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Faculty & Research

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    • HBS Book

    Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire

    By: Caroline M. Elkins

    Drawing on more than a decade of research on four continents, Legacy of Violence implicates all sides of Britain’s political divide in the creation, execution, and cover-up of imperial violence. By demonstrating how and why violence was the most salient factor underwriting Britain’s empire and the nation’s imperial identity at home, Elkins upends long-held myths and sheds new light on empire’s role in shaping the world today.

    • HBS Book

    Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire

    By: Caroline M. Elkins

    Drawing on more than a decade of research on four continents, Legacy of Violence implicates all sides of Britain’s political divide in the creation, execution, and cover-up of imperial violence. By demonstrating how and why violence was the most salient factor underwriting Britain’s empire and the nation’s imperial identity at home, Elkins upends...

    • Journal of Financial Economics 144, no. 2 (May 2022): 523–546.

    Do the Right Firms Survive Bankruptcy?

    By: Samuel Antill

    In U.S. Chapter 11 bankruptcy cases, firms are either reorganized, acquired, or liquidated. I show that decisions to liquidate often reduce creditor recovery, costing creditors billions of dollars every year. I exploit the within-district random assignment of bankruptcy judges to estimate a structural model of bankruptcy. I estimate that liquidation is frequently chosen when a reorganization would have maximized total creditor recovery. Liquidations involving "363 sales," in which managers sell assets without creditor approval, are especially harmful for creditors. I estimate that courts could dramatically improve creditor recovery by assigning liquidations using a statistical model.

    • Journal of Financial Economics 144, no. 2 (May 2022): 523–546.

    Do the Right Firms Survive Bankruptcy?

    By: Samuel Antill

    In U.S. Chapter 11 bankruptcy cases, firms are either reorganized, acquired, or liquidated. I show that decisions to liquidate often reduce creditor recovery, costing creditors billions of dollars every year. I exploit the within-district random assignment of bankruptcy judges to estimate a structural model of bankruptcy. I estimate that...

    • Business & Environment Initiative

    ReNew Power: Leading the Energy Transition in India

    By: Gunnar Trumbull and Malini Sen

    Founder-CEO of one of India’s largest clean energy companies, ReNew Power, which develops, builds, and operates utility-scale wind and solar energy projects, has to decide the way forward for the company as the country and the world stand poised at the cusp of an energy revolution. In 2021, at the COP26 summit, India’s Prime Minister had pledged that the country would achieve net-zero emissions by 2070 and raise renewable energy capacity fivefold by 2030. What role will ReNew Power play in this transition? Besides, with traditional power generators, which had focused on fossil fuel-based sources, finally taking notice of the renewables market, how can ReNew Power stay ahead of the competition?

    • Business & Environment Initiative

    ReNew Power: Leading the Energy Transition in India

    By: Gunnar Trumbull and Malini Sen

    Founder-CEO of one of India’s largest clean energy companies, ReNew Power, which develops, builds, and operates utility-scale wind and solar energy projects, has to decide the way forward for the company as the country and the world stand poised at the cusp of an energy revolution. In 2021, at the COP26 summit, India’s Prime Minister had pledged...

    • Featured Case

    Unilever: Remote Work in Manufacturing

    By: Prithwiraj Choudhury and Susie L. Ma

    In December 2021, Unilever—one of the world’s largest producers of consumer goods—was in the midst of a pilot project to digitize its manufacturing facilities and enable remote work for factory employees. This was possible because of an earlier project to retrofit a facility in Brazil with state-of-the art sensors on factory equipment to collect real-time data. The data was then analyzed using machine learning applications on the cloud so that key capabilities of the factory could be run remotely on a laptop in a technician’s kitchen. The company hoped expanding this effort would improve efficiency and performance across its network of factories, and result in cost savings and decreased energy consumption for the entire organization.

    • Featured Case

    Unilever: Remote Work in Manufacturing

    By: Prithwiraj Choudhury and Susie L. Ma

    In December 2021, Unilever—one of the world’s largest producers of consumer goods—was in the midst of a pilot project to digitize its manufacturing facilities and enable remote work for factory employees. This was possible because of an earlier project to retrofit a facility in Brazil with state-of-the art sensors on factory equipment to collect...

