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- 2025
- Working Paper
Management and Firm Dynamism
By: Nicholas Bloom, Jonathan S. Hartley, Raffaella Sadun, Rachel Schuh and John Van Reenen
We show better-managed firms are more dynamic in plant acquisitions, disposals, openings and closings in U.S. Census and international data. Better-managed firms also birth better-managed plants, and improve the performance of the plants they acquire. To explain these... View Details
- March 2025
- Case
Boom, Bust, or Bullseye? Navigating the Short-Term Rental Market
By: John Macomber, Juan Pablo Heusser Killing, Siddhant Pardeshi and Sally Su
Short-term rentals listed via apps like AirBnB and VRBO are increaslingly interesting investments for small scale real estate investors. However, they have substantial operating costs, vacancy risk, and regulatory exposure compared to traditional long term leases... View Details
- March 2025
- Case
GiveDirectly: Can Direct Cash Transfers End Extreme Poverty?
By: Natalia Rigol, Benjamin N. Roth, Sarah Mehta and John Schultz
Founded in 2008, GiveDirectly was a nonprofit organization that used direct cash transfers—giving people cash via mobile money—to combat poverty worldwide. By August 2024, the organization had transferred over $800 million to poor people in targeted communities and... View Details
- March 2025
- Article
Optimal Illiquidity
By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, Christopher Clayton, Christopher Harris, David Laibson and Brigitte C. Madrian
We study the socially optimal level of illiquidity in an economy populated by households with taste shocks and present bias with naive beliefs. The government chooses mandatory contributions to accounts, each with a different pre-retirement withdrawal penalty.... View Details
- January 2025
- Article
Automatic Enrollment with a 12% Default Contribution Rate
By: John Beshears, Ruofei Guo, David Laibson, Brigitte C. Madrian and James J. Choi
We study a retirement savings plan with a default contribution rate of 12% of income, which is much higher than previously studied defaults. Twenty-five percent of employees had not opted out of this default 12 months after hire; a literature review finds that the... View Details
- January 2025
- Case
Constitutional Fiction: John Miller & the Legitimacy of Family Constitutions
By: Lauren Cohen, Octavian Graf Pilati and Sophia Pan
John Miller sat reviewing his family’s Constitution, grappling with how best to implement and enforce its provisions. Designed to prevent ambiguity in governance, the Family Constitution set out core values and guidelines to promote harmony and cohesion among family... View Details
Keywords: Conflict Resolution; Perspective Taking; Liabilities; Family Business; Family Ownership; Business Growth and Maturation; Alignment; Cooperation; Attitudes; Behavior; Cognition and Thinking; Conflict Management; Conflict of Interests; Power and Influence; Perception; Trust; Perspective; Motivation and Incentives; Happiness; Identity; Goals and Objectives; Legal Liability; Contracts; Fairness; Values and Beliefs; Governance Controls; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Family and Family Relationships; Manufacturing Industry; Germany
- January 2025
- Article
Overcoming Barriers to Employee Ownership: Insights from Small and Medium-Sized Businesses
By: John Guzek and Ashley Whillans
This research investigates the limited adoption of employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) among small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs) in the U.S. Through interviews with 30 SMB owners across various industries, we identify the key barriers to ESOP adoption as lack of... View Details
- November 2024 (Revised November 2024)
- Case
Indonesia Education Reform: Merdeka Belajar ('Emancipated Learning')
By: John Jong-Hyun Kim, Adina Wong, Nancy Hua Dai and Mary C. Sauer
This case is set in 2024 in Indonesia, as Nadiem Makarim, Minister of Education, Culture, Research, and Technology, reflects on his tenure as Minister shortly before stepping down. With the ambition to lift Indonesia out of the middle-income gap by raising K12 to... View Details
- September 2024
- Case
InfraCredit and the Project Inception Facility
By: John Macomber, Namrata Arora and Maagatha Kalavadakken
Around the world, large infrastructure projects are frequently stymied by the high cost and high uncertainty of the project inception phase: the research and engineering and planning prior to financial close and start of construction. Could there be a new kind of... View Details
Keywords: Infrastructure; Financial Institutions; Financial Instruments; Cost; Cash Flow; Capital; Assets; Financial Markets; Financial Strategy; Insurance; Energy; Product Development; Risk and Uncertainty; Business Strategy; Credit; Financial Services Industry; Energy Industry; Banking Industry; Africa; Nigeria
- September 2024
- Article
The Human Side of the Future of Work: Understanding the Role People Play in Shaping a Changing World
By: Jochen I. Menges, Lauren C. Howe, Erika Hall, Jon M. Jachimowicz, Sharon K. Parker, Riki Takeuchi, Abhijeet K. Vadera, Ashley Whillans and Susan K. Cohen
