Publications
Publications
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(2,136)
- Faculty Publications (372)
- January 2017 (Revised January 2019)
- Case
The Rise and Fall of Lehman Brothers
By: Stuart C. Gilson, Kristin Mugford and Sarah L. Abbott
With nearly $700 billion in assets, Lehman was the largest U.S. bankruptcy in history. In 2007, Lehman achieved record earnings of over $4 billion on revenues of $60 billion. By September 2008 the fourth largest investment bank in the world was bankrupt. How had a... View Details
Keywords: Bankruptcy; Financial Distress; Accounting Policies; Business Ethics; Financial Reporting; Volatility; Judgments; Financial Crisis; Insolvency and Bankruptcy; Financial Liquidity; Investment Banking; Financial Management; Financial Strategy; Corporate Accountability; Corporate Disclosure; Corporate Governance; Crisis Management; Risk Management; Failure; Business and Government Relations; Ethics; Banking Industry; New York (city, NY)
- 2017
- Working Paper
A Welfarist Role for Nonwelfarist Rules: An Example with Envy
I propose and formalize an argument for why economists working in the welfarist normative tradition should include nonwelfarist principles in how they judge economic policy. The key idea behind this argument is that the world is too complex, and our ability to model it... View Details
- 2016
- Article
Peer-to-Peer Markets
By: Liran Einav, Chiara Farronato and Jonathan Levin
Peer-to-peer markets such as eBay, Uber, and Airbnb allow small suppliers to compete with traditional providers of goods or services. We view the primary function of these markets as making it easy for buyers to find sellers and engage in convenient, trustworthy... View Details
- 2016
- Working Paper
Pros vs Joes: Agent Pricing Behavior in the Sharing Economy
By: Jun Li, Antonio Moreno and Dennis J. Zhang
One of the major differences between markets that follow a “sharing economy” paradigm and traditional two-sided markets is that the supply side in the sharing economy often includes individual nonprofessional decision makers, in addition to firms and professional... View Details
- July 2016
- Article
Taxation, Corruption, and Growth
By: Philippe Aghion, Ufuk Akcigit, Julia Cagé and William R. Kerr
We build an endogenous growth model to analyze the relationships between taxation, corruption, and economic growth. Entrepreneurs lie at the center of the model and face disincentive effects from taxation but acquire positive benefits from public infrastructure.... View Details
- 2016
- Working Paper
The Empirical Economics of Online Attention
By: Andre Boik, Shane Greenstein and Jeffrey Prince
In several markets, firms compete not for consumer expenditure but instead for consumer attention. We model and characterize how households allocate their scarce attention in arguably the largest market for attention: the Internet. Our characterization of household... View Details
- June 2016
- Case
Augustine Heard & Co.: Building a Family Business in the China Trade (A)
By: William C. Kirby, Joycelyn W. Eby and John S. Ji
Augustine Heard Sr. founded Augustine Heard & Company, a commission house focused on trade between China and the United States, in 1840. He welcomed his four nephews into the family business as it expanded in the increasingly complex economic and political environment... View Details
Keywords: Exports; China; Commissions; Family Business; Family and Family Relationships; China; Boston
- 2019
- Working Paper
Fiscal Rules and Sovereign Default
By: Laura Alfaro and Fabio Kanczuk
Recurrent concerns over debt sustainability in emerging and developed nations have prompted renewed debate on the role of fiscal rules. Their optimality, however, remains unclear. We provide a quantitative analysis of fiscal rules in a standard model of sovereign debt... View Details
- May 2016 (Revised June 2017)
- Case
India's Amul: Keeping Up with the Times
By: Rohit Deshpandé, Tarun Khanna, Namrata Arora and Tanya Bijlani
Amul is an Indian dairy cooperative founded in 1947—eight months before India's independence from British rule—and owned by over three million farmers in the state of Gujarat. It is India's largest food product marketing organization, selling 46 products, including... View Details
- April 2016 (Revised May 2016)
- Case
Hôpital Universitaire de Mirebalais, Partners In Health in Haiti
By: Robert S. Kaplan, Bipin Mistry and Karla Bertrand