    • Featured Case

    Passing the Mic: Career and Firm Outcomes of Executive Interactions

    By: Wei Cai, Ethan Rouen and Yuan Zou

    To Cédric Jeannot, leveraging technology to promote financial inclusion was personal. After no established financial institution would accept his technology platform to lower transaction costs for free, Jeannot launched FinTech company Be Mobile Africa in May 2020. Within a year, the company had reached over 35 countries with many potential users pending on its waiting lists. A ‘for-profit with purpose’, Be Mobile Africa aimed to lift 100 million people out of poverty by extending financial services to previously unbanked populations across the African continent. Racing towards its goal, the company needed a longer-term expansion strategy to fulfill Jeannot’s mission.

    • Featured Case

    Passing the Mic: Career and Firm Outcomes of Executive Interactions

    By: Wei Cai, Ethan Rouen and Yuan Zou

    To Cédric Jeannot, leveraging technology to promote financial inclusion was personal. After no established financial institution would accept his technology platform to lower transaction costs for free, Jeannot launched FinTech company Be Mobile Africa in May 2020. Within a year, the company had reached over 35 countries with many potential users...

    • HBS Working Paper

    Passing the Mic: Career and Firm Outcomes of Executive Interactions

    By: Wei Cai, Ethan Rouen and Yuan Zou

    We exploit a unique feature of conference calls to study one type of interaction among executives—directly inviting colleagues to respond to analysts’ questions. We find that the frequency of initiating interaction is positively associated with an executive’s ability, but not associated with firm performance. When new CEOs initiate more interactions than their predecessors, interaction among the rest of the executive team also increases, suggesting a learning effect. Turning to the outcomes of this practice, we find that executives who initiate more interactions than their peers are twice as likely as the average executive to be promoted to CEO.

    • HBS Working Paper

    Passing the Mic: Career and Firm Outcomes of Executive Interactions

    By: Wei Cai, Ethan Rouen and Yuan Zou

    We exploit a unique feature of conference calls to study one type of interaction among executives—directly inviting colleagues to respond to analysts’ questions. We find that the frequency of initiating interaction is positively associated with an executive’s ability, but not associated with firm performance. When new CEOs initiate more...

    • NBER Working Paper

    High-Yield Debt Covenants and Their Real Effects

    By: Falk Bräuning, Victoria Ivashina and Ali Ozdagli

    High-yield debt including leveraged loans is characterized by incurrence financial covenants, or “cov-lite” provisions. A traditional loan agreement includes maintenance covenants, which require continuous compliance with the covenant threshold, and their violation shifts the control rights to creditors. Incurrence covenants preserve equity control rights but trigger pre-specified restrictions on the borrower’s actions once the covenant threshold is crossed. We show that the prevalence of incurrence covenants indirectly imposes significant constraints on investments as restricted actions become binding: Similar to the effects associated with the shift of control rights to creditors in traditional loans, the drop in investment under incurrence covenants is large and sudden.

    • NBER Working Paper

    High-Yield Debt Covenants and Their Real Effects

    By: Falk Bräuning, Victoria Ivashina and Ali Ozdagli

    High-yield debt including leveraged loans is characterized by incurrence financial covenants, or “cov-lite” provisions. A traditional loan agreement includes maintenance covenants, which require continuous compliance with the covenant threshold, and their violation shifts the control rights to creditors. Incurrence covenants preserve equity...

Initiatives & Projects

Business History

The Business History Initiative seeks to facilitate learning from the past through innovative research and course development, employing global and interdisciplinary perspectives.
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Seminars & Conferences

May 31
  • 31 May 2022

Governing Global Capitalism

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Recent Publications

The Passionate Pygmalion Effect: Passionate Employees Attain Better Outcomes in Part Because of More Preferential Treatment by Others

