra and Mark Shepard
This JAMA Forum discusses alternative ways to achieve universal coverage in the US such as administrative simplification in the Affordable Care Act plans to increase enrollment, having a basic policy that would be available to everyone, and options for supplemental... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Crowding in Private Quality: The Equilibrium Effects of Public Spending in Education
By: Tahir Andrabi, Natalie Bau, Jishnu Das, Asim Ijaz Khwaja and Naureen Karachiwalla
We estimate the equilibrium effects of a public-school grant program administered through school councils in Pakistani villages with multiple public and private schools and clearly defined catchment boundaries. The program was randomized at the village-level, allowing... View Details
- January–February 2023
- Article
Forecasting COVID-19 and Analyzing the Effect of Government Interventions
By: Michael Lingzhi Li, Hamza Tazi Bouardi, Omar Skali Lami, Thomas Trikalinos, Nikolaos Trichakis and Dimitris Bertsimas
We developed DELPHI, a novel epidemiological model for predicting detected cases and deaths in the prevaccination era of the COVID-19 pandemic. The model allows for underdetection of infections and effects of government interventions. We have applied DELPHI across more... View Details
- February 2023
- Article
Increasing the Demand for Workers with a Criminal Record
By: Zoë Cullen, Will Dobbie and Mitchell Hoffman
State and local policies increasingly restrict employers’ access to criminal records, but without
addressing the underlying reasons that employers may conduct criminal background checks.
Employers may thus still want to ask about a job applicant’s criminal record... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Life After Death: A Field Experiment with Small Businesses on Information Frictions, Stigma, and Bankruptcy
By: Shai Benjamin Bernstein, Emanuele Colonnelli, Mitchell Hoffman and Benjamin Iverson
In a randomized control trial (RCT) with U.S. small businesses, we document that a large share of firms are not well-informed about bankruptcy. Many assume that bankruptcy necessarily entails the death of a business and do not know about Chapter 11 bankruptcy, where... View Details
- February 2023
- Article
National Models of Climate Governance Among Major Emitters
By: Johnathan Guy, Esther Shears and Jonas Meckling
National climate institutions structure the process of climate mitigation policymaking and shape climate policy ambition and performance. Countries have, for example, been building science bodies, passing climate laws and creating new agencies. Here we provide the... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Leadership and the Value of Persistence
By: James J. Anton, Alan Jaske and Dennis Yao
Consider a leader’s decision whether to persist with an unsuccessful R&D project
or to terminate the project in favor of a new project with an uncertain value. How
does that decision affect the effort exerted by the manager assigned to the project? To
study this... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Achieving Universal Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: Addressing Market Failures or Providing a Social Floor?
By: Katherine Baicker, Amitabh Chandra and Mark Shepard
The United States spends substantially more on health care than most developed countries, yet leaves a greater share of the population uninsured. We suggest that incremental insurance expansions focused on addressing market failures will propagate inefficiencies and... View Details
- 2023
- Article
Experimental Evaluation of Individualized Treatment Rules
By: Kosuke Imai and Michael Lingzhi Li
The increasing availability of individual-level data has led to numerous applications of individualized (or personalized) treatment rules (ITRs). Policy makers often wish to empirically evaluate ITRs and compare their relative performance before implementing them in a... View Details
- Winter 2023
- Article
Moral Firms?