For as long as there has been work, there has been a “future of work,” through humans’ ingenuity and drive to get things done easier, faster, and better. With the industrial revolution, efforts to shape a better future of work were dominated by improvements in... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Smaller than We Thought? The Effect of Automatic Savings Policies
By: James J. Choi, David Laibson, Jordan Cammarota, Richard Lombardo and John Beshears
Medium- and long-run dynamics undermine the effect of automatic enrollment and default savings-rate auto-escalation on retirement savings. Our analysis of 401(k) plans incorporates the facts that employees frequently leave firms (often before matching contributions... View Details
- July 2024
- Case
Negotiating in a Hurricane: John Branca and the Michael Jackson Estate
By: James K. Sebenius and Alex Green
When the "King of Pop," Michael Jackson, unexpectedly died in 2009, he left behind an estate that was over $500 million in debt, with largely illiquid assets, and legions of creditors poised to begin to seize assets in as soon as 60 days. The task of managing Jackson’s... View Details
- April 2024 (Revised July 2024)
- Case
Market Dynamics and Moral Dilemmas: Novo Nordisk’s Weight-Loss Drugs
By: Joseph L. Badaracco, Tom Quinn and John Schultz
Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk was owned by a charitable foundation, and since its founding in the 1920s had focused on producing insulin to treat diabetes. In 2017, however, it released Ozempic, a diabetes treatment with the revolutionary side effect of... View Details
Keywords: Cost vs Benefits; Decisions; Judgments; Values and Beliefs; Global Strategy; Health Care and Treatment; Patents; Growth and Development Strategy; Growth Management; Product Positioning; Supply and Industry; Supply Chain; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Mission and Purpose; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Opportunities; Social Issues; Equality and Inequality; Pharmaceutical Industry; Health Industry; Denmark; United States; Europe; China; India; Middle East; North Africa
- April 2024
- Article
A Machine Learning Algorithm Predicting Risk of Dilating VUR among Infants with Hydronephrosis Using UTD Classification
By: Hsin-Hsiao Scott Wang, Michael Lingzhi Li, Dylan Cahill, John Panagides, Tanya Logvinenko, Jeanne Chow and Caleb Nelson
Backgrounds: Urinary Tract Dilation (UTD) classification has been designed to be a more objective grading system to evaluate antenatal and post-natal UTD. Due to unclear association between UTD classifications to specific anomalies such as vesico-ureteral reflux (VUR),... View Details
- February 2024 (Revised April 2024)
- Case
CPP Investments—The Road to Zero
By: Vikram Gandhi and Radhika Kak
In February 2022, Canadian Pension Plan (CPP) Investments, the investment management organization that managed funds for the CPP, one of the biggest pension plans in the world, announced a net-zero commitment for its portfolio by 2050. Under its CEO, John Graham, it... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Does Pension Automatic Enrollment Increase Debt? Evidence from a Large-Scale Natural Experiment
By: John Beshears, Matthew Blakstad, James J. Choi, Christopher Firth, John Gathergood, David Laibson, Richard Notley, Jesal D. Sheth, Will Sandbrook and Neil Stewart
Does automatic enrollment into retirement saving increase household debt? We study the randomized roll-out of automatic enrollment pensions to ~160,000 employers in the United Kingdom with 2-29 employees. We find that the additional savings generated through automatic... View Details
- December 2023
- Case
Robert McNamara: Changing the World
By: Robert Simons and Shirley Sun
This case traces the life of Robert McNamara from Harvard Business School to Ford Motor Company to the U.S. Department of Defense. McNamara excelled in every job along the way: becoming the youngest-ever professor at Harvard Business School, the first non-family... View Details
- November 2023
- Case
Gabon Special Economic Zone
By: John Macomber and Wale Lawal
Tropical rain forest covers about 80% of the West African nation of Gabon, part of the Congo Basin and the "lungs of the world." Gabon is one of the first nations to earn revenue from carbon sequestration...as long as the rain forest remains intact. There are... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Do Active Funds Do Better in What They Trade?
By: Marco Sammon and John J. Shim
We develop two new, simple measures to quantify active fund decisions at the individual position level. The intuition is to separate passive rebalancing induced by flows and position changes from active rebalancing decisions. We find that additive active rebalancing --... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
How People Use Statistics
By: Pedro Bordalo, John J. Conlon, Nicola Gennaioli, Spencer Yongwook Kwon and Andrei Shleifer
We document two new facts about the distributions of answers in famous statistical problems: they are i) multi-modal and ii) unstable with respect to irrelevant changes in the problem. We offer a model in which, when solving a problem, people represent each hypothesis... View Details