By: Ke Wang, Erica R. Bailey and Jon M. Jachimowicz
  • July 2022 |
  • Article |
  • Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
Employees are increasingly exhorted to “pursue their passion” at work. Inherent in this call is the belief that passion will produce higher performance because it promotes intrapersonal processes that propel employees forward. Here, we suggest that the pervasiveness of this “passion narrative,” coupled with the relative observability of passion, may lead others to treat passionate employees in more favorable ways that subsequently produce better workplace outcomes, a self-fulfilling prophecy we term the Passionate Pygmalion Effect. We find evidence for this effect across two experiments (Study 1 and pre-registered Study 3) and one field survey with pairs of subordinates and supervisors from a diverse set of organizations (Study 2). In line with the Passionate Pygmalion Effect, our studies show that more passionate employees (1) received more positive feedback for their success, (2) were offered more training and promotion opportunities, (3) elicited more favorable emotional reactions, and (4) prompted more favorable attributions for varied performance outcomes. Such favorable treatment persisted despite describing passionate employees' job performance identically or controlling for job performance statistically. Notably, more passionate employees even elicited more favorable emotional reactions and attributions when their job performance decreased. We subsequently discuss how our interpersonal perspective on the passion narrative implicates challenges for the advancement of employees with fewer opportunities to pursue their passion (e.g., given socioeconomic constraints or exploitative work demands), or who are less likely to be perceived as passionate by others (e.g., given cross-cultural differences).
Citation
Related
Wang, Ke, Erica R. Bailey, and Jon M. Jachimowicz. "The Passionate Pygmalion Effect: Passionate Employees Attain Better Outcomes in Part Because of More Preferential Treatment by Others." Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 101 (July 2022).

Human Resource Management and Abuse in Global Supply Chains

By: Laura G. Babbitt, Drusilla K. Brown, Ana W. Antolin, Elyse N. Voegeli and Kimberly A. Elliot
  • 2022 |
  • Chapter |
  • Faculty Research
Citation
Related
Babbitt, Laura G., Drusilla K. Brown, Ana W. Antolin, Elyse N. Voegeli, and Kimberly A. Elliot. "Human Resource Management and Abuse in Global Supply Chains." Chap. 7 in Handbook on Globalisation and Labour Standards, edited by Kimberly Ann Elliott, 126–141. Handbooks on Globalisation. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2022.

Multitasking While Driving: A Time Use Study of Commuting Knowledge Workers to Assess Current and Future Uses

By: Thomaz Teodorovicz, Andrew L. Kun, Raffaella Sadun and Orit Shaer
  • Article |
  • International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
Commuting has enormous impact on individuals, families, organizations, and society. Advances in vehicle automation may help workers employ the time spent commuting in productive work-tasks or wellbeing activities. To achieve this goal, however, we need to develop a deeper understanding of which work and personal activities are of value for commuting workers. In this paper we present results from an online time-use study of 400 knowledge workers who commute-by-driving. The data allow us to study multitasking-while-driving behavior of commuting knowledge workers, identify which non-driving tasks knowledge workers currently engage in while driving, and the non-driving tasks individuals would like to engage in when using a safe highly automated vehicle in the future. We discuss the implications of our findings for the design of technology that supports work and wellbeing activities in automated cars.
Citation
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Related
Teodorovicz, Thomaz, Andrew L. Kun, Raffaella Sadun, and Orit Shaer. "Multitasking While Driving: A Time Use Study of Commuting Knowledge Workers to Assess Current and Future Uses." International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 162 (June 2022).

The Use and Misuse of Patent Data: Issues for Finance and Beyond

By: Josh Lerner and Amit Seru
  • June 2022 |
  • Article |
  • Review of Financial Studies
Patents and citations are powerful tools for understanding innovation increasingly used in financial economics (and management research more broadly). Biases may result, however, from the interactions between the truncation of patents and citations and the changing composition of inventors. When aggregated at the firm level, these patent and citation biases can survive popular adjustment methods and are correlated with firm characteristics. These issues can lead to problematic inferences. We provide an actionable checklist to avoid biased inferences and also suggest machine learning as a potential new way to address these problems.
Citation
Related
Lerner, Josh, and Amit Seru. "The Use and Misuse of Patent Data: Issues for Finance and Beyond." Review of Financial Studies 35, no. 6 (June 2022): 2667–2704.

