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Liquidity Needs in Economies with Interconnected Financial Obligations

Rotemberg, Julio J.
August 2008

A model is developed where firms in a financial system have to settle their debts to each other by using a liquid asset. The question that is studied is how many firms must obtain how much of this asset from outside the financial system to make sure that all debts within the system are settled. The main result is that these liquidity needs are larger when these firms are more interconnected through their debts, i.e., when they borrow from and lend to more firms. Two pecuniary externalities are discussed. One involves the choice of paying one creditor first rather than another. The second involves the extent to which firms borrow and acquire claims on other firms with the proceeds. When a group of firms raises their involvement in this activity, firms outside the group may face more difficulties in settling their debts.

NBER Working Paper Series, No. 14222, August 2008

Economic Impacts of Immigration: A Survey

Pekkala Kerr, Sari, and William R. Kerr
August 2008

This paper surveys recent empirical studies on the economic impacts of immigration. Particular emphasis is given to the experiences of Northern Europe and Scandinavia. The survey first examines the magnitude of immigration as an economic phenomenon in various host countries. The second part deals with the assimilation of immigrant workers in host-country labor markets and the use of social benefits by immigrants. The survey then considers the effect of immigration on the labor market outcomes of natives. The paper concludes with studies of immigration's impact for the public sector of host countries.

Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 09-013, July 2008

Wellsprings of Creation: Perturbation and the Paradox of the Highly Disciplined Organization (pdf)

Plant-Size Distribution and Cross-Country Income Differences

Alfaro, Laura, Fabio Kanczuk, and Andrew Charlton
August 2008

We investigate, using plant-level data for 79 developed and developing countries, whether differences in the allocation of resources across heterogeneous plants are a significant determinant of cross-country differences in income per worker. For this purpose, we use a standard version of the neoclassical growth model augmented to incorporate monopolistic competition among heterogeneous plants. For our preferred calibration, the model explains 58% of the log variance of income per worker. This figure should be compared to the 42% success rate of the usual model.

NBER International Seminar on Macroeconomics (forthcoming); NBER Working Paper Series, No. 14060.

Debt Maturity: Is Long-Term Debt Optimal?

Alfaro, Laura, and Fabio Kanczuk
August 2008

We model and calibrate the arguments in favor and against short-term and long-term debt. These arguments broadly include: maturity premium, sustainability, and service smoothing. We use a dynamic equilibrium model with tax distortions and government outlays uncertainty, and model maturity as the fraction of debt that needs to be rolled over every period. In the model, the benefits of defaulting are tempered by higher future interest rates. We then calibrate our artificial economy and solve for the optimal debt maturity for Brazil as an example of a developing country and the U.S. as an example of a mature economy. We obtain that the calibrated costs from defaulting on long-term debt more than offset costs associated with short-term debt. Therefore, short-term debt implies higher welfare levels.

Review of International Economics (forthcoming); Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 06-005; NBER Working Paper No. 13119.

Guanxi versus Networking: Distinctive Configurations of Affect- and Cognition-based Trust in the Networks of Chinese and American Managers

Chua, Roy Y.J., M.W. Morris, and P. Ingram
August 2008

This research investigates hypotheses about differences between Chinese and American managers in the configuration of trusting relationships within their professional networks. Consistent with hypotheses about Chinese familial collectivism, an egocentric network survey found that affect- and cognition-based trust were more intertwined for Chinese than for American managers. In addition, the effect of economic exchange on affect-based trust was more positive for Chinese than for Americans, whereas the effect of friendship was more positive for Americans than for Chinese. Finally, the extent to which a given relationship was highly embedded in ties to third parties increased cognition-based trust for Chinese but not for Americans. Implications for cultural research and international business practices are discussed.

Journal of International Business Studies (forthcoming)

Style Investing and Institutional Investors

Froot, Kenneth A., and Melvyn Teo
August 2008

This paper explores institutional investors' trades in stocks grouped by style and the relationship of these trades with equity market returns. It aggregates transactions drawn from a large universe of approximately $6 trillion of institutional funds. To analyze style behavior, we assign equities to deciles in each of five style dimensions: size, value/growth, cyclical/defensive, sector, and country. We find, first, strong evidence that investors organize and trade stocks across style-driven lines. This appears true for groupings both strongly and weakly related to fundamentals (e.g., industry or country groupings versus size or value/growth deciles). Second, the positive linkage between flows and returns emerges at daily frequencies, yet becomes even more important at lower frequencies. We show that quarterly decile flows and returns are even more strongly positively correlated than are daily flows and returns. However, as the horizon increases beyond a year, we find that the flow/return correlation declines. Third, style flows and returns are important components of individual stock expected returns. We find that nearby style inflows and returns positively forecast future returns while distant style inflows and returns forecast negatively. Fourth, we find strong correlations between style flows and temporary components of return. This suggests that behavioral theories may play a role in explaining the popularity and price impact of flow-related trading.

Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis (forthcoming)

Delivering Global Health

Jain, Sachin H., Rebecca Weintraub, Joseph Rhatigan, Michael E. Porter, and Jim Yong Kim
August 2008

Editorials. Student British Medical Journal 16, no. 227, June 2008

Brunner, David James, Bradley R. Staats, David M. Upton, Michael L. Tushman and David M. Upton
July 2008

Organizations face simultaneous imperatives to exploit and explore. Paradoxically, exploitation tends to drive out exploration, rendering organizations rigid and vulnerable to environmental change. Drawing on the Carnegie School, we propose a model where perturbation moderates the relationship between exploitation and exploration. We posit that highly disciplined organizations can sustain virtuous cycles of exploitation and exploration by deliberately perturbing their own processes. We provide illustrations from Toyota and formulate testable hypotheses about the mechanisms of perturbation.

Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 09-011, July 2008

Fight or Flight? Portfolio Rebalancing by Individual Investors

Calvet, Laurent E., John Y. Campbell, and Paolo Sodini
July 2008

This paper investigates the dynamics of individual portfolios in a unique dataset containing the disaggregated wealth of all households in Sweden. Between 1999 and 2002, we observe little aggregate rebalancing in the financial portfolio of participants. These patterns conceal strong household-level evidence of active rebalancing, which on average offsets about one half of idiosyncratic passive variations in the risky asset share. Wealthy, educated investors with better diversified portfolios tend to rebalance more actively. We find some evidence that households rebalance towards a higher risky share as they become richer. We also study the decisions to trade individual assets. Households are more likely to fully sell directly held stocks if those stocks have performed well and more likely to exit direct stockholding if their stock portfolios have performed well; but these relationships are much weaker for mutual funds, a pattern which is consistent with previous research on the disposition effect among direct stockholders and performance sensitivity among mutual fund investors. When households continue to hold individual assets, however, they rebalance both stocks and mutual funds to offset about one sixth of the passive variations in individual asset shares. Households rebalance primarily by adjusting purchases of risky assets if their risky portfolios have performed poorly and by adjusting both fund purchases and full sales of stocks if their risky portfolios have performed well. Finally, the tendency for households to fully sell winning stocks is weaker for wealthy investors with diversified portfolios of individual stocks.

NBER Working Paper Series, No. 14177, July 2008

The Agglomeration of U.S. Ethnic Inventors

Kerr, William R.,
July 2008

The ethnic composition of U.S. inventors is undergoing a significant transformation-with deep impacts for the overall agglomeration of U.S. innovation. This study applies an ethnic-name database to individual U.S. patent records to explore these trends with greater detail. The contributions of Chinese and Indian scientists and engineers to U.S. technology formation increase dramatically in the 1990s. At the same time, these ethnic inventors became more spatially concentrated across U.S. cities. The combination of these two factors helps stop and reverse long-term declines in overall inventor agglomeration evident in the 1970s and 1980s. The heightened ethnic agglomeration is particularly evident in industry patents for high-tech sectors, and similar trends are not found in institutions constrained from agglomerating (e.g., universities, government).

Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 09-003, July 2008

Domestic Effects of the Foreign Activities of U.S. Multinationals

Desai, Mihir A., C. Fritz Foley, and James R. Hines Jr.
July 2008

Do firms investing abroad simultaneously reduce their domestic activity? This paper analyzes the relationship between the domestic and foreign operations of American manufacturing firms between 1982 and 2004 by instrumenting for changes in foreign operations with GDP growth rates of the foreign countries in which they invest. Estimates produced using this instrument indicate that 10% greater foreign investment is associated with 2.6% greater domestic investment, and 10% greater foreign employee compensation is associated with 3.7% greater domestic employee compensation. These results do not support the popular notion that expansions abroad reduce a firm's domestic activity, instead suggesting the opposite.

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy (forthcoming)

The Finance Function in a Global Corporation

Desai, Mihir A.
July 2008

As corporations globalize, capital markets open up within them, giving companies a powerful mechanism for arbitrage across national financial markets. Managing these internal markets to build an advantage requires that CFOs must balance new financial opportunities with the managerial and institutional challenges of operating in multiple environments

Harvard Business Review 86, nos. 7/8, July/August 2008

Should You Invest in the Long Tail?

