Publications

Educators

June 2016
Teaching Note

HubSpot: Lower Churn through Greater CHI

By: Jill Avery, Asis Martinez Jerez and Thomas Steenburgh

HubSpot, a web marketing startup selling inbound marketing software to small- and medium-sized businesses, is under pressure from its venture capital partners to rapidly acquire new customers and to maintain a low level of customer churn. The B2B SaaS company is in the... View Details

Keywords: CRM; Customer Acquisition; Customer Retention; Churn Management; SaaS Business Models; Customer Lifetime Value; Venture Capital; Startup; Software; Monitoring And Control; Marketing; Customer Relationship Management; Marketing Strategy; Accounting; Technology Industry; United States

2012
Working Paper

School Accountability and Principal Mobility: How No Child Left Behind Affects the Allocation of School Leaders

By: Danielle Li

The move toward increased school accountability may substantially affect the career risks that school leaders face without providing commensurate changes in pay. Since effective school leaders likely have significant scope in choosing where to work, these uncompensated... View Details

Keywords: Leadership; Corporate Accountability; Education; North Carolina

07 Nov 2023
Research & Ideas

When Glasses Land the Gig: Employers Still Choose Workers Who 'Look the Part'

to aid evaluations. The study examined some of the characteristics that employers look for in photos when assessing whether a candidate is a good fit. And it is an effect, Troncoso, notes, that goes “above and beyond demographics and... View Details

Keywords: by Scott Van Voorhis

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

Keywords: Criminal Record; Hiring; Background Checks; Recruitment; Insurance

June 2015
Case

Beacon Group of Hong Kong: Finding Light in the Shadow Education Industry

By: Christopher Marquis, Qi Li and Guy Leung

After more than 25 years of operation, Beacon Group had grown from having 3 small classrooms on the fourth floor of a commercial building, to a network of 21 centers across Hong Kong with over 60,000 students enrolled per year. The key long-term challenge for the... View Details

Keywords: Online Education; Education; Tutoring; Incentives; Hong Kong; Motivation and Incentives; Internet and the Web; Family Business; Education Industry; Hong Kong

Educators

2012
Chapter

China: The Indigenization of Insurance

By: Elisabeth Koll and David Faure

The concept of insurance was introduced to China in the early nineteenth century by Westerners trading in Guangzhou and practised essentially among them. We argue that indigenization of insurance, in particular life insurance, was a slow process that stretched from the... View Details

Keywords: History; Insurance; Insurance Industry; China

14 Feb 2011
Research & Ideas

Clay Christensen’s Milkshake Marketing

fast-food restaurant chain that wanted to improve its milkshake sales. The company started by segmenting its market both by product (milkshakes) and by demographics (a marketer's profile of a typical milkshake drinker). Next, the... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Retail; Service; Consumer Products; Food & Beverage

02 Jan 2024
Research & Ideas

10 Trends to Watch in 2024

The lightning-fast ascent of generative AI isn’t the only sea change on the horizon for businesses in the new year. The global economy is in flux as war, climate change, trade issues, and infrastructure problems demand attention. Many companies continue to struggle to... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne

2021
Working Paper

Supply- and Demand-Side Effects in Performance Appraisals: The Role of Gender and Race

By: Iris Bohnet, Oliver P. Hauser and Ariella Kristal

Performance reviews in firms are common but controversial. Managers’ subjective appraisals of their employees’ performance and employees’ self-evaluations might be affected by demographic characteristics, interact with each other as self-evaluations are typically... View Details

Keywords: Performance Appraisals; Gender; Race; Performance Evaluation

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Browse All Articles, Research, & Case Studies - HBS Working Knowledge

Politically Divided. That’s Not Surprising. by Richard Calvo, Vincent Pons, and Jesse M. Shapiro Demographics are not destiny in politics. Richard Calvo, Vincent Pons, and Jesse Shapiro explain how their latest research is playing out in... View Details

February 2014
Article

Causes and Frequency of Unplanned Hospital Readmission After Total Hip Arthroplasty.

By: W. W. Schairer, D. C. Sing, T. P. Vail and K J Bozic

BACKGROUND:
Total hip arthroplasty (THA) is a beneficial and cost-effective procedure for patients with osteoarthritis. Recent initiatives to improve hospital quality of care include assessing unplanned hospital readmission rates. Patients presenting for THA have... View Details

23 Oct 2024
HBS Seminar

Rosa Ferrer, University of Pompeu Fabra and BSE

Summer 2008
Editorial

Will the Stork Return to Europe and Japan? Understanding Fertility within Developed Nations

By: James Feyrer, Bruce Sacerdote and Ariel Dora Stern

Only a few rich nations are currently at replacement levels of fertility and many are considerably below. We believe that changes in the status of women are driving fertility change. At low levels of female status, women specialize in household production and... View Details

Keywords: Income; Household; Gender; Japan; Italy; United States; Sweden; Spain

Winter 2021
Article

Mobile Internet Usage and Usage-based Pricing

By: Jeffrey Prince and Shane Greenstein

Using data on mobile Internet usage of thousands of individuals, we provide some of the first analyses linking mobile usage to key demographics such as income. We find a reverse-U relationship between mobile Internet usage and income—notably different than the... View Details

Keywords: Mobile Internet Usage; Pricing Strategy; Internet and the Web; Mobile and Wireless Technology; Demographics; Income; Price; Strategy

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Article

Social Technology: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Improving Care for Older Adults

By: Arthur Kleinman, Hongtu Chen, Sue E. Levkoff, Ann Forsyth, David E. Bloom, Winnie Yip, Tarun Khanna, Conor J. Walsh, David Perry, Ellen W. Seely, Anne S. Kleinman, Yan Zhang, Yuan Wang, Jun Jing, Tianshu Pan, Ning An, Zhenggang Bai, Jiexiu Wang, Qing Liu and Fawwaz Habbal

Population aging is a defining demographic reality of our era. It is associated with an increase in the societal burden of delivering care to older adults with chronic conditions or frailty. How to integrate global population aging and technology development to help... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Age; Service Delivery; Information Technology; Collaborative Innovation and Invention