Faculty & Research
Faculty & Research
Harvard Business School faculty members have made notable contributions to the history
of business. Faculty research is diverse, based in several of the School’s units,
and reflects disciplinary backgrounds in economics, history, sociology, strategy,
and political science.
- November 2022
- Case
GE: A New Way Forward?
By: David J. Collis and Haisley Wert
| One of the most iconic American companies, General Electric (GE) was founded in 1892 in New York state. Named among the original dozen companies on the Dow Jones index in 1896, it was the list’s most tenacious holdout, maintaining its “blue chip” stock status for over...
|
- 2022
- Working Paper
You've Got Mail! The Late 19th Century U.S. Postal Service Expansion, Entrepreneurship, and Firm Performance
By: Astrid Marinoni and Maria P. Roche
| We analyze the impact of the US Postal Service's western expansion in the late 19th century, a major institutional innovation, on entrepreneurship and its heterogeneous influence on firm performance. Exploiting a novel dataset constructed from digitized archival...
|
- August 2022
- Case
Air Wars: Deregulating the U.S. Airline Industry
By: Tom Nicholas and James Weber
| In the early decades of the twentieth century, the U.S. government assisted in the development of an airline industry by subsidizing the delivery of mail and allowing mail carriers to also fly passengers. Because the government awarded mail routes to the lowest...
|
- 2022
- Working Paper
The Impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act on the U.S. Economy
By: Joe Long, Carlo Medici, Nancy Qian and Marco Tabellini
| This paper studies the impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned Chinese immigration to the United States after 1882, across U.S. counties between 1870 and 1940. We find that the Act reduced labor supply for both the Chinese and other groups (i.e., white and...
|
- 2022
- Book
Making Meritocracy: Lessons from China and India, from Antiquity to the Present
By: Tarun Khanna and Michael Szonyi
| How do societies identify and promote merit? Enabling all people to fulfill their potential, and ensuring the selection of competent and capable leaders are central challenges for any society. These are not new concerns. Scholars, educators, and political and economic...
|
- July 2022
- Case
A Soul and a Service: North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance
By: Tom Nicholas and John Masko
| The North Carolina Mutual and Provident Association (the Mutual) was founded in 1898 as a for-profit entity selling life insurance catering to the Black community. The Mutual was entering a field crowded with established White-owned competitors that largely refused to...
|
- 2022
- Book
Empires of Ideas: Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China
By: William C. Kirby
| The modern university was born in Germany. In the twentieth century, the United States leapfrogged Germany to become the global leader in higher education. Will China challenge its position in the twenty-first? Today American institutions dominate nearly every major...
|
- June 2022
- Case
Mossadeq’s Gambit: The US, UK, and Iranian Oil Nationalization
By: Jeremy Friedman and Jingyu Liu
| Many of the West’s political problems in the Middle East and in Iran in particular can be traced to the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh by military forces supported by the American CIA and the British MI6 in August 1953. Mossadegh, at the head of a...
|
- 2022
- Working Paper
Multinationals and Varieties of Capitalism: When U.S. Giants Stepped into the Swiss Coordinated Labor Market in the 1950s
By: Sabine Pitteloud
| This working paper investigates unintended consequences of U.S. FDI in Switzerland in the 1950s-1960s: the increased competition that U.S. firms generated within the national labor market and the challenge their hiring practices constituted for the institutional...
|
- April 2022
- Case
Gender Equality in Business: 100 Years of Progress?
By: Boris Groysberg and Colleen Ammerman
| "Gender Equality in Business: 100 Years of Progress?" traces the history of women in management from the early 20th to early 21st century through analysis of Harvard Business Review's coverage of women and gender. The case identifies six distinct phases in the...
|
- 12 Apr 2022
- Book
Racism, Colonialism, and Britain's Legacy of Violence
by Avery Forman
| In a new book, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Caroline Elkins shows how Britain exported and institutionalized racially motivated violence, and covered it up as the country lost its grip on imperial rule.
|
Initiative Leadership
Related Faculty