Elberse, Anita
July 2008

The blockbuster strategy is a time-honored approach, particularly in media and entertainment. When space is limited on store shelves and in traditional distribution channels, producers tend to focus on a few likely best sellers, hoping that one or two big hits will carry the rest of their lists. But online retailing and the digitization of information goods have changed the commercial landscape: Virtual shelf space is infinite, consumers can search through innumerable options, and the marginal cost of reproducing and distributing products is low. What does that mean for the blockbuster strategy? In his 2006 book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine, argues that the sudden availability of niche offerings more closely tailored to their tastes will lure consumers away from homogenized hits. The "tail" of the sales distribution curve, he says, will become longer, fatter, and more profitable. Elberse set out to investigate whether Anderson's long-tail theory is actually playing out in today's markets. She focused on the music and home-video industries-two markets that Anderson and others frequently hold up as examples of the long tail in action-reviewing sales data from Nielsen SoundScan, Nielsen VideoScan, the online music service Rhapsody, and the Australian DVD-by-mail service Quickflix. What she found may surprise you: Blockbusters are capturing even more of the market than they used to, and consumers in the tail don't really like niche products much. Elberse outlines the implications of her research for producers and retailers, and offers strategic advice to both groups.

Harvard Business Review 86, nos. 7/8, July/August 2008: 88-96

On Chinese, European and American Universities

Kirby, William C.
July 2008

In North America and in Europe, the past three decades have seen an unprecedented expansion of higher education and, in the most recent time, efforts at reform and restructuring. Harvard has overhauled its undergraduate curriculum in a comprehensive fashion for the first time in 30 years. European universities have witnessed even more thoroughgoing changes in the structure of undergraduate education. But perhaps nowhere on earth have recent decades seen more revolutionary change in higher education than in the People's Republic of China. Thirty years ago, Chinese universities were just reopening after the catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution. Today they are poised for positions of international leadership in research and education.

Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 137, no. 3, Summer 2008

Governance in Global Information Economy

McFarlan, F. Warren
July 2008

In the early 21st century, IT has become more important than ever. Technology evolution, the creation of new channels to global resource pools, increased corporate operational dependence on IT, and enhanced application opportunities have combined to drive this topic much higher on many companies' agendas. Different companies are impacted in different ways. Embedded in this chapter are two analytical frameworks often used by managers to understand this different impact; namely, the strategic grid and technological learning. Some aspects of IT have remained unchanged over a 40-year period. These include the constant emergence of new technologies, the obsolescence of technical skills, and the need for strong leadership. For many firms, however, this technology now has a much deeper impact on the transformation of their operations than could have been conceived several decades ago. The chapter successively describes how Otis, World Bank, COSCO and Cathay Pacific have each been utterly transformed by IT.

China Journal of Information Systems 1, no. 1, October 2007: 8-15.

What Do Nongovernmental Organizations Do?

Werker, Eric D., and Faisal Z. Ahmand
July 2008

Nongovernmental organizations are one group of players who are active in the efforts of international development and increasing the welfare of poor people in poor countries. Nongovernmental organizations are largely staffed by altruistic employees and volunteers working towards ideological, rather than financial, ends. Their founders are often intense, creative individuals who sometimes come up with a new product to deliver or a better way to deliver existing goods and services. They are funded by donors, many of them poor or anonymous. Yet these attributes should not be unfamiliar to economists. Development NGOs, like domestic nonprofits, can be understood in the framework of not-for-profit contracting. It is easy to conjure up a glowing vision of how the efforts of NGOs could focus on problem solving without getting bogged down in corruption or bureaucracy. But the strengths of the NGO model have some corresponding weaknesses-in agenda setting, decision making, and resource allocation. We highlight three factors in explaining the increased presence of NGOs in the last few decades: a trend towards more outsourcing of government services; new ventures by would-be not-for-profit "entrepreneurs"; and the increasing professionalization of existing NGOs.

Journal of Economic Perspectives 22, no. 2, Spring 2008

Firm-Size Distribution and Cross-Country Income Differences

Alfaro, Laura, Andrew Charlton, and Fabio Kanczuk
June 2008

We investigate, using firm-level data for 79 developed and developing countries, whether differences in the allocation of resources across heterogeneous plants are a significant determinant of cross-country differences in income per worker. For this purpose, we use a standard version of the neoclassical growth model augmented to incorporate monopolistic competition among heterogeneous firms. For our preferred calibration, the model explains 58% of the log variance of income per worker. This figure should be compared to the 42% success rate of the usual model.

NBER Working Paper Series, No. 14060, June 2008

A Better Approach to Foreign Aid

Muzinich, Justin, Eric Werker
June 2008

Frustration with U.S. foreign aid is widespread. At the same time, flows of private development finance-including foreign direct investment and remittances-have begun to dwarf official aid. We suggest a new approach that harnesses the power of private development finance to direct it towards developmental and foreign policy goals. Specifically, we argue that tax credits for companies, and tax breaks for individuals, can be used to incentivize productive investments while being a positive force for meaningful reform in the developing world.

Policy Review 149, June/July 2008

Where Oil-Rich Nations Are Placing Their Global Bets

Abdelal, Rawi, Ayesha Khan, and Tarun Khanna

The combination of the gigantic American trade deficit and the price of oil at more than $130 per barrel (at press time) have created an inevitable pool of financial liquidity among oil exporters in the Arabian Gulf. But this era of petrodollar surpluses is markedly different from the last one. In the 1970s, the member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council-Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates-outsourced the management of their petrodollars to American and U.K. bankers. This time around, they have adopted active investment and development strategies: They are investing heavily in large Western organizations as well as in emerging markets in Africa and India. They are spending lavishly at home to establish institutional infrastructures, create free-trade zones for manufacturing and services, and build recreational facilities that will attract businesses, skilled knowledge workers, and tourists. All of this is destined to have long-run effects not just on their local economies but also on regional and international trading, argue the authors. In fact, the authors say, the actions of the GCC states are pulling the Gulf closer than it has ever been to the center of the international financial system. In this article, the authors consider how the economic landscape in the West will be affected by oil exporters' new investment strategies and interests over the next decades, how proximate emerging markets will be reshaped, and finally, how the GCC home environment itself will be dramatically reconfigured.

Harvard Business Review (forthcoming)

A Better Approach to Foreign Aid

Muzinich, Justin and Eric Werker
June 2008

Frustration with U.S. foreign aid is widespread. At the same time, flows of private development finance-including foreign direct investment and remittances-have begun to dwarf official aid. We suggest a new approach that harnesses the power of private development finance to direct it towards developmental and foreign policy goals. Specifically, we argue that tax credits for companies, and tax breaks for individuals, can be used to incentivize productive investments while being a positive force for meaningful reform in the developing world.

Policy Review 149 June/July 2008

Industrial Specialization and Regional Clusters in the Ten New EU Member States

Solvell, Orjan, Christian H.M. Ketels, and Goran Lindqvist
June 2008

The purpose of this paper is to provide an analysis of regional concentration patterns within ten new European Union (EU) member states, EU10, and make comparisons with EU15 and the U.S. economy.

Competitiveness Review: An International Business Journal Incorporating Journal of Global Competitiveness 18, nos. 1/2, 2008: 104-130

Firm-Size Distribution and Cross-Country Income Differences

Alfaro, Laura, and Andrew Charlton, and Fabio Kanczuk
June 2008

We investigate, using firm-level data for 79 developed and developing countries, whether differences in the allocation of resources across heterogeneous plants are a significant determinant of cross-country differences in income per worker. For this purpose, we use a standard version of the neoclassical growth model augmented to incorporate monopolistic competition among heterogeneous firms. For our preferred calibration, the model explains 58% of the log variance of income per worker. This figure should be compared to the 42% success rate of the usual model.

NBER Working Paper Series, No. 14060, June 2008

Explaining International Differences in Entrepreneurship: The Role of Individual Characteristics and Regulatory Constraints

Ardagna, Silvia and Annamaria Lusardi
June 2008

We use a micro dataset that collects information across individuals, countries, and time to investigate the determinants of entrepreneurial activity in 37 developed and developing nations. We focus both on individual characteristics and on countries' regulatory differences. We show that individual characteristics, such as gender, age, and status in the workforce are important determinants of entrepreneurship, and we also highlight the relevance of social networks, self-assessed skills, and attitudes toward risk. Moreover, we find that regulation plays a critical role, particularly for those individuals who become entrepreneurs, to pursue a business opportunity. The individual characteristics that are impacted most by regulation are those measuring working status, social networks, business skills, and attitudes toward risk.

NBER Working Paper Series, No. 14012, May 2008

America the Difficult

Desai, Mihir
June 2008

The American (May - June 2008)

Accountability and Inequality in Single-Party Regimes: A Comparative Analysis of Vietnam and China (pdf)

Abrami, Regina, and Edmund Malesky, and Yu Zheng
May 2008

Over the past two decades, no two economies have averaged more rapid economic growth than China and Vietnam. But while China's income inequality has risen rapidly over that same time frame, Vietnam's has only grown moderately. Structural and socio-cultural determinants fail to account for these divergent pathways. Existing political variables are also unhelpful. China and Vietnam are coded in exactly the same way, even in the path-breaking work on authoritarian regimes. In this paper, we take a deeper look at political institutions in the two countries, demonstrating that profound differences between the polities directly impact distributional choices. In particular, we find that Vietnamese elite institutions require construction of broader coalitions of policymakers, place more constraints on executive decision making, and have more competitive selection processes. As a result, there are stronger political motivations for Vietnamese leaders to provide equalizing transfers that limit inequality growth.

Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 08-099, May 2008

The 'Thin Film of Gold': Monetary Rules and Policy Credibility In Developing Countries

Ferguson, Niall, and Moritz Schularick
April 2008

This paper asks whether developing countries can reap credibility gains from submitting policy to a strict monetary rule. Following earlier work, we look at the gold standard era (1880-1914) as a "natural experiment" to test whether adoption of a rule-based monetary framework such as the gold standard increased policy credibility. On the basis of the largest possible dataset covering almost sixty independent and colonial borrowers in the London market, we challenge the traditional view that gold-standard adherence worked as a credible commitment mechanism that was rewarded by financial markets with lower borrowing costs. We demonstrate that in the poor periphery-where policy credibility is a particularly acute problem-the market looked behind "the thin film of gold." Our results point to a dichotomy: whereas country-risk premia fell after gold adoption in developed countries, there were no credibility gains in the volatile economic and political environments of developing countries. History shows that monetary policy rules are no short-cut to credibility in situations where vulnerability to economic and political shocks, not time-inconsistency, are overarching concerns for investors.

NBER Working Paper Series, No. 13918, April 2008

Learning to Live with Governments: Unilever in India and Turkey, 1950-1980

Jones, Geoffrey G.
March 2008

A noteworthy characteristic of the contemporary global economy is the uneven distribution of world foreign direct investment (FDI). In 2007 three-quarters of world FDI was located in developed countries. The residual was concentrated in a small number of emerging countries. Large countries with little inward FDI included India and Turkey. This is puzzling, given that both countries have greatly liberalized their regulations on inward FDI. After 1945 many developing governments pursued policies which restricted foreign-owned firms. India and Turkey were among the countries with particularly difficult policy environments. This paper explores why Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch consumer products company, was able to sustain large businesses in developing countries such as India and Turkey. The paper argues that the explanation is multi-causal. Unilever held first-mover advantages, but was also prepared to accept low dividend remittances for years. It pursued flexible business strategies beyond its "core" business, even distributing condoms. It maintained a high standard of corporate ethics. It was effective at building contacts with local business and government elites, primarily through localization of management.

Entreprises et Histoire 49, December 2007

Foreign Direct Investment, Productivity, and Financial Development: An Empirical Analysis of Complementarities and Channels

Alfaro, Laura , Sebnem Kalemli-Ozcan, and Selin Sayek
March 2008

This paper examines the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) on growth by focusing on the complementarities between FDI in flows and financial markets. In our earlier work, we find that FDI is beneficial for growth only if the host country has well-developed financial institutions. In this paper, we investigate whether this effect operates through factor accumulation and/or improvements in total factor productivity (TFP). Factor accumulation-physical and human capital-does not seem to be the main channel through which countries benefit from FDI. Instead, we find that countries with well-developed financial markets gain significantly from FDI via TFP improvements. These results are consistent with the recent findings in the growth literature that shows the important role of TFP over factors in explaining cross-country income differences.

The World Economy (forthcoming)

The Fiscal Impact of the Brain Drain: Indian Emigration to the U.S.

Desai, Mihir, D. Kapur, and J. McHale
February 2008

Easing immigration restrictions for the highly skilled in developed countries portend a future of increased human capital outflows from developing countries. The myriad consequences of these developments for developing countries include the direct loss of the fiscal contributions of these highly skilled individuals. This paper analyzes the fiscal impact of this loss of talent for a developing country by examining human capital flows from India to the U.S. The escalation of the emigration of highly skilled professionals from India to the U.S is examined by surveying evidence on the changing nature of the Indian-born in the U.S. during the 1990s. The loss of talent to India during the 1990s was dramatic and highly concentrated amongst the prime-age work force, the highly educated and high earners. In order to estimate the fiscal losses associated with these emigrants, this paper first estimates what these emigrants would have earned in India, and then integrates the resulting counterfactual distributions with details of the Indian fiscal system to estimate fiscal impacts. Two distinct methods to estimate the counterfactual earnings distributions are implemented: a translation of actual U.S. incomes in purchasing power parity terms and an income simulation based on a jointly estimated model of Indian earnings and participation in the workforce. The PPP methods indicate that the foregone income tax revenues associated with the Indian-born residents of the U.S. comprise one-third of current Indian individual income tax receipts. Depending on the method for estimating expenditures saved by the absence of these emigrants, the net fiscal loss associated with the U.S. Indian-born resident population ranges from 0.24% to 0.58% of Indian GDP in 2001.

Journal of Development Economics (forthcoming)

Learning Processes in Environmental Policy Making and Implementation

Ebrahim, Alnoor S.
February 2008

This paper explores how "learning" occurs in the context of environmental policy formulation and implementation. Rather than viewing policy learning as a rational and technocratic process, the emphasis here is on the political and institutional contexts within which opportunities for policy learning emerge. In particular, opportunities for policy learning are examined with respect to (a) agenda or priority-setting on environmental issues, (b) stakeholder access and representation in policy formulation, and (c) accountability in implementation. Examples are drawn from the experiences of South Africa and Brazil. Several preliminary factors are identified that may enhance policy learning, while acknowledging the constraints of bounded rationality and relationships of power.

Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 08-071, February 2008

Crime and Beliefs: Evidence from Latin America

Di Tella, Rafael, Javier Donna, and Robert MacCulloch
February 2008

Economics Letters (forthcoming)

Gross National Happiness as an Answer to the Easterlin Paradox?

Di Tella, Rafael, and Robert MacCulloch
February 2008

The Easterlin Paradox refers to the fact that happiness data are typically stationary in spite of considerable increases in income. This amounts to a rejection of the hypothesis that current income is the only argument in the utility function. We find that the happiness responses of around 350,000 people living in the OECD between 1975 and 1997 are positively correlated with the level of income, the welfare state and (weakly) with life expectancy; they are negatively correlated with the average number of hours worked, environmental degradation (measured by SOx emissions), crime, openness to trade, inflation and unemployment-all controlling for country and year dummies. These effects separate across groups in a pattern that appears broadly plausible (e.g., the rich suffer environmental degradation more than the poor). Based on actual changes from 1975 to 1997, small contributions to happiness can be attributed to the increase in income in our sample. Interestingly, the actual changes in several of the 'omitted variables' such as life expectancy, hours worked, inflation and unemployment also contribute to happiness over this time period since life expectancy has risen and the others have, on average, fallen. Consequently the unexplained trend in happiness is even bigger than would be predicted if income was the only argument in the utility function. In other words, introducing omitted variables worsens the income-without-happiness paradox.

Journal of Development Economics 16, no. 3, Fall 2007

'Chimerica' and Global Asset Markets

Ferguson, Niall, and Moritz Schularick
February 2008

In this essay we present a potential explanation for the persistent and, to some eyes, puzzling buoyancy of global asset markets in recent years. We argue that the current world economic conjuncture is the product of a large and unusual divergence or "wedge" between the returns on capital and the cost of capital. Globalization-in particular the integration of the massive Asian labor force into the world economy-has significantly increased the returns on capital. However, contrary to what economic theory might lead us to expect, the cost of capital as measured by long-term real interest rates has not increased, but actually fallen. We call this phenomenon "Chimerica" because it is a consequence of the symbiotic economic relationship that has developed between the People's Republic of China and the United States of America. The entry of Chinese labor into the world economy has significantly boosted the returns on capital relative to the returns on labor. At the same time, by accumulating large currency reserves and channeling them (until very recently) almost exclusively into U.S.government securities, China has kept nominal and real long-term interest rates artificially low. In our view, it is this wedge between returns on capital and the cost of capital, rather than excess liquidity or a shortage of financial assets, that explains the boom in global asset markets as well as the recent upsurge of leveraged buy-out activity.

International Finance 10, no. 3, winter 2007: 215-239

Transforming Giants

Kanter, Rosabeth M.
February 2008

Large corporations have long been seen as lumbering, inflexible, bureaucratic-and clueless about global developments. But recently some multinationals seem to be transforming themselves: They're engaging employees, moving quickly, and introducing innovations that show true connection with the world. Harvard Business School's Kanter ventured with a research team inside a dozen global giants-including IBM, Procter & Gamble, Omron, CEMEX, Cisco, and Banco Real-to discover what has been driving the change. After conducting more than 350 interviews on five continents, she and her colleagues came away with a strong sense that we are witnessing the dawn of a new model of corporate power: The coordination of actions and decisions on the front lines now appears to stem from widely shared values and a sturdy platform of common processes and technology, not from top-down decrees. In particular, the values that engage the passions of far-flung workforces stress openness, inclusion, and making the world a better place. Through this shift in what might be called their guidance systems, the companies have become as creative and nimble as much smaller ones, even while taking on social and environmental challenges of a scale that only large enterprises could attempt. IBM, for instance, has created a nonprofit partnership, World Community Grid, through which any organization or individual can donate unused computing power to research projects and see what is being done with the donation in real time. IBM has gained an inspiring showcase for its new technology, helped business partners connect with the company in a positive way, and offered individuals all over the globe the chance to contribute to something big.

