Faculty & Research

• HBS Book

Why does the gender gap persist and how can we close it? For years women have made up the majority of college-educated workers in the United States. In 2019, the gap between the percentage of women and the percentage of men in the workforce was the smallest on record. But despite these statistics, women remain underrepresented in positions of power and status, with the highest-paying jobs the most gender-imbalanced. Even in fields where the numbers of men and women are roughly equal, or where women actually make up the majority, leadership ranks remain male-dominated. The persistence of these inequalities begs the question: Why haven't we made more progress? In Glass Half-Broken, HBS Gender Initiative director Colleen Ammerman and Boris Groysberg reveal the pervasive organizational obstacles and managerial actions—limited opportunities for development, lack of role models and sponsors, and bias in hiring, compensation, and promotion—that create gender imbalances.

• Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 164 (May 2021): 179-191.

In the past decade, behavioral science has seen the introduction of beneficial reforms to reduce false positive results. Serving as the motivational backdrop for the present research, we wondered whether these reforms might have unintended negative consequences on researchers’ behavior and emotional experiences. In an experiment simulating the research process, Study 1 (N=449 researchers) suggested that engaging in a pre-registration task impeded the discovery of an interesting but non-hypothesized result. Study 2 (N=404 researchers) indicated that relative to confirmatory research, researchers found exploratory research more enjoyable, motivating, and interesting; and less anxiety-inducing, frustrating, boring, and scientific. These studies raise the possibility that emphasizing confirmation can shift researchers away from exploration, and that such a shift could degrade the subjective experience of conducting research.

• Digital Initiative

Network effects have risen to the forefront of platform competition discussions (e.g. the House Judiciary investigation of competition in digital markets, claiming that Facebook, for example, is entrenched due to strong network effects and high switching costs). While newer literature has developed much more sophistication in characterizing network effects, common regulatory perspective often assumes more simplistic views.

• Featured Case

This case introduces a new Amazon program that has consumers upload their receipts from transactions outside of Amazon, in exchange for money. Through the discussion, the case aims to explore issues in customers’ privacy in the digital age, the value of customers’ own data, and the change in regulations aimed to protect consumers that move companies from using third party data to first party data. In addition, the case offers an opportunity to discuss the power dynamics of online giants such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook.

• Featured Case

In early 2020, 414 Capital was hired by Proteak, Mexico´s largest forestry platform, to perform a valuation of its teak business, a high-grade hardwood commonly used to build boat decks, outdoor walls, furniture, doors and small objects. Teak plantations typically became commercially viable upon reaching 20 to 30 years of maturity and Proteak was two years away from reaching its final harvest period for several teak plantations in Mexico. Teak productivity could vary significantly across plantations. Ariel Fischman, founder and CEO of 414 Capital, a leading independent corporate financial services firm, recognized valuing land in Mexico was also a tricky business, and although they had previously performed a valuation of Proteak in 2014, the market dynamics had changed in the last six years, and so had the company’s position in the market.

• HBS Working Knowledge

Company performance evaluations have included sell-side analyst forecasts, recommendations, and credit ratings, but a newer set has emerged: environmental, social, and governance (ESG) ratings. This study finds that ESG ratings are useful for predicting future ESG news, but their predictive ability diminishes for firms with large disagreement between raters.

• HBS Working Paper

This paper estimates housing choice differences between households with and without remote workers. Prior to the pandemic, the expenditure share on housing was more than seven percent higher for remote households compared to similar non-remote households in the same commuting zone. Remote households’ higher housing expenditures arise from larger dwellings (more rooms) and a higher price per room. Pre-COVID, households with remote workers were actually located in areas with above-average housing costs, and sorting within-commuting zone to suburban or rural areas was not economically meaningful. Using the pre-COVID distribution of locations, we estimate how much additional pre-tax income would be necessary to compensate non-remote households for extra housing expenses arising from remote work in the absence of geographic mobility, and we compare this compensation to commercial office rents in major metro areas.