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- Faculty Publications (318)
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- 2013
- Report
Competitiveness at a Crossroads: Finding of Harvard Business School's 2012 Survey on U.S. Competitiveness
Harvard Business School gleaned responses from nearly 7,000 alumni and more than 1,000 members of the general public. The survey not only provides an updated view of the U.S. business environment, but also illuminates specific actions that business leaders and... View Details
- 2013
- Comment
Fairness and Redistribution: Comment
By: Rafael Di Tella and Juan Dubra
In an influential paper, Alesina and Angeletos (2005)—henceforth, AA—argued that a preference for fairness could lead two identical societies to choose different economic systems. In particular, two equilibria might arise: one with low taxes and a belief that the... View Details
- February 2013
- Article
Institutions and Venture Capital
By: Josh Lerner and Joacim Tag
We survey the literature on venture capital and institutions and present a case study comparing the development of the venture capital market in the United States and Sweden. Our literature survey underscores that the legal environment, financial market development,... View Details
Keywords: Venture Capital; Organizations; Taxation; Entrepreneurship; Financial Markets; United States; Sweden
- January 2013 (Revised October 2015)
- Case
Pittsburgh
By: Eric Werker, Meg Rithmire, Benjamin Kennedy and Andrew Knauer
The case narrates the development of Pittsburgh from the 1940s to 2012. It analyzes the collapse of the steel industry in the early 1980s, the city's subsequent decline, and the city's later re-emergence as a hub for higher education, the tech sector, and the... View Details
Keywords: Google; Population; City Growth; Shale; PNC; Tom Murphy; Luke Ravenstahl; Public-private Partnership; Tax Increment Financing; Brownfields; Renaissance; Industry Clusters; Industry Growth; City; Business and Government Relations; Taxation; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Nonprofit Organizations; Higher Education; Technology Industry; Health Industry; Steel Industry; Education Industry; Pittsburgh
- January 2013
- Article
Preference Heterogeneity and Optimal Capital Income Taxation
By: Mikhail Golosov, Maxim Troshkin, Aleh Tsyvinski and Matthew Weinzierl
We examine a prominent justification for capital income taxation: goods preferred by those with high ability ought to be taxed. In an environment where commodity taxes are allowed to be nonlinear functions of income and consumption, we derive an analytical expression... View Details
Keywords: Taxation
- Article
Tax Policy and the Efficiency of U.S. Direct Investment Abroad
By: Mihir A. Desai, C. Fritz Foley and James R. Hines Jr.
Deferral of U.S. taxes on foreign source income is commonly characterized as a subsidy to foreign investment, as reflected in its inclusion among "tax expenditures" and occasional calls for its repeal. This paper analyzes the extent to which tax deferral and other... View Details
- September 2012 (Revised September 2015)
- Case
Doing Business in Turkey
By: Felix Oberholzer-Gee, Robin J. Ely, Daniela Beyersdorfer, Emilie Billaud and Cigdem Çelik
In a rather flat international business environment characterized by shrinking markets and economic turmoil, Turkey promoted itself as one of the safe havens for investments. Led by the strong domestic demand of a young population, the country had tripled its GDP... View Details
- September 2012 (Revised December 2013)
- Case
Intel: Strategic Decisions in Locating a New Assembly and Test Plant (A)
By: Juan Alcacer and Kerry Herman
In mid-2005, Intel is examining its options for where to locate its next assembly and test plant. On its short list of potential sites include locations in China, India, Thailand, and Vietnam. Each country has its own unique benefits and risks related to... View Details
- August 2012 (Revised June 2017)
- Case
Australia: Commodities, Competitiveness, Climate and China
By: Richard H.K. Vietor and Laura Alfaro
For the past few decades, Australia has dealt with the benefits and costs of repeated mining booms—inflation, a housing bubble, a current account deficit and growing dependence on China. Between 1996 and 2007, however, Australia had most of these issues under control... View Details
- 2012
- Article
Signing at the Beginning Makes Ethics Salient and Decreases Dishonest Self-reports in Comparison to Signing at the End
By: L. Shu, N. Mazar, F. Gino, D. Ariely and M. Bazerman
Many written forms required by businesses and governments rely on honest reporting. Proof of honest intent is typically provided through signature at the end of the document, e.g., tax returns or insurance policy forms. Still, people sometimes cheat to advance their... View Details
Keywords: Nudge; Morality; Honesty; Self-report; Policy-making; Ethics; Corporate Disclosure; Reports; Policy
- July–August 2012
- Article
A Better Way to Tax U.S. Businesses
By: Mihir Desai
The article argues that U.S. taxation reform should reduce corporate taxes, incorporate an awareness of the global marketplace, and generate revenue-neutral incentives for innovation. According to the article, a reduction in corporate tax rates would be offset by a tax... View Details
- Blog Post
Why Economic Conservatives Should Support the Individual Mandate in Health Care
Although many conservatives are gnashing their teeth about the Supreme Court's upholding the individual mandate, had it not been upheld, their worst nightmares would have occurred: government would have required hundreds of billions in additional taxes to pay for... View Details
- June 2012 (Revised December 2017)
- Case
Marc Rich and Global Commodity Trading
By: Geoffrey Jones and Espen Storli
Examines the career of Marc Rich, the world's leading commodity trader before his criminal indictment in the United States in 1983. The case surveys the historical growth of commodity trading, especially in metals, from the late nineteenth century, and its evolving... View Details
- March 2012 (Revised August 2014)
- Case
Fiji versus FIJI: Negotiating Over Water
By: Francesca Gino, Michael W. Toffel and Stephanie van Sice
This case examines negotiations between a company and government over natural resources. The Fijian government proposed a substantial increase in its water extraction tax that would only apply to large extractors, and thus to FIJI Water and not to its competitors. FIJI... View Details
- March 2012
- Article
Macroeconomic Policy and U.S. Competitiveness
By: Richard H.K. Vietor and Matthew Weinzierl
The United States is on a glide path to fiscal disaster, with experts projecting that the federal government will take in far less money than it spends-indefinitely. Our current fiscal policy is eroding competitiveness in several ways, and business conditions in the... View Details
- March 2012
- Article
Reviving Entrepreneurship
By: Josh Lerner and William Sahlman
New enterprises don't exist in a vacuum: They rise or fall depending on myriad contextual factors, all of them interrelated, and all of them affected by government policy. U.S. lawmakers must carefully consider the effects of interventions in at least 12 areas, ranging... View Details
- March 2012
- Article
The Looming Challenge to U.S Competitiveness
By: Michael E. Porter and Jan W. Rivkin
The United States is a competitive location to the extent that companies operating in the U.S. are able to compete successfully in the global economy while supporting high and rising living standards for the average American. By this standard, U.S. competitiveness is... View Details
- 2012
- Working Paper
~Why Do We Redistribute so Much but Tag so Little? Normative Diversity, Equal Sacrifice and Optimal Taxation
Tagging is a free lunch in conventional optimal tax theory because it eases the classic tradeoff between efficiency and equality. But tagging is used in only limited ways in tax policy. I propose one explanation: conventional optimal tax theory has yet to capture the... View Details
- 2014
- Working Paper
De Gustibus non est Taxandum: Heterogeneity in Preferences and Optimal Redistribution
By: Benjamin B Lockwood and Matthew Weinzierl
The prominent but unproven intuition that preference heterogeneity reduces redistribution in a standard optimal tax model is shown to hold under the plausible condition that the distribution of preferences for consumption relative to leisure rises, in terms of... View Details