Harvard Business Review, 86, no. 1, January 2008: 43-52

Embracing Commitment and Performance: CEOs and Practices Used to Manage Paradox (pdf)

Fredberg, Tobias, Michael Beer, Russell Eisenstat, Nathaniel Foote, and Flemming Norrgren.
January 2008

We tend to assume that great leaders must make difficult choices between two or more conflicting outcomes. In an interview study with 26 CEOs of top American and European companies (including IKEA, Campbell Soups, Nokia, H&M), we find that instead of choosing between conflicting outcomes such as long-term strategy or short-term performance drivers, top-tier managers argue that their role is to embrace such paradoxes to make both things happen simultaneously. The study identifies five groups of practices that make this possible. Together, they reveal a systematic approach to managerial work at the top, which is seldom found in the literature. By building on the engagement of many in the development of the organization, the practices are important for our understanding of how a CEO facilitates the partaking of many in strategy making. The paper contributes to theory by relating the current findings to the literature on the connection between commitment and performance and on the strategic management literature that focuses on the proliferation of strategy and strategy as practice.

Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 08-052, January 2008

Do Legal Origins Have Persistent Effects Over Time? A Look at Law and Finance around the World c. 1900 (pdf)

Musacchio, Aldo
January 2008

How persistent are the effects of legal institutions adopted or inherited in the distant past? A substantial literature argues that legal origins have persistent effects that explain clear differences in investor protections and financial development around the world today (La Porta et al., 1998, 1999 and passim). This paper examines the persistence of the effects of legal origins by examining new estimates of different indicators of financial development in more than 20 countries in 1900 and 1913. The evidence presented does not yield robust results that can sustain the hypothesis of persistence effects of legal origin, but it is not powerful enough to reject it either. Then the paper examines if there were systematic differences in the extent of investor protections across countries, since that is the main channel through which legal origin affects financial development, and shows that all the evidence supports the idea of relative convergence in corporate governance practices across legal families circa 1900. The paper concludes that, if the evidence presented is representative, the variation observed in financial development around the world today is likely a product of events of the twentieth century rather than a consequence of long-term (and persistent) differences occasioned by legal traditions.

Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 08-030, January 2008

Grist: A Strategic Approach to Climate

Porter, Michael E , and Forest L. Reinhardt
December 2007

Climate change will affect everything businesses do, as government efforts to mitigate carbon emissions cause their prices to rise steeply. This special edition of Forethought takes a hard-nosed look at the risks and opportunities of climate change. Michael E. Porter and Forest L. Reinhardt argue that the effects of climate change on companies' operations are now so tangible and certain that the issue is best addressed with the tools of the strategist, not the philanthropist.

Forethought. Harvard Business Review 85, no. 10, October 2007: 22-26

Opinion: Place Your Bets on the Future You Want

Reinhardt, Forest L.
December 2007

This piece posits that success in a carbon-constrained world will be determined by innovation and acumen, requiring companies to make bold moves.

Forethought. Harvard Business Review 85, no. 10, October 2007: 42-43

Happiness, Contentment and Other Emotions for Central Banks

Di Tella, Rafael , and Robert MacCulloch
December 2007

We show that data on satisfaction with life from over 600,000 Europeans are negatively correlated with the unemployment rate and the inflation rate. Our preferred interpretation is that this shows that emotions are affected by macroeconomic fluctuations. Contentment is, at a minimum, one of the important emotions that central banks should focus on. More ambitiously, contentment might be considered one of the components of utility. The results may help central banks understand the tradeoffs that the public is willing to accept in terms of unemployment for inflation, at least in terms of keeping the average level of one particular emotion (contentment) constant. An alternative use of these data is to study the particular channels through which macroeconomics affects emotions. Finally, work in economics on the design of monetary policy makes several assumptions (e.g., a representative agent, a summary measure of emotions akin to utility exists and that individuals only care about income and leisure) that can be used to interpret our results as weights in a social loss function.

NBER Working Paper Series, No. 13622, November 2007

China + India: The Power of Two

Khanna, Tarun
December 2007

China and India are burying the hatchet after four-plus decades of hostility. A few companies from both nations have been quick to gain competitive advantages by viewing the two as symbiotic. If Western corporations fail to do the same, they will lose their competitive edge-and not just in China and India but globally. The trouble is, most companies and consultants refuse to believe that the planet's most populous nations can mend fences. Not only do the neighbors annoy each other with their foreign policies, but they're also vying to dominate Asia. Moreover, the world's fastest-growing economies are archrivals for raw materials, technologies, capital, and overseas markets. Still, China and India are learning to cooperate, for three reasons. First, these ancient civilizations may have been at odds since 1962, but for 2,000 years before that, they enjoyed close economic, cultural, and religious ties. Second, neighbors trade more than non-neighbors do, research suggests. Third, China and India have evolved in very different ways since their economies opened up, reducing the competitiveness between them and enhancing the complementarities. Some companies have already developed strategies that make use of both countries' capabilities. India's Mahindra & Mahindra developed a tractor domestically but manufactures it in China. China's Huawei has recruited 1,500 engineers in India to develop software for its telecommunications products. Even the countries' state-owned oil companies, including Sinopec and ONGC, have teamed up to hunt for oil together. Multinational companies usually find that tapping synergies across countries is difficult. At least two American corporations, GE and Microsoft, have effectively combined their China and India strategies, allowing them to stay ahead of global rivals.

Harvard Business Review 85, no. 12, December 2007

An Interdisciplinary Model for Effective Software Requirements Engineering

Klendauer, Ruth, Richard Gelvin, and Daniel J. Isenberg
December 2007

In recent studies, the success rate of software development projects has been found to be low (about 29%). The majority of the challenges can be traced back to the requirements engineering workflow (RE). Although it is widely acknowledged that the difficulties faced in RE are multifarious, recent research has primarily focused on limited factors. This ongoing research project addresses this limitation by integrating the fields of social and organizational psychology, organizational behavior, and software engineering. The primary goals are to (a) develop and validate an interdisciplinary multidimensional model, which focuses on the complex interrelationships among requirements workflow related risk factors, individual, team and organizational competencies, software processes, techniques, tools, and requirements workflow success and (b) develop a set of instruments to assess RE risk factors and to design, evaluate, and apply effective measures to mitigate those risks. The data collection consists of interviews with RE experts and other experienced practitioners (e.g., managers, business and technical people) in eight major North American and European financial services companies as well as an international internet survey in collaboration with journals and organizations. The present paper gives an overview of the initial findings of 61 interviews and highlights some of the key factors.

Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 08-033, November 2007

Acting Globally but Thinking Locally? The Influence of Local Communities on Organizations (pdf)

Marquis, Christopher, and Julie Battilana
December 2007

Acting Globally but Thinking Locally? The Influence of Local Communities on Organizations We develop an institutional theory of how local communities continue to matter for organizations, and why community factors are particularly important in a global age. Since globalization has taken center stage in both practitioner and academic circles, research has shifted away from understanding effects of local factors. In this paper, our aim is to redirect theoretical and empirical attention back to understanding the determinants and importance of local influences. We review classical and contemporary research from organizational theory, sociology and economics that have focused on geographic influences on organizations. We adapt Scott's (2001) influential three pillars model, including regulative, social-normative and cultural-cognitive features to conceptualize an overarching model of how communities influence organizations. We suggest that because organizations are simultaneously embedded in communities and organizational fields, by accounting for both of these different levels, researchers will better understand isomorphism and change dynamics. Our approach thus runs counter to the idea that globalization is a homogeneity-producing process and the view that society is moving from particularism to universalism. With globalization, not only has the local remained important, but in many ways local particularities have become more visible and salient, and so understanding these dynamics will be helpful for researchers addressing institutional isomorphism and change.

Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 08-034, November 2007

A Global Tax Credit

Muzinich, Justin, and Eric D. Werker
December 2007

Op-ed. The New York Times, October 20, 2007

Pharmaceutical Regulation in the United States and Europe

Daemmrich, Arthur
November 2007

The Division for Public Education of the American Bar Association. Focus on Law Studies 23, no. 1, Fall 2007: 8-11

Design, Meanings, and Radical Innovation: A Meta-model and a Research Agenda

Verganti, Roberto
November 2007

Recent studies on design management have helped us to better comprehend how companies can apply design to get closer to users and better understand their needs; an approach usually referred to as "user-centered design". Yet, analysis of design-intensive manufacturers such as Alessi, Artemide and other leading Italian firms, show that their innovation process hardly starts from a close observation of user needs and requirements. Rather, they follow a different strategy that we call "design-driven innovation". This strategy aims at radically changing the emotional and symbolic content of products, i.e., their meanings and languages, through a deep understanding of broader changes in society, culture and technology. Rather than being pulled by user requirements, design-driven innovation is pushed by a firm's vision about possible new product meanings and languages that could diffuse in society. Design-driven innovation, that plays such a crucial role in the innovation strategy of design-intensive firms, has still remained largely unexplored. This article aims at providing a possible direction to fill this empty spot in innovation management literature. In particular, first we propose a meta-model for investigation of design-driven innovation. In this meta-model a manufacturer's ability to understand, anticipate and influence emergence of new product meanings is built by leveraging on external interpreters (designers, firms in other industries, suppliers, schools, artists, the media, etc…) who share its same problem: to understand the evolution of socio-cultural models, and propose new visions and meanings. Managing design-driven innovation therefore implies to manage the interaction with these interpreters, in order to access, share and internalize knowledge on product languages and influence shifts in socio-cultural models. Second, we propose a possible direction to scientifically investigate the management of this networked and collective research process. In particular we show that the process of creating breakthrough innovations of meanings partially mirrors the process of creating breakthrough technological innovations. Studies of design-driven innovation may therefore benefit significantly from the existing body of theories in the field of technology management. The analysis of the analogies between these two types of radical innovations (of meanings and technologies) allow to set a research agenda for exploration of design-driven innovation, a relevant as well as underinvestigated phenomenon.

