Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(11,335)
- Faculty Publications (3,480)
- March 2024
- Article
Flight to Safety: How Economic Downturns Affect Talent Flows to Startups
By: Shai Bernstein, Richard Townsend and Ting Xu
Using proprietary data from AngelList Talent, we study how individuals’ job search and application behavior changed during the COVID-19 downturn. We find that job seekers shifted their searches toward more established firms and away from early-stage startups, even... View Details
- March 2024
- Article
Human Capital Affects Religious Identity: Causal Evidence from Kenya
By: Livia Alfonsi, Michal Bauer, Julie Chytilová and Edward Miguel
We study how human capital and economic conditions causally affect the choice of religious denomination. We utilize a longitudinal dataset monitoring the religious history of more than 5,000 Kenyans over 20 years, in tandem with a randomized experiment (deworming) that... View Details
- March 2024
- Article
The Political Effects of Immigration: Culture or Economics?
By: Alberto Alesina and Marco Tabellini
We review the growing literature on the political economy of immigration. First, we discuss the effects of immigration on a wide range of political and social outcomes. The existing evidence suggests that immigrants often, but not always, trigger backlash, increasing... View Details
- February 2024
- Module Note
Collaborate on the Core, Compete on the Edges
By: Frank Nagle
In the rapidly evolving environment of modern business, the digitization of economic activity and the ubiquitous integration of technology across industries are fundamentally altering how companies develop and implement strategy. The rise of digital technologies has... View Details
- 2024
- Article
Half the Firms, Double the Profits: Public Firms' Transformation, 1996–2022
By: Mark J. Roe and Charles C.Y. Wang
The number of public firms in the United States has halved since the beginning of the twenty-first century, causing consternation among corporate and securities law regulators. The dominant explanations, often advanced by Securities and Exchange commissioners when... View Details
- February 2024 (Revised June 2024)
- Case
Can Families Conquer Private Equity? Pritzker Private Capital
By: Lauren Cohen and Sophia Pan
Anthony (Tony) Pritkzer, Paul Carbone, and the Pritzker Private Capital (PPC) team wondered how to approach the firm’s next phase of growth. PPC was a private equity firm that offered a differentiated approach to the family capital market. Back in 2016, the partners... View Details
Keywords: Family Office; External Financing; Succession; Leadership Transition; Family Business; Private Equity; Investment; Business Growth and Maturation; Financial Strategy; Investment Portfolio; Business Model; Private Sector; Financial Liquidity; Risk Management; Organizational Structure; Competitive Advantage; Venture Capital; Management Succession; Financial Services Industry; Chicago; Illinois; United States
- February 2024 (Revised May 2025)
- Case
Doing Business in Medellín, Colombia
By: Nori Gerardo Lietz, Leonard A. Schlesinger and Karina Souza
This case examines the challenges and opportunities of doing business in Colombia. It highlights Colombia's economic transformation in the decades leading up to 2024 in the context of its history, culture, and politics. The case gives an overview of some of the main... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
'De Gustibus' and Disputes about Reference Dependence
By: Thomas Graeber, Pol Campos-Mercade, Lorenz Goette, Alexandre Kellogg and Charles Sprenger
Existing tests of reference-dependent preferences assume universal loss aversion. This paper examines the implications of heterogeneity in gain-loss attitudes for such tests. In experiments on labor supply and exchange behavior we measure gain-loss attitudes and then... View Details
- February 2024
- Article
An Economic Framework for Vaccine Prioritization
By: Mohammad Akbarpour, Eric Budish, Piotr Dworczak and Scott Duke Kominers
We propose an economic framework for determining the optimal allocation of a scarce supply of vaccines that become gradually available during a public health crisis, such as the Covid-19 pandemic. Agents differ in observable and unobservable characteristics, and the... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Corporate Culture Homogeneity and Top Executive Incentive Design: Evidence from CEO Compensation Contracts
By: Dennis Campbell, Ruidi Shang and Zhifang Zhang
We examine how corporate cultures characterized by high degrees of homogeneity in the underlying values and beliefs of organizational members are related to the design of CEO incentive compensation contracts. We argue that culture homogeneity within firms lowers... View Details
- February 2024
- Article
Fifty Shades of QE: Robust Evidence
By: Brian Fabo, Marina Jančoková, Elisabeth Kempf and Ľuboš Pástor
