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Article

The Art of Balancing Autonomy and Control: What Managers Can Learn from Hackathon Organizers about Spurring Innovation.

By: Hila Lifshitz - Assaf, Sarah Lebovitz and Lior Zalmanson

Today, managers recognize that innovation requires a high level of work autonomy for their employees. This encourages curiosity, enables independent thinking, and provides an environment in which employees can experiment and test new problem-solving approaches with... View Details

Keywords: Innovation; Hackathon; Autonomy; Control; Innovation and Invention; Innovation and Management

23 Jun 2023
HBS Case

This Company Lets Employees Take Charge—Even with Life and Death Decisions

big problem these days. We also know from research that when employees feel empowered, they report being more motivated at work,” says Tatiana Sandino, the Arthur Lowes Dickinson Professor of Business Administration at HBS View Details

Keywords: by Annelena Lobb; Health

2016
Working Paper

The Reference Wars: Encyclopedia Britannica's Decline and Encarta's Emergence

By: Shane Greenstein

The experience of Encyclopædia Britannica provides the canonical example of the decline of an established firm at the outset of the digital age. Competition from Microsoft's Encarta in 1993 led to sharp declines in the sales of books, which led to the distressed sale... View Details

Keywords: Market Entry and Exit; Service Operations; Emerging Markets; Applications and Software; Books; Information Technology Industry; Information Industry

Forthcoming
Article

Racial Discrimination and the Social Contract: Evidence from U.S. Army Enlistment During WWII

By: Nancy Qian and Marco Tabellini

This paper documents that the Pearl Harbor attack triggered a sharp increase in volunteer enlistment rates of American men, the magnitude of the increase was smaller for Black men than for white men and the Black-white gap was larger in counties with higher levels of... View Details

Keywords: State Capacity; Institutions; War; History; Race; Prejudice and Bias; Government Administration

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14 Aug 2007
Working Paper Summaries

Improving Patient Outcomes: The Effects of Staff Participation and Collaboration in Healthcare Delivery

Keywords: by Ingrid M. Nembhard, Anita L. Tucker, Jeffrey D. Horbar & Joseph H. Carpenter; Health

Research Summary

Building Small Business Utopia: How Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Can Increase Small Business Success

Small business lending has remained unchanged for decades, laden with frictions and barriers that prevent many small businesses from accessing the capital they need to succeed. Financial technology, or “fintech,” promises to change this trajectory. In 2010, new fintech... View Details

2023
Working Paper

Point Four and the Politics of Foreign Direct Investment in the United States during the Early Cold War

By: Melanie Sheehan

This article traces business influence in the formulation of the Point Four technical assistance program, the first US Cold War-era international development program. It focuses specifically on business interest associations’ efforts to secure federal incentives to... View Details

Keywords: Point Four Program; Business Interest Association; International Development; Cold War; Foreign Direct Investment; Business History; Business and Government Relations

Article

Does the Law and Finance Hypothesis Pass the Test of History?

By: Aldo Musacchio and John D. Turner

For the body of work known as the law and finance literature, the development of financial markets and the concentration of ownership across countries is to a large extent the consequence of the legal system nations created or inherited decades or hundreds of years... View Details

Keywords: Finance; Business History; Financial Markets; Financial History; Business and Shareholder Relations; Law; Financial Services Industry; United States; United Kingdom; Brazil

Article

Affording to Wait: Medicare Initiation and the Use of Health Care

By: Guy David, Philip Saynisch, Victoria Acevado-Perez and Mark D. Neuman

Delays in receipt of necessary diagnostic and therapeutic medical procedures related to the timing of Medicare initiation at age 65 years have potentially broad welfare implications. We use 2005–2007 data from Florida and North Carolina to estimate the effect of... View Details

Keywords: Medicare; Behavior; Insurance; Health Care and Treatment; Public Administration Industry; Public Administration Industry; Public Administration Industry; North Carolina; Florida

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02 Jun 2020
Research & Ideas

Coronavirus Careers: Cloud Kitchens Are Now Serving

work, typically through online delivery companies such as Uber Eats, Postmates, Grubhub, and DoorDash. (Delivery services are not new, of course. In 2018, American consumers used third-party delivery View Details

Keywords: by Lena Ye and Geoffrey Jones; Food & Beverage

06 Feb 2020
Research & Ideas

What We Learned from Reading Jeff Bezos’ Patents

and services for Amazon. [div class=infogram-embed data-id=_/4jCyR8RvHi80c0ZOdbho][/div] 2. Jeff Bezos is inventing more, not less Most notably, Bezos’ patent activity increased dramatically post-2007, with... View Details

Keywords: by Tricia Gregg and Boris Groysberg; Retail

April 2025
Article

The Fed and the Secular Decline in Interest Rates

By: Sebastian Hillenbrand

In this paper I document a striking fact: a narrow window around Fed meetings fully captures the secular decline in U.S. Treasury yields since 1980. By contrast, yield movements outside this window are transitory and wash out over time. This is surprising because the... View Details

Keywords: United States Treasury; Monetary Policy; Yield Curve; Bonds; Financial Markets; Government Administration; Valuation; Interest Rates; United States

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