Journal of Product Innovation Management (forthcoming)

The Country Effect: Leveraging the Origin of a Brand for the Global Markets (El efecto país: cuándo capitalizar el origen de una marca en los mercados globales)

Deshpandé, Rohit
November 2007

Entre los consumidores más jóvenes, la procedencia de una marca no hace tanta diferencia. De hecho, un estudio reciente de Samsung descubrió que la imagen país no exhibe ningún impacto significativo en la imagen de marca ni en la intención de compra, al menos cuando se trata de una marca establecida. ¿Pero qué pasa cuando la marca es nueva o relativamente desconocida en el mercado? El profesor de Harvard Business School Rohit Deshpandé responde que en esos casos el efecto país puede tener un impacto primario en la evaluación de la marca mientras se vuelve parte integrante de la imagen de marca. Por ello es que existen casos (como los que usa como ejemplo: Lan Airlines, Corona, Café Colombia, SIA, entre otros) en los que una empresa puede ganar acceso a los mercados globales si escoge la forma adecuada de lidiar con su origen: ya sea matizándolo, ocultándolo o realzándolo para crear la imagen con la que desea llegar a los consumidores del mundo. Para afrontar adecuadamente esta decisión, el autor hace cuatro recomendaciones:
• La mejor estrategia de ingreso no es necesariamente la mejor estrategia para el desarrollo de mercado.
• El desarrollo económico de un país no siempre se correlaciona con la etapa de desarrollo del mercado para los productos.
• Conocimiento del marketing (relacionado con el producto) y conocimiento del mercado (relacionado con el territorio) son dos cosas distintas.
• Pocos clientes se benefician del marketing globalizado, pero las empresas de marketing sí lo hacen. Si, como muchas empresas latinoamericanas, su empresa quiere dejar de vender productos de bajo costo y saltar a los productos premium en el mercado global, debe poner atención al afecto país.

Harvard Business Review - America Latina, August 2007: 2-6

Will Harmonizing Accounting Standards Really Harmonize Accounting? Evidence from Non-U.S. Firms Adopting US GAAP

Bradshaw, Mark T., and Gregory S. Miller
November 2007

International harmonization of accounting standards appears to be inevitable. However, little evidence exists regarding whether harmonizing accounting standards will result in actual harmonization of accounting practices. Using a sample of non-US firms that adopt US GAAP to provide evidence on this issue, we find that most firms that adopt US GAAP adjust their accounting methods to those required by US GAAP. Properties of the firms' accounting numbers also change significantly after adopting US GAAP, but do not fully converge towards that of U.S. firms. In the cross-section, regulatory oversight is associated with more successful implementation of US GAAP; firm-specific capital market incentives are not. These results suggest that harmonizing accounting standards may result in more comparable accounting methods and numbers, but that effective regulatory oversight will be important in reaching this outcome.

Journal of Accounting, Auditing and Finance (forthcoming)

Accountability in Complex Organizations: World Bank Responses to Civil Society (pdf)

Ebrahim, Alnoor, and Steve Herz
November 2007

Civil society actors have been pushing for greater accountability of the World Bank for at least three decades. This paper outlines the range of accountability mechanisms currently in place at the World Bank along four basic levels: (1) staff, (2) project, (3) policy, and (4) board governance. We argue that civil society organizations have been influential in pushing for greater accountability at the project and policy levels, particularly through the establishment and enforcement of social and environmental safeguards and complaint and response mechanisms. But they have been much less successful in changing staff incentives for accountability to affected communities, or in improving board accountability through greater transparency in decision making, more representative vote allocation, or better parliamentary scrutiny. In other words, although civil society efforts have led to some gains in accountability with respect to Bank policies and projects, the deeper structural features of the institution-the incentives staff face and how the institution is governed-remain largely unchanged.

Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 08-027, October 2007

Facts and Fallacies about U.S. FDI in China

Branstetter, Lee, and Foley, C. Fritz
October 2007

Despite the rapid expansion of U.S.-China trade ties, the increase in U.S. FDI in China, and the expanding amount of economic research exploring these developments, a number of misconceptions distort the popular understanding of U.S. multinationals in China. In this paper, we seek to correct four common misunderstandings by providing a statistical portrait of several aspects of U.S. affiliate activity in the country and placing this activity in its appropriate economic context.

NBER Working Paper Series, No. 13470, October 2007

Governance and Merger Accounting: Evidence from Stock Price Reactions to Purchase versus Pooling

Martinez-Jerez, Francisco de Asis
September 2007

This paper examines the effect of corporate governance on investor reactions to accounting choice in the context of accounting for business combinations. Using a sample of 324 recent stock swap acquisitions I find that, contrary to practitioners' belief that capital markets penalize purchase accounting, the opposite appears to be true; there is a negative and significant differential market reaction of approximately 4 percent for acquiring firms that announce pooling transactions. This return differential declines to negative 8 percent for firms with ineffective corporate governance. These findings are consistent with capital markets interpreting the choice of purchase accounting as a signal of management's confidence in the likelihood of a successful merger. This signal is particularly relevant when corporate governance is considered ineffective.

European Accounting Review (forthcoming)

Digital Interactivity: Unanticipated Consequences for Markets, Marketing, and Consumers (pdf)

Deighton, John A., and Leora Kornfeld
September 2007

The digital interactive transformation in marketing is not unfolding, as many thought it would, on the model of direct marketing. That model anticipated that digital media using rich profiling data would intrude marketing messaging more deeply and more precisely into consumer lives than broadcast media had been able to do. But the technology that threatened intrusion is delivering seclusion. The transformation is unfolding on a model of consumer collaboration, in which consumers use digital media that lie beyond the control of marketers to communicate among one another, responding to marketing's intrusions by disseminating counterargument, information sharing, rebuttal, parody, reproach and, though more rarely, fandom. Globally the media of collaboration range from consumer review sites like Epinions and Trip Advisor, to collaborative networking sites like Bebo, Facebook, Orkut and Meetup, to trading sites like Craigslist and eBay, and user-generated content sites like YouTube, Cyworld, and blogs. This paper reviews five emerging paradigms governing marketing in this new media environment. It concludes that while meaning-making remains the central purpose of marketing communication, the shift from broadcasting to interaction within digital communities is moving the locus of control over meanings from marketer to consumer and rewarding more participatory, more sincere, and less directive marketing styles.

Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 08-017, September 2007

Entrepreneurial Theory and the History of Globalization

Deighton, John A., Geoffrey G. Jones, and R. Daniel Wadhwani
September 2007

In this article, we build on the recent efforts of scholars to re-introduce entrepreneurship into the research agenda of business historians. We examine the value and limitations of adapting recent social scientific theories and methods on entrepreneurship to research on international business history. Specifically, we focus on three recent areas of social scientific work on entrepreneurship and weigh their value to business history research. First, we consider how scholars can employ research on entrepreneurial cognition to understand the historical ownership advantages of multinational firms. Second, we draw on concepts from entrepreneurial strategy and finance and examine their use in understanding the history of how firms allocated resources to uncertain international ventures. Finally, we look at the question of the diffusion of the benefits of globalization and their impact on entrepreneurship within host economies. We conclude that the cautious adoption of some of these recent conceptual developments offers fertile opportunities for further research in international business history.

Business and Economic History On-Line 5, 2007

Intra-Industry Foreign Direct Investment (pdf)

Alfaro, Laura, and Andrew Charlton
September 2007

We use a new firm-level data set that establishes the location, ownership, and activity of 650,000 multinational subsidiaries-close to a comprehensive picture of global multinational activity. A number of patterns emerge from the data. Most foreign direct investment (FDI) occurs between rich countries. The share of vertical FDI (subsidiaries which provide inputs to their parent firms) is larger than commonly thought, even within developed countries. More than half of all vertical subsidiaries are only observable at the four-digit level because the inputs they are supplying are so proximate to their parent firms' final good that they appear identical at the two-digit level. We call these proximate subsidiaries 'intra-industry' vertical FDI and find that their location and activity are significantly different to the inter-industry vertical FDI visible at the two-digit level. These subsidiaries are not readily explained by the comparative advantage considerations in traditional models, where firms locate their low skill production stages abroad in low skill countries to take advantage of factor cost differences. We find that overwhelmingly, multinationals tend to own the stages of production proximate to their final production giving rise to a class of high-skill intra-industry vertical FDI.

Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 08-018, September 2007

Optimal Reserve Management and Sovereign Debt (pdf)

Alfaro, Laura, and Fabio Kanczuk
September 2007

Most models currently used to determine optimal foreign reserve holdings take the level of international debt as given. However, given the sovereign's willingness-to-pay incentive problems, reserve accumulation may reduce sustainable debt levels. In addition, assuming constant debt levels does not allow addressing one of the puzzles behind using reserves as a means to avoid the negative effects of crisis: why don't sovereign countries reduce their sovereign debt instead? To study the joint decision of holding sovereign debt and reserves, we construct a stochastic dynamic equilibrium model calibrated to a sample of emerging markets. We obtain that the reserve accumulation does not play a quantitative important role in this model. In fact, we find the optimal policy is not to hold reserves at all. This finding is robust to considering interest rate shocks, sudden stops, contingent reserves and reserve dependent output costs.

NBER Working Paper Series, No. 13216, July 2007

Local Company Politics: A Proposal (pdf)

Fisman, Ray, and Eric D. Werker
September 2007

Corrupt politicians, and poor government more generally, are commonly viewed as a primary barrier to economic progress. The roots to these problems run deep in many political systems across the developing world, and attempts at reform have rarely found much success. To combat this impasse, we suggest a radical new approach to local politics that, instead of proposing reforms to the electoral process, focuses on the political actors that might enter into this process. Specifically, we suggest that private firms be allowed to compete in elections to hold public office. That is, a corporate entity (e.g., Ernst and Young), rather than an individual representative of the firm, would be permitted to contest a local election. We argue that this is feasible: sufficient economic incentives could be put in place to induce firms to run for office, particularly if company officeholders prove to be competent in revenue collection. More importantly, we claim that there are many channels through which company politics should improve government, from breaking up entrenched old boys' networks to leveraging a company's existing organizational expertise. Private firms have realized efficiency and performance gains in areas such as infrastructure and many bureaucratic functions; we argue that the private sector can also attain results in politics, the most public of all realms.

Capitalism and Society 2, no. 1, March 2007

The Baltic Sea Region: Prepared for the Next Stage?

Ketels, Christian H.M.
September 2007

Baltinfo 86, May/June 2007

The Baltic Tigers: An End in Sight for the Growth Story?

Ketels, Christian H.M.
September 2007

Baltic Rim Economies, no. 5, 2006

Investigative Negotiation

Malhotra, Deepak, and Max H. Bazerman
August 2007

Negotiators often fail to achieve results because they channel too much effort into selling their own position and too little into understanding the other party's perspective. To get the best deal-or, sometimes, any deal at all-negotiators need to think like detectives, digging for information about why the other side wants what it does. This investigative approach entails a mind-set and a methodology, say Harvard Business School professors Malhotra and Bazerman. Inaccurate assumptions about the other side's motivations can lead negotiators to propose solutions to the wrong problems, needlessly give away value, or derail deals altogether. Consider, for example, the pharmaceutical company that deadlocked with a supplier over the issue of exclusivity in an ingredient purchase. Believing it was a ploy to raise the price, the drug maker upped its offer-unsuccessfully. In fact, the supplier was balking because a relative's company needed a small amount of the ingredient to make a local product. Once the real motivation surfaced, a compromise quickly followed. Understanding the other side's motives and goals is the first principle of investigative negotiation. The second is to figure out what constraints the other party faces. Often when your counterpart's behavior appears unreasonable, his hands are tied somehow, and you can reach agreement by helping overcome those limitations. The third is to view onerous demands as a window into what the other party prizes most-and use that information to create opportunities. The fourth is to look for common ground; even fierce competitors may have complementary interests that lead to creative agreements. Finally, if a deal appears lost, stay at the table and keep trying to learn more. Even if you don't win, you can gain insights into a customer's future needs, the interests of similar customers, or the strategies of competitors.

Harvard Business Review 85, no. 9, September 2007

The Ethnic Composition of U.S. Inventors (pdf)

Kerr, William R.
August 2007

The ethnic composition of U.S. scientists and engineers is undergoing a significant transformation. This study applies an ethnic-name database to individual patent records granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office to document these trends with greater detail than previously available. Most notably, the contributions of Chinese and Indian scientists to U.S. technology formation increased dramatically in the 1990s, before noticeably leveling off after 2000 and declining in the case of India. Growth in ethnic innovation is concentrated in high-tech sectors; the institutional and geographic dimensions are further characterized.

Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 08-006, May 2007

Business and Low-Income Sectors: Finding a New Weapon to Attack Poverty

Austin, James E., and Michael Chu
August 2007

Art. 1. Social Enterprise: Making a Difference. ReVista 6, no. 1, Fall 2006: 3-5

Diversification of Chinese Companies - An International Comparison (pdf)

Fan, Joseph P.H., Jun Huang, Felix Oberholzer-Gee, Troy D. Smith, and Mengxin Zhao
August 2007

This paper provides a systematic comparison of the level of business diversification in China and eight other large economies for the 2001 to 2005 period. We investigate reasons why Chinese firms are more diversified than companies elsewhere. Design/methodology/approach - We collect data on the number of business segments in which publicly traded companies operate from the Thomson One Banker database. We analyze the data using nonparametric tests and regression analysis.

Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 08-007, August 2007

Corporate Legitimacy and Advertising: British Companies and the Rhetoric of Deveolpment in West Africa, 1950 - 1970

Decker, Stephanie
August 2007

Development, modernity, and industrialization became dominant themes in corporate advertising in Africa in the 1950s and remained prevalent through the following two decades while many African nations were gaining independence. British businesses operating there created a publicity strategy that couched their presence in less developed countries in terms of a commitment and a positive contribution to the progress of the new states. Eventually, British companies tried to "Africanize" their corporate image through these campaigns.

Business History Review 81, Spring 2007: 59-86

Contingent Claims Approach to Measuring and Managing Sovereign Credit Risk (pdf)

Dale F. Gray, Merton, Robert C., and Zvi Bodie
August 2007

This paper proposes a new approach to measure, analyze, and manage sovereign risk based on the theory and practice of modern contingent claims analysis (CCA). The paper provides a new framework for adapting the CCA model to the sovereign balance sheet in a way that can help forecast credit spreads and evaluate the impact of market risks and risks transferred from other sectors. This new framework is useful for assessing vulnerability, policy analysis, sovereign credit risk analysis, and design of sovereign risk mitigation and control strategies. Applications for investors in three areas are discussed. First, CCA provides a new framework for valuing, investing, and trading sovereign securities, including sovereign capital structure arbitrage. Second, it provides a new framework for analysis and management of sovereign wealth funds being created by many emerging market and resource-rich countries. Third, the framework provides quantitative measures of sovereign risk exposures which facilitates the design of new instruments and contracts to control or transfer sovereign risk.

Journal of Investment Management (forthcoming)

Commerical Returns at the Base of the Pyramid

Chu, Michael
August 2007

Innovations, Winter/Spring 2007: 115-146

Incubating Social Change

Chu, Michael
August 2007

Viewpoints, 2007: 25-29

Institutional Tax Clienteles and Payout Policy

Desai, Mihir A., and Li Jin
August 2007

This paper employs heterogeneity in institutional shareholder tax characteristics to identify the relationship between firm payout policy and tax incentives. Analysis of a panel of firms matched with the tax characteristics of the clients of their institutional shareholders indicates that "dividend-averse" institutions are significantly less likely to hold shares in firms with larger dividend payouts. This relationship between the tax preferences of institutional shareholders and firm payout policy could reflect dividend-averse institutions gravitating to low-dividend paying-firms or managers adapting their payout policies to the interests of their institutional shareholders. Evidence is provided that both effects are operative. Instrumental variables analysis indicates that plausibly exogenous changes in payout policy result in shifting institutional ownership patterns. Similarly, exogenous changes in the tax code indicate that as the tax cost of paying dividends changes, managers alter their dividend policy to serve their institutional shareholders.

NBER Working Paper Series, No. 13283, July 2007

Taxes and Portfolio Choice: Evidence from JGTRRA's Treatment of International Dividends

Desai, Mihir A., and Dhammika Dharmapala
August 2007

This paper investigates how taxes influence portfolio choices by exploring the response to the distinctive treatment of foreign dividends in the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act (JGTRRA). JGTRRA lowered the dividend tax rate to 15% for American equities and extended this tax relief only to foreign corporations from a subset of countries. This paper uses a difference-in-difference analysis that compares US equity holdings in affected and unaffected countries. The international investment responses to JGTRRA were substantial and imply an elasticity of asset holdings with respect to taxes of -1.6. This effect cannot be explained by several potential alternative hypotheses, including differential changes to the preferences of American investors, differential changes in investment opportunities, differential time trends in investment or changed tax-evasion behavior.

