Publications

2025
Working Paper

Private Equity and Workers: Modeling and Measuring Monopsony, Reallocation, and Trust

By: Kyle Herkenhoff, Josh Lerner, Gordon M. Phillips, Francisca Rebelo and Benjamin Sampson

We measure the real effects of private equity buyouts on worker outcomes by building a new database that links transactions to matched employer-employee data in the United States. To guide our empirical analysis, we derive testable implications from three theories in... View Details

Keywords: Monopsony; Market Power; Productivity; Private Equity; Employment; Wages; Employees

2025
Working Paper

Workplace Segregation Between College and Non-college Workers

By: Francis Dillon, Edward L. Glaeser and William Kerr

We measure the level and growth of education segregation in American workplaces from 2000 to 2020. American workplaces show an educational segregation, measured by the degree to which the establishment has mostly workers of similar education levels, that is... View Details

Keywords: Isolation; Segregation; Mobility; Learning; Human Capital; Competency and Skills; Demographics

2025
Working Paper

Discrimination, Rejection, and Job Search

By: Anne Boring, Katherine Coffman, Dylan Glover and María José González-Fuentes

We investigate how candidates’ willingness to apply responds to (potential) discrimination and rejection using a simulated labor market. Past work has shown that “blinding” job applications reduces discrimination and increases the rate at which women are hired. Our... View Details

Keywords: Job Search; Prejudice and Bias; Selection and Staffing; Demographics

2025
White Paper

Data & Technology in Action: Community Colleges Advancing Economic Mobility

By: Joseph B. Fuller, Kerry McKittrick and Amanda Holloway

Keywords: Higher Education; Demographics; Economic Growth; Competency and Skills; Employment

2025
Working Paper

Turning Away from the State: Trade Shocks and Informal Insurance in Brazil

By: Paula Rettl

How does economic globalization affect vote choices? Conventional wisdom holds that voters who lose from economic integration support parties that propose expanding the welfare state. However, in the Global South, where the state is frequently weak or under-resourced,... View Details

Keywords: Global Strategy; Globalized Economies and Regions; Governance; Government Administration; Political Elections; Voting; Latin America; Brazil; South America

SSRN

2024
Working Paper

Displacement or Complementarity? The Labor Market Impact of Generative AI

By: Wilbur Xinyuan Chen, Suraj Srinivasan and Saleh Zakerinia

Generative AI is poised to reshape the labor market, affecting cognitive and white-collar occupations in ways distinct from past technological revolutions. This study examines whether generative AI displaces workers or augments their jobs by analyzing labor demand and... View Details

Keywords: Generative Ai; Labor Market; Automation And Augmentation; Labor; AI and Machine Learning; Competency and Skills

November–December 2024
Article

Scaling Up Transformational Innovations

By: Peter Koen, Ananya Sheth, Mike DiPaola and Linda A. Hill

For large companies operating in mature sectors—such as Procter & Gamble in consumer goods, Apple in consumer electronics, and Adobe in cloud software—driving growth is a perennial challenge. Growth through acquisition is always an option, but companies often quickly... View Details

Keywords: Growth and Development Strategy; Leadership; Innovation Strategy; Consumer Products Industry

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2024
Contribution

Work

By: Nien-hê Hsieh and Julie L. Rose

This chapter has two aims. First, in light of the continued dominance of market capitalism, one aim of the chapter is to examine contemporary approaches to traditional concerns about the impact of market capitalism on the manner in which work is carried out. By the... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Design; Employees; Labor

2024
Working Paper

A Gender Backlash: Does Exposure to Female Labor Market Participation Fuel Gender Conservatism?

By: Paula Rettl, Diane Bolet, Catherine E. De Vries, Simone Cremaschi, Tarik Abou-Chadi and Sergi Pardos-Prado

The growing participation of women in the labor market has marked a significant societal transformation, coinciding with the rise of gender conservatism and far-right support. We study whether the economic consequences of labor market feminization and gender backlash... View Details

Keywords: Gender Bias; Gender Equality; Gender Inclusivity; Politics; Political Backlash; Political Culture; Conservatism; Gender; Government and Politics; Equality and Inequality; Prejudice and Bias; Labor

November 2024
Case

Ather Energy: The Future of Mobility

By: Shunyuan Zhang, Kannan Srinivasan and Malini Sen

Ather Energy, India’s third-largest electric scooter maker by volume, was founded in 2013. Five years later, the start-up launched its first electric scooter, Ather 450, which was powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT), to navigate... View Details

Keywords: Energy Policy; Climate Change; Alternative Energy; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Transportation; Transformation; Green Technology; Technology Adoption; Communication Strategy; Marketing Strategy; Customer Focus and Relationships; Asia; India

October 2024
Case

Sacoor Brothers: From Co-Family CEOs to No Family CEOs?

