Faculty & Research

Facilitating faculty research and case development on an international scale

Our unprecedented network of research centers and regional offices in key areas of the world enable faculty to work with leaders, industry, government, and academia worldwide, and to learn from business challenges and innovations wherever they occur. Through sustained work in the field, faculty are provided the opportunity to immerse themselves in the culture and values – as well as intricacies and nuances – that lead to truly meaningful and insightful global research.

Research Centers & Offices

More than half the faculty are actively involved in international research, developing high-impact cases and course materials on relevant global issues and innovations.

New Research

September 2025
Article
Journal of Development Economics

Using Satellites and Phones to Evaluate and Promote Agricultural Technology Adoption: Evidence from Smallholder Farms in India

By: Shawn Cole, Tomoko Harigaya, Grady Killeen and Aparna Krishna

This paper evaluates a low-cost, customized soil nutrient management advisory service in India. As a methodological contribution, we examine whether and in which settings satellite measurements may be effective at estimating both agricultural yields and treatment effects. The intervention improves self-reported fertilizer management practices, though not enough to measurably affect yields. Satellite measurements calibrated using OLS produce more precise point estimates than farmer-reported data, suggesting power gains. However, linear models, common in the literature, likely produce biased estimates. We propose an alternative procedure, using two-stage least squares. In settings without attrition, this approach obtains lower statistical power than self-reported yields; in settings with differential attrition, it may substantially increase power. We include a “cookbook'' and code that should allow other researchers to use remote sensing for yield estimation and program evaluation.

June 2025
Article
Accounting, Organizations and Society

Gender Diversity Performance and Voluntary Disclosure: Mind the (Gender Pay) Gap

By: June Huang and Shirley Lu

We study whether voluntary gender diversity disclosure is predictive of gender diversity performance. Exploiting a mandate in the United Kingdom that requires firms to disclose 2017 gender pay gap ("GPG") data for the first time, we find that providing voluntary gender diversity disclosure in 2016 is correlated with having a worse gender pay gap in 2017. Our results are concentrated in industries with worse gender diversity reputations, consistent with legitimacy theory, where firms facing more public pressure use voluntary disclosure to help legitimize their reputations. We further examine whether this disclosure reflects a firm's intent to improve its gender diversity performance over time. We find that forward-looking disclosures, such as gender diversity targets, are positively associated with GPG improvement from 2017 to 2019. Collectively, these gender pay gap findings shed light on how voluntary ESG disclosure can be used to predict current and future ESG performance.

May 2025
Case

stc Group: DARE to Transform

By: Sunil Gupta and Sadika El Hariri

Established as a government-owned entity in 1998, stc Group was the sole telecommunications operator in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). Soon after it was privatized in 2003, regional players started entering the Saudi market. To deal with the competition and to align with the government’s ambitious long-term vision for the country, stc launched its DARE strategy in 2017 that focused on Digitizing operations, Accelerating the performance of core assets, Reinventing the customer experience, and Expanding the scale and scope of the business. This strategy was revised as DARE 2.0 in 2020 to create focus on a few big bets. The most ambitious part of the strategy was to expand the scale and scope with the aim of diversifying the business. The expansion was anchored in five key initiatives, referred to as “Big Bets.” One focused on scaling stc’s core telecom business beyond KSA. The others aimed to expand the Group’s scope into information technology, data centers, internet-of-things, and digital banking. The leadership team at stc had been allocating significant resources to the Big Bets, the bulk of the Group’s revenues still came from the Saudi market and its core telecom business, and there was no major appreciable change in stc’s share price after five years since the revised strategy’s launch.

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Global Colloquium for participant-centered learning

For senior faculty at top business schools in emerging economies who want to be trained in interactive methods of teaching and learning. GloColl comprises a seven-day session held on the HBS campus, followed by a three-day session held in two cities in Asia, Europe, or Latin America each year.

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Faculty & Research

Facilitating faculty research and case development on an international scale

Research Centers & Offices

New Research

Using Satellites and Phones to Evaluate and Promote Agricultural Technology Adoption: Evidence from Smallholder Farms in India

Gender Diversity Performance and Voluntary Disclosure: Mind the (Gender Pay) Gap

stc Group: DARE to Transform

Global Colloquium for participant-centered learning

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