NBER Working Paper Series, No. 13281, July 2007

Innovation Through Global Collaboration: A New Source of Competitive Advantage (pdf)

MacCormack, ALan, Theodore Forbath, Peter Brooks, and Patrick Kalaher
July 2007

Many recent studies highlight the need to rethink the way we manage innovation. Traditional approaches, based on the assumption that the creation and pursuit of new ideas is best accomplished by a centralized and collocated R&D team, are rapidly becoming outdated. Instead, innovations are increasingly brought to the market by networks of firms, selected for their unique capabilities, and operating in a coordinated manner. This new model demands that firms develop different skills, in particular, the ability to collaborate with partners to achieve superior innovation performance. Yet despite this need, there is little guidance on how to develop or deploy this ability.

Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 07-079, July 2007 (revised August 2007)

Business Groups in Emerging Markets: Paragons or Parasites?

Khanna, Tarun, and Yishay Yafeh
July 2007

Diversified business groups, consisting of legally independent firms operating across diverse industries, are ubiquitous in emerging markets. Groups around the world share certain attributes but also vary substantially in structure, ownership, and other dimensions. This paper proposes a business group taxonomy, which is used to formulate hypotheses and present evidence about the reasons for the formation, prevalence, and evolution of groups in different environments. In interpreting the evidence, the authors pay particular attention to two aspects neglected in much of the literature: the circumstances under which groups emerge and the historical evidence on some of the questions addressed by recent studies. They argue that business groups are responses to different economic conditions and that, from a welfare standpoint, they can sometimes be "paragons" and, at other times, "parasites." The authors conclude with an agenda for future research.

Journal of Economic Literature 45, no. 2

Ethnic Scientific Communities and International Technology Diffusion

Kerr, William R.
July 2007

This study explores the importance of knowledge transfer for international technology diffusion by examining ethnic scientific and entrepreneurial communities in the US and their ties to their home countries. US ethnic research communities are quantified by applying an ethnic-name database to individual patent records. International patent citations confirm knowledge diffuses through ethnic networks, and manufacturing output in foreign countries increases with an elasticity of 0.1-0.3 to stronger scientific integration with the US frontier. To address reverse-causality concerns, reduced-form specifications exploit exogenous changes in US immigration quotas. Consistent with a model of sector reallocation, output growth in less developed economies is facilitated by employment gains, while more advanced economies experience sharper increases in labor productivity. The ethnic transfer mechanism is especially strong in high-tech industries and among Chinese economies. The findings suggest channels for transferring codified and tacit knowledge partly shape the effective technology frontiers of developing and emerging economies.

Review of Economics and Statistics (forthcoming)

Risk Management, Capital Budgeting and Capital Structure Policy for Insurers and Reinsurers

Froot, Kenneth A.
June 2007

This paper builds on Froot and Stein (1998) in developing a framework for analyzing the risk allocation, capital budgeting, and capital structure decisions facing insurers and reinsurers. The model incorporates three key features: i) value-maximizing insurers and reinsurers face product-market as well as capital market imperfections that give rise to well-founded concerns with risk management and capital allocation; ii) some, but not all, of the risks they face can be frictionlessly hedged in the capital market; iii) the distribution of their cashflows may be asymmetric, which alters the demand for underwriting and hedging. We show that these features result in a three-factor model that determines the pricing and allocation of risk and the optimal capital structure of the firm. This approach allows us to integrate these features into: i) the pricing of risky investment, underwriting, reinsurance, and hedging; and ii) the allocation of risk across all of these opportunities, and the optimal amount of surplus capital held by the firm.

Journal of Risk and Insurance 74, no. 2, June 2007: 273-299

Market Reactions to Export Subsidies

Desai, Mihir A., and James R. Hines Jr
June 2007

This paper analyzes the economic impact of export subsidies by investigating stock price reactions to a critical event in 1997. On November 18, 1997, the European Union announced its intention to file a complaint before the World Trade Organization (WTO), arguing that the United States provided American exporters illegal subsidies by permitting them to use Foreign Sales Corporations to exempt a fraction of export profits from taxation. Share prices of American exporters fell sharply on this news, and its implication that the WTO might force the United States to eliminate the subsidy. The share price declines were largest for exporters whose tax situations made the threatened export subsidy particularly valuable. Share prices of exporters with high profit margins also declined markedly on November 18, 1997, suggesting that the export subsidies were most valuable to firms earning market rents. This last evidence is consistent with strategic trade models in which export subsidies improve the competitive positions of firms in imperfectly competitive markets.

Journal of International Economics (forthcoming)

Taxes, Institutions and Foreign Diversification Opportunities

Desai, Mihir A., and Dhammika Dharmapala
June 2007

Investors can access foreign diversification opportunities through either foreign portfolio investment (FPI) or foreign direct investment (FDI). By combining data on US outbound FPI and FDI, this paper analyzes whether the composition of US outbound capital flows reflect efforts to bypass home country tax regimes and weak host country investor protections. The cross-country analysis indicates that a 10% decrease in a foreign country's corporate tax rate increases US investors' equity FPI holdings by 21%, controlling for effects on FDI. This suggests that the residual tax on foreign multinational firm earnings biases capital flows to low corporate tax countries toward FPI. A one standard deviation increase in a foreign country's investor protections is shown to be associated with a 24% increase in US investors' equity FPI holdings. These results are robust to various controls, are not evident for debt capital flows, and are confirmed using an instrumental variables analysis. The use of FPI to bypass home country taxation of multinational firms is also apparent using only portfolio investment responses to within-country corporate tax rate changes in a panel from 1994 to 2005. Investors appear to alter their portfolio choices to circumvent home and host country institutional regimes.

NBER Working Paper Series, No. 13132, 2007

Capital Structure with Risky Foreign Investment

Desair, Mihir A., C. Fritz Foley, and James R. Hines Jr
June 2007

Political risks increase the volatility of multinational firm operating returns, prompting firms to adjust their capital structures. Politically risky countries feature more volatile returns, and the volatility of a parent company's aggregate foreign returns also increases with the extent of the firm's political risk exposure. Parent companies mitigate the cost of return volatility by adjusting their capital structures: a one standard deviation increase in exposure to political risks reduces domestic leverage by 4.4% of its mean level. Foreign political risks most strongly influence the capital structures of firms in industries that are particularly susceptible to political risks. These results suggest that other business risks may similarly affect capital structures.

Journal of Financial Economics (forthcoming)

Growth and the Quality of Foreign Direct Investment: Is All FDI Equal? (pdf)

Alfaro, Laura, and Andrew Charlton
June 2007

In this paper we distinguish different "qualities" of FDI to re-examine the relationship between FDI and growth. We use 'quality' to mean the effect of a unit of FDI on economic growth. However, this is difficult to establish because it is a function of many different country and project characteristics which are often hard to measure. Hence, we differentiate "quality FDI" in several different ways. First, we look at the possibility that the effects of FDI differ by sector. Second, we differentiate FDI based on objective qualitative industry characteristics including the average skill intensity and reliance on external capital. Third, we use a new dataset on industry-level targeting to analyze quality FDI based on the subjective preferences expressed by the receiving countries themselves. Finally, we use a two-stage least squares methodology to control for measurement error and endogeneity. Exploiting a new comprehensive industry level data set of 29 countries between 1985 and 2000, we find that the growth effects of FDI increase when we account for the quality of FDI.

Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 07-072, 2007 (revised May 2007)

Global Currency Hedging (pdf)

Campbell, John Y., Karine Serfaty-de Medeiros, and Luis M. Viceira
May 2007

This paper considers the risk management problem of an investor who holds a diversified portfolio of global equities or bonds and chooses long or short positions in currencies to manage the risk of the total portfolio. Over the period 1975-2005, we find that a risk-minimizing global equity investor should short the Australian dollar, Canadian dollar, Japanese yen, and British pound but should hold long positions in the US dollar, the euro, and the Swiss franc. The resulting currency position tends to rise in value when equity markets fall. This strategy works well for investment horizons of one month to one year. In the past 15 years the risk-minimizing demand for the dollar appears to have weakened slightly, while demands for the euro and Swiss franc have strengthened. These changes may reflect the growing role for the euro as a reserve currency in the international financial system. The risk-minimizing currency strategy for a global bond investor is close to a full currency hedge, with a modest long position in the US dollar. Risk-reducing currencies have had lower average returns during our sample period, but the difference in average returns is smaller than would be implied by the global CAPM given the historical equity premium.

Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 07-084, May 2007

From Outsourcing to Global Collaboration: New Ways to Build Competitiveness

MacCormack, Alan D., Theodore Forbath, Peter Brooks, and Patrick Kalaher
May 2007

Many companies have successfully used outsourcing to lower costs. But, unless the company's efforts are unusually good, true competitive advantage is fleeting when competitors begin outsourcing and achieve similar results. To build sustainable competitive advantage, leading companies are now using an advanced form of outsourcing, called global collaboration, to drive new revenue, quicken time-to-market, and increase innovation. Global collaboration impacts their top as well as bottom lines. But effectively adopting this approach requires adjustments to traditional outsourcing strategy, organization and processes. In a recent research project, we interviewed managers from 45 projects in over 20 firms to understand the practices that differentiated those firms that reported greater success with the use of collaboration. We found that the competencies required for achieving top-line growth through global partners are different than the competencies required to be successful in reducing costs via outsourcing. Yet, many companies continue to manage global collaboration projects in the same ways they managed cost-reduction projects and thus do not obtain the full value from these projects. Our work led us to propose several frameworks for how firms should think about their collaboration efforts (reported in a separate working paper) as well as to codify a set of organizational "best practices" that were common to companies who reported greater success in the use of collaboration (reported in this paper).

Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 07-080, May 2007

Why the World Isn't Flat

Ghemawat, Pankaj
May 2007

The article discusses what the author sees as a misperception that globalization has made national boundaries nearly obsolete. Statistics are cited that over 90% of phone calls, Internet traffic, and investment is local. The author contends global interconnectedness and integration have barely occurred, and globalization's future is fragile. Cross-border mergers are running up against protectionism, and local economic stagnation may lead to a reversal of globalization that may persist for decades.

Foreign Policy, no. 159, March/April 2007: 54-60

How Is Foreign Aid Spent? Evidence from a Compelling Natural Experiment (pdf)

Werker, Eric D., Faisal Z. Ahmed, and Charles Cohen
May 2007

We use yearly variations in the price of oil to construct a powerful new instrument to test the impact of an important but often-overlooked foreign aid channel: money given by wealthy OPEC nations to their poorer Muslim allies. The instrument identifies plausibly exogenous variation in foreign aid. We investigate how aid is spent by tracking its short-run effect on aggregate demand, prices, the national accounts, savings, and the balance of payments. We find that aid is mostly consumed, primarily in the form of higher imports of non-capital goods. Some aid is invested and aid has a small but insignificant effect on growth. Aid has no effect on the financial account, but does raise holdings of foreign reserves.
Harvard Business School Working Paper No. 07-074, April 2007

The Price of Capital: Evidence from Trade Data (pdf)

Alfaro, Laura, and Faisal Z. Ahmed
April 2007

In this paper we use highly disaggregated data on trade in capital goods to study differences in the price of capital across countries. Our strategy is motivated by the fact that most countries import the bulk of machinery equipment (from a small number of industrialized countries). We find the price of imported capital goods to be negatively and significantly correlated with the income of the importing country. Because most low-income countries import the bulk of capital goods, our results provide suggestive evidence that capital goods are more expensive in poor countries, consistent with the conventional explanation regarding the low real investment rates in poor countries.

Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 07-073, April 2007

Intellectual Property Rights, Imitation, and Foreign Direct Investment: Theory and Evidence

Branstetter, Lee, Raymond Fisman, Foley, C. Fritz, and Kamal Saggi
April 2007

This paper theoretically and empirically analyzes the effect of strengthening intellectual property rights in developing countries on the level and composition of industrial development. We develop a North-South product cycle model in which Northern innovation, Southern imitation, and FDI are all endogenous. Our model predicts that IPR reform in the South leads to increased FDI in the North, as Northern firms shift production to Southern affiliates. This FDI accelerates Southern industrial development. The South's share of global manufacturing and the pace at which production of recently invented goods shifts to the South both increase. Additionally, the model also predicts that as production shifts to the South, Northern resources will be reallocated to R&D, driving an increase in the global rate of innovation. We test the model's predictions by analyzing responses of U.S.-based multinationals and domestic industrial production to IPR reforms in the 1980s and 1990s. First, we find that MNCs expand the scale of their activities in reforming countries after IPR reform. MNCs that make extensive use of intellectual property disproportionately increase their use of inputs. There is an overall expansion of industrial activity after IPR reform, and highly disaggregated trade data indicate an increase in the number of initial export episodes in response to reform. These results suggest that the expansion of multinational activity more than offsets any decline in the imitative activity of indigenous firms.

No. 13033, NBER Working Paper Series, 2007

Multinationals as Arbitrageurs? The Effect of Stock Market Valuations on Foreign Direct Investment

Baker, Malcolm P., C. Fritz Foley, and Jeffrey Wurgler
April 2007

Empirical evidence of imperfect integration across world capital markets suggests a role for cross-border arbitrage by multinationals. Consistent with the hypothesis that multinational arbitrage is a determinant of FDI patterns, we find that FDI flows increase sharply with source-country stock market valuations-particularly the component of valuations that is predicted to revert the next year, and particularly in the presence of capital account restrictions that limit other mechanisms of cross-country arbitrage. The results suggest the existence of a cheap financial capital channel in which FDI flows reflect, in part, the use of relatively low-cost capital available to overvalued parents in the source country.

Review of Financial Studies (forthcoming)

Merchant or Two-Sided Platform

Hagiu, Andrei
April 2007

This paper provides a first pass at clarifying the economic tradeoffs between two polar strategies for market intermediation: the "merchant" mode, in which the intermediary buys from sellers and resells to buyers; and the "two-sided platform" mode, under which the intermediary enables affiliated sellers to sell directly to affiliated buyers. The merchant mode yields higher profits than the two-sided platform mode when the chicken-and-egg problem due to indirect network effects for the two-sided platform mode is more severe and when the degree of complementarity/substitutability among sellers' products is higher. Conversely, the platform mode is preferred when seller investment incentives are important or when there is asymmetric information regarding seller product quality. We discuss these tradeoffs in the context of several prominent digital intermediaries.

Review of Network Economics (forthcoming)

Public Action for Public Goods (pdf)

Abhijit Banerjee, Iyer, Lakshmi, and Rohini Somanathan
April 2007

This paper focuses on the relationship between public action and access to public goods. It begins by developing a simple model of collective action which is intended to capture the various mechanisms that are discussed in the theoretical literature on collective action. We argue that several of these intuitive theoretical arguments rely on special additional assumptions that are often not made clear. We then review the empirical work based on the predictions of these models of collective action. While the available evidence is generally consistent with these theories, there is a dearth of quality evidence. Moreover, a large part of the variation in access to public goods seems to have nothing to do with the "bottom-up" forces highlighted in these models and instead reflect more "top-down" interventions. We conclude with a discussion of some of the historical evidence on top-down interventions.

Harvard Business School Working Paper No. 07-061, April 2007

The Internal Markets of Multinational Firms

Desai, Mihir A., C. Fritz Foley, and James R. Hines Jr.
April 2007

Survey of Current Business 87, no. 3, March 2007

Dealing with Global Fluidity

El-Erian, Mohamed A.
March 2007

IMF. Finance and Development 44, no. 1, March 2007

International Financial Integration and Entrepreneurial Firm Dynamics (pdf)

Alfaro, Laura, and Andrew Charlton
March 2007

We explore the relation between international financial integration and the level of entrepreneurial activity in a country. We use a unique firm level data set of approximately 24 million firms in nearly 100 countries in 2004 and 1999, which enables us to present both cross-country and industry level evidence. We establish robust cross-country correlations between increased international financial integration and the activity of entrepreneurs using various proxies for entrepreneurial activity such as entry, size, and skewness of the firm-size distribution and de jure and de facto measures of international capital integration. We then explore causal channels through which foreign capital may encourage entrepreneurship. We find evidence that entrepreneurial activity in industries which are more reliant on external finance is disproportionately affected by international financial integration, suggesting that foreign capital may improve access to capital either directly or through improved domestic financial intermediation. Second we find that entrepreneurial activity is higher in industries which have a large share of foreign firms or in vertically linked industries.

Harvard Business School Working Paper No. 07-012, 2006 (revised March 2007); NBER Working Paper No. 13216

Managing Differences: The Central Challenge of Global Strategy

Ghemawat, Pankaj
March 2007

The main goal of any international strategy should be to manage the large differences that arise at the borders of markets. Yet executives often fail to exploit market and production discrepancies, focusing instead on the tensions between standardization and localization. In this article, Pankaj Ghemawat presents a new framework that encompasses all three effective responses to the challenges of globalization. He calls it the AAA Triangle. The As stand for the three distinct types of international strategy. Through Adaptation, companies seek to boost revenues and market share by maximizing their local relevance. Through Aggregation, they attempt to deliver economies of scale by creating regional, or sometimes global, operations. And through Arbitrage, they exploit disparities between national or regional markets, often by locating different parts of the supply chain in different places--for instance, call centers in India, factories in China, and retail shops in Western Europe. Ghemawat draws on several examples that illustrate how organizations use and balance these strategies and describes the trade-offs they make as they do so. Because most enterprises should draw from all three As to some extent, the framework can be used to develop a summary scorecard indicating how well the company is globalizing. However, given the tensions among the strategies, it's not enough simply to tick off the corresponding boxes. Strategic choice requires some degree of prioritization--and the framework can help with that as well. While it is possible to make progress on all three strategies, companies usually must focus on one or two when trying to build competitive advantage.

Harvard Business Review 85, no. 3, March 2007

Institutional Portfolio Flows and International Investments

Froot, Kenneth A., and T. Ramadorai
February 2007

Review of Financial Studies

Trends in Executive Education in Business Marketing

Narayandas, Das
February 2007

Journal of Business-to-Business Marketing 14, no. 1, 2007

Multinational Firms, FDI Flows and Imperfect Capital Markets (pdf)

Pol Antras, Desai, Mihir A., and C. Fritz Foley
February 2007

National Bureau of Economic Research Series, No. 12855, 2007

Acquisitions and Firm Growth: Creating Unilever's Ice Cream and Tea Business

Jones, Geoffrey, and Peter Miskell
January 2007

Business History 49, no. 1, January 2007