By: Lauren Cohen, David Ager and Alpana Thapar

Sacoor Brothers, a luxury clothing retail company, was founded in 1989 in Lisbon, Portugal, by four brothers—Malik, Salim, Rahimo, and Moez. After establishing a strong presence in Portugal, the brothers were drawn to the rapidly growing retail markets in the Middle... View Details

October 2024
Article

Global Mobile Inventors

By: Dany Bahar, Prithwiraj Choudhury, Ernest Miguelez and Sara Signorelli

The number of Global Mobile Inventors (GMIs), inventors moving across borders during their career, has increased more than tenfold over the past two decades, and the corridors of mobility have shifted towards a growing presence of emerging markets. We document that... View Details

Keywords: Emerging Markets; Immigration; Patents; Knowledge; Technological Innovation

Fall, 2024
Article

Sixty Years of the Voting Rights Act: Progress and Pitfalls

By: Andrea Bernini, Giovanni Facchini, Marco Tabellini and Cecilia Testa

We review the literature on the effects of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA), which removed formal restrictions to Black political participation. After a brief description of racial discrimination suffered by Black Americans since Reconstruction, we introduce the goals... View Details

Keywords: Prejudice and Bias; Equality and Inequality; Race; Political Elections; Voting; Policy; Outcome or Result; Government Legislation

September 2024 (Revised October 2024)
Case

Anker Innovations (A)

By: Feng Zhu, Jiangyong Lu and Nancy Hua Dai

An Amazon-native brand, Anker is the world’s No. 1 mobile charging brand and a leading consumer electronics company. Over the years, Anker developed an effective model of proving new products online first by leveraging customer insights from its proprietary Voice of... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Product; Distribution; Product Launch; Electronics Industry; Consumer Products Industry

September 2024
Supplement

Anker Innovations (B)

By: Feng Zhu, Jiangyong Lu and Nancy Hua Dai

An Amazon-native brand, Anker is the world’s No. 1 mobile charging brand and a leading consumer electronics company. Over the years, Anker developed an effective model of proving new products online first by leveraging customer insights from its proprietary Voice of... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Product; Distribution; Product Launch; Business Model; Electronics Industry; Consumer Products Industry

September 2024
Article

Gender Gaps: Back and Here to Stay? Evidence from Skilled Ugandan Workers During COVID-19

By: Livia Alfonsi, Mary Namubiru and Sara Spaziani

We investigate gender disparities in the effect of COVID-19 on the labor market outcomes of skilled Ugandan workers. Leveraging a high-frequency panel dataset, we find that the lockdowns imposed in Uganda reduced employment by 69% for women and by 45% for men,... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19; Wage Gap; Gender; Equality and Inequality; Employment; Wages; Uganda

August 2024
Article

The Labor Market Effects of Loan Guarantee Programs

By: Jean-Noël Barrot, Thorsten Martin, Julien Sauvagnat and Boris Vallée

We investigate the labor market effects of a loan guarantee program targeting French SMEs during the financial crisis. Exploiting differences in regional treatment intensity in a border discontinuity design, we uncover a central trade-off for such interventions. While... View Details

Keywords: Labor; Financial Crisis; Policy; France

Working Paper

The Returns to Skills During the Pandemic: Experimental Evidence from Uganda

By: Livia Alfonsi, Vittorio Bassi, Imran Rasul and Elena Spadini

The Covid-19 pandemic represents one of the most significant labor market shocks to the world economy in recent times. We present evidence from a field experiment to understand whether and why skilled and unskilled workers were differentially impacted by the shock, in... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19 Pandemic; System Shocks; Labor; Competency and Skills; Development Economics; Uganda

SSRN

July 2024
Case

Freelancer, Ltd.

By: Christopher Stanton, Karim R. Lakhani, Jin Hyun Paik and Nina Cohodes

Over the course of the 2010s, the rapid advancement of mobile technologies and the rise of online freelancing platforms seemed to portend a radical transformation of labor markets into on-demand, flexible talent pools. Even though several Fortune 500... View Details

Keywords: Freelancers; Labor Markets; Internet and the Web; Digital Platforms; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Human Capital; Change Management; Globalized Firms and Management; Employment; Global Range; Employment Industry