The case describes the application of Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing (TDABC) at a new tertiary hospital, operated by Partners in Health in Mirebelais, Haiti. A project team mapped the clinical processes for use in estimating the direct costs of personnel,... View Details
- Spring 2016
- Article
Net Neutrality: A Fast Lane to Understanding the Tradeoffs
By: Shane Greenstein, Martin Peitz and Tommaso Valletti
The last decade has seen a strident public debate about the principle of "net neutrality." The economic literature has focused on two definitions of net neutrality. The most basic definition of net neutrality is to prohibit payments from content providers to internet... View Details
- Article
Optimal Taxation When Children's Abilities Depend on Parents' Resources
By: Alexander Gelber and Matthew Weinzierl
Empirical research suggests that parents' economic resources affect their children's future earnings abilities. Optimal tax policy therefore treats future ability distributions as endogenous to current taxes. We model this endogeneity, calibrate the model to match... View Details
- Article
Representative Democracy and the Implementation of Majority-Preferred Alternatives
In this paper, we contrast direct and representative democracy. In a direct democracy, individuals have the opportunity to vote over the alternatives in every choice problem the population faces. In a representative democracy, the population commits to a candidate ex... View Details
- 2016
- Book
Revolutionizing Innovation: Users, Communities, and Open Innovation
By: Dietmar Harhoff and Karim R. Lakhani
The last two decades have witnessed an extraordinary growth of new models of managing and organizing the innovation process, which emphasize users over producers. Large parts of the knowledge economy now routinely rely on users, communities, and open innovation... View Details
- Article
Third-party Punishment as a Costly Signal of Trustworthiness
By: Jillian J. Jordan, Moshe Hoffman, Paul Bloom and David G. Rand
Third-party punishment (TPP), in which unaffected observers punish selfishness, promotes cooperation by deterring defection. But why should individuals choose to bear the costs of punishing? We present a game theoretic model of TPP as a costly signal of... View Details
- 2016
- Working Paper
Paying (for) Attention: The Impact of Information Processing Costs on Bayesian Inference
By: Scott Duke Kominers, Xiaosheng Mu and Alexander Peysakhovich
Human information processing is often modeled as costless Bayesian inference.
However, research in psychology shows that attention is a computationally costly and potentially limited resource. We study a Bayesian individual for whom computing posterior beliefs is... View Details
- January 2016 (Revised November 2018)
- Case
Match Next: Next Generation Middle School?
By: John J-H Kim and Daniel Goldberg
This case is set in 2015 as a team at Match Education, a high performing charter middle school in Boston, explores new staffing and technology approaches in their quest to obtain what they term "jaw dropping" results. The team hopes to test and model for other schools... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
Who Should Select New Employees, Headquarters or the Unit Manager? Consequences of Centralizing Hiring at a Retail Chain
By: Carolyn Deller and Tatiana Sandino
We examine how changing the allocation of hiring decision rights in a multiunit organization affects employee-firm match quality, contingent on a unit’s circumstances. Our research site, a US retail chain, switched from a decentralized hiring model (hiring by business... View Details
- December 2015
- Article
Harnessing Productive Tensions in Hybrid Organizations: The Case of Work Integration Social Enterprises
By: Julie Battilana, Metin Sengul, Anne-Claire Pache and Jacob Model
We examine the factors that influence the social performance of hybrid organizations that pursue a social mission, and sustain their operations through commercial activities, by studying work integration social enterprises (WISEs). We argue that social imprinting and... View Details
- 2015
- Working Paper
The Probability of Rare Disasters: Estimation and Implications
By: Emil Siriwardane
I analyze a rare disasters economy that yields a measure of the risk neutral probability of a macroeconomic disaster, p*t. A large panel of options data provides strong evidence that p*t is the single factor driving option-implied jump risk measures in the cross... View Details