Building a new political economy requires transforming our markets, our institutions, and our policy and regulatory regimes. In this essay, I argue that it also requires transforming the purpose of the firm: from a singular focus on maximizing financial returns to the... View Details
- January 2023
- Article
Racial Diversity and Racial Policy Preferences: The Great Migration and Civil Rights
By: Alvaro Calderon, Vasiliki Fouka and Marco Tabellini
Between 1940 and 1970, more than 4 million African Americans moved from the South to the North of the United States, during the Second Great Migration. This same period witnessed the struggle and eventual success of the civil rights movement in ending institutionalized... View Details
Keywords: Civil Rights; Great Migration; History; Race; Rights; Prejudice and Bias; Government Legislation
- 2023
- Working Paper
State Employment as a Strategy of Autocratic Control in China
By: Jaya Y. Wen
This paper presents evidence that autocrats use state-owned firms to strategically pacify social unrest via employment provision, a role that may contribute to their favorable treatment and persistence across settings. I use variation in a regional conflict between... View Details
- August 2023
- Article
Taking Stock of the Implementation Gap in Climate Policy
By: Taryn Fransen, Jonas Meckling, Anna Stunzi, Tobias Schmidt, Florian Egli, Nicolas Schmid and Christopher Beaton
A gap persists between the emissions reductions pledged by countries under the Paris Agreement and those resulting from their domestic policies. We argue that this gap in fact contains two parts: one in the policies that countries adopt, and the other in the outcomes... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
Credit and the Family: The Economic Consequences of Closing the Credit Gap of U.S. Couples
By: Olivia S. Kim
Closing disparities in credit access between spouses can help reduce consumption inequality in the household. The 2013 reversal of the Truth-in-Lending Act increased the borrowing capacity of secondary earners in equitable-distribution states but not in... View Details
- December 2022 (Revised February 2023)
- Case
Daniel Defense: Responding to the Shooting at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, TX
By: Benjamin C. Esty and Daniel Fisher
At 11:33am on May 24, 2022, an 18-year-old man from Uvalde, Texas walked into the Robb Elementary School carrying a semi-automatic "AR-15-style” rifle manufactured by Daniel Defense and killed 19 children and two adults. Three days later, Representative Carolyn Maloney... View Details
Keywords: Gun Violence; Gun Policy; Second Amendment; Legal Liability; Government Legislation; Marketing Strategy; Business or Company Management; Product Marketing; Ethics; Corporate Accountability; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Moral Sensibility; Crime and Corruption; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Manufacturing Industry; Advertising Industry; United States
- December 8, 2022
- Article
The New China Shock: How Beijing’s Party-State Capitalism Is Changing the Global Economy
By: Margaret M. Pearson, Meg Rithmire and Kellee S. Tsai
In the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008, China began to move away from the market-based approach that had shaped its economic policies for three decades, and toward something that might be termed “party-state capitalism,” which involves a high degree of... View Details
- December 2022
- Article
Does Industry Employment of Active Regulators Weaken Oversight?
By: Jonas Heese
I study whether industry employment of active regulators weakens oversight. To examine this question, I exploit that the Financial Reporting Enforcement Panel (FREP), the German capital-market regulator responsible for enforcing public firms’ compliance with accounting... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
Regulatory Incentives for Innovation: The FDA's Breakthrough Therapy Designation
By: Amitabh Chandra, Jennifer Kao, Kathleen Miller and Ariel D. Stern
Regulators of new products confront a tradeoff between speeding a new product to market and collecting additional product quality information. The FDA’s Breakthrough Therapy Designation (BTD) provides an opportunity to understand if a regulator can use new policy to... View Details
- December 2022
- Article
The Contribution of Price Growth to Pharmaceutical Revenue Growth in the United States: Evidence from Medicines Sold in Retail Pharmacies
By: Pragya Kakani, Michael Chernew and Amitabh Chandra
Context: To what extent does pharmaceutical revenue growth depend on new medicines versus increasing prices for existing medicines? Moreover, does using list prices, as is commonly done, instead of prices net of confidential rebates offered by manufacturers, which are... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
The Limits of Decentralized Administrative Data Collection: Experimental Evidence from Colombia
By: Natalia Garbiras-Diaz and Tara Slough
States collect vast amounts of data for use in policymaking and public administration. To
do so, central governments frequently solicit data from decentralized bureaucrats. Because
central governments use these data in policymaking, decentralized bureaucrats may face... View Details