Fabo et al. (2021) show that papers written by central bank researchers find quantitative easing (QE) to be more effective than papers written by academics. Weale and Wieladek (2022) show that a subset of these results lose statistical significance when OLS regressions... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Age at Immigrant Arrival and Career Mobility: Evidence from Vietnamese Refugee Migration and the Amerasian Homecoming Act
By: Sari Pekkala Kerr, William R. Kerr and Kendall Smith
We study the long-run career mobility of young immigrants, mostly refugees, from Vietnam who moved to the United States during 1989-1995. This third and final migration wave of young Vietnamese immigrants was sparked by unexpected events that culminated in the... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
The Wandering Scholars: Understanding the Heterogeneity of University Commercialization
By: Josh Lerner, Henry Manley, Carolyn Stein and Heidi Williams
University-based scientific research has long been argued to be a central source of
commercial innovation and economic growth. Yet at the same time, there have been
long-held concerns that many university-based discoveries never realize their potential
social... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
The Value of Open Source Software
By: Manuel Hoffmann, Frank Nagle and Yanuo Zhou
The value of a non-pecuniary (free) product is inherently difficult to assess. A pervasive
example is open source software (OSS), a global public good that plays a vital role in the economy
and is foundational for most technology we use today. However, it is... View Details
- January 11, 2024
- Article
Understanding the Tradeoffs of the Amazon Antitrust Case
By: Chiara Farronato, Andrey Fradkin, Andrei Hagiu and Dionne Lomax
Regulators in the United States and Europe have been taking on Big Tech, challenging what they say are the companies’ anti-competitive and predatory strategies that harm consumers and third-party users of their platforms. This article examines the FTC’s case against... View Details
- January 2024
- Technical Note
The ICARUS Principles: What It Takes to Tackle the World
By: Debora L. Spar and Julia M. Comeau
Over the course of the 20th century, most of the world’s major multinational corporations framed their mission around Milton Friedman’s famous mantra: that the sole purpose of the firm is to maximize its shareholders’ profits. Recently, however, growing numbers of... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Lost in Transmission
By: Thomas Graeber, Shakked Noy and Christopher Roth
For many decisions, people rely on information received from others by word of mouth. How does the process of verbal transmission distort economic information? In our experiments, participants listen to audio recordings containing economic forecasts and are paid to... View Details
- 2024
- Article
Technological Adoption and Taxation: The Case of China's Golden Tax Reform
By: Haichao Fan, Yu Liu, Nancy Qian and Jaya Y. Wen
This paper investigates the effect of Phase 2 of the Golden Tax Project on VAT in China. The reform introduced computer-generated invoices and electronic transaction linking. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we show that the reform increased VAT by reducing... View Details
- 2024
- Book
The Everything Token: How NFTs and Web3 Will Transform the Way We Buy, Sell, and Create
By: Steve Kaczynski and Scott Duke Kominers
We demystify the coming digital revolution, showing how NFTs will transform our online and offline interactions.
NFTs aren’t just pictures on the internet, or a fad that has come and gone. Rather, they’re a new technology for creating digital assets and... View Details
NFTs aren’t just pictures on the internet, or a fad that has come and gone. Rather, they’re a new technology for creating digital assets and... View Details
Keywords: Economic Systems; Microeconomics; Entrepreneurship; Cultural Entrepreneurship; Information Technology; Innovation and Invention; Innovation Strategy; Digital Platforms; Digital Strategy; Digital Transformation; Internet and the Web; Technology Adoption; Marketing; Marketing Strategy; Product Marketing; Product Positioning; Markets; E-commerce; Market Design; Value; Customer Value and Value Chain; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Innovation and Management; Organizational Structure; Customer Ownership; Ownership; Advertising Industry; Communications Industry; Computer Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Fashion Industry; Information Technology Industry; Media and Broadcasting Industry; Technology Industry; Web Services Industry
- 2024
- Chapter
The Private Economy Under Party-State Capitalism
By: Margaret M. Pearson, Meg Rithmire and Kellee S. Tsai
This chapter addresses the evolution of China’s approach to the private sector from the early reform era until the beginning of Xi Jinping’s third term. It argues that China has evolved from a familiar form of state capitalism, in which economic growth is the primary... View Details