Are Experts Blinded by Feasibility?: Experimental Evidence from a NASA Robotics Challenge

By: Jacqueline N. Lane, Zoe Szajnfarber, Jason Crusan, Michael Menietti and Karim R. Lakhani
  • 2022 |
  • Working Paper |
  • Faculty Research
Resource allocation decisions play a dominant role in shaping a firm’s technological trajectory and competitive advantage. Recent work indicates that innovative firms and scientific institutions tend to exhibit an anti-novelty bias when evaluating new projects and ideas. In this paper, we focus on shedding light into this observed pattern by examining how evaluator expertise in the problem’s focal domain shapes the relationship between novelty and feasibility in evaluations of quality for technical solutions. To estimate relationships, we partnered with NASA and Freelancer.com, an online labor marketplace, to design an evaluation challenge, where we recruited 374 evaluators from inside and outside the technical domain to rate 101 solutions drawn from nine robotics challenges. This resulted in 3,869 evaluator-solution pairs, in which evaluators were randomly assigned to solutions to facilitate experimental comparisons. Our experimental findings, complemented with text analysis of the evaluators’ comments, indicate that domain experts exhibit a feasibility preference, focusing first on the feasibility of a solution as the primary indicator of its quality, while discounting riskier but more novel solutions. This results in a tradeoff in which highly feasible but less novel solutions are judged as being higher in quality, shedding light into why experts prefer more incremental ideas over more radical but untested ideas.
Citation
SSRN
Related
Lane, Jacqueline N., Zoe Szajnfarber, Jason Crusan, Michael Menietti, and Karim R. Lakhani. "Are Experts Blinded by Feasibility? Experimental Evidence from a NASA Robotics Challenge." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 22-071, May 2022.

Red Hen Baking Company (Abridged)

By: Richard S. Ruback and Royce Yudkoff
  • May 2022 |
  • Supplement |
  • Faculty Research
Citation
Purchase
Related
Ruback, Richard S., and Royce Yudkoff. "Red Hen Baking Company (Abridged)." Harvard Business School Spreadsheet Supplement 222-722, May 2022.

Volkswagen and Suzuki: A Match Made in Heaven (A)? and An Alliance Breaks Down (B1, B2)

By: Ranjay Gulati and Bradley Turner
  • May 2022 |
  • Teaching Note |
  • Faculty Research
Citation
Purchase
Related
Gulati, Ranjay, and Bradley Turner. "Volkswagen and Suzuki: A Match Made in Heaven (A)? and An Alliance Breaks Down (B1, B2)." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 422-087, May 2022.

Deborah Quazzo at GSV Ventures

By: William A. Sahlman, Michael D. Smith and Nicole Tempest Keller
  • May 2022 |
  • Case |
  • Faculty Research
Facing a surge in investor interest in EdTech during the COVID-19 pandemic, GSV Ventures must decide whether to raise a larger Fund #2
Citation
Educators
Purchase
Related
Sahlman, William A., Michael D. Smith, and Nicole Tempest Keller. "Deborah Quazzo at GSV Ventures." Harvard Business School Case 822-131, May 2022.
More Publications

In The News

    • 23 May 2022
    • Ethics Expert Podcast

    J.S. Nelson

    Re: JS Nelson
    • 23 May 2022
    • Sales Lead Dog Podcast

    Sales Management That Works: Frank Cespedes: Senior Lecturer for Harvard Business School

    Re: Frank Cespedes
    • 23 May 2022
    • Harvard Business School

    HBS Professors Win Wyss Awards for Excellence in Mentoring Doctoral Students

    Re: Francesca Gino, Charles Wang, Ryan Buell & Ryan Raffaelli
    • 23 May 2022
    • Harvard Business School

    Four HBS Faculty Members Receive Class of 2022 Faculty Teaching Award Honors

    Re: Mattias Fibiger, Nori Gerardo Lietz, Emily McComb & David Moss
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The Case Method

Introduced by HBS faculty to business education in 1925, the case method is a powerful interactive learning process that puts students in the shoes of a leader faced with a real-world management issue and challenges them to propose and justify a resolution.
Today, HBS remains an authority on teaching by the case method. The School is also the world’s leading case-writing institution, with HBS faculty members contributing hundreds of new cases to the management curriculum a year via the School’s unique case development and writing process.
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Faculty Positions

Harvard Business School seeks candidates in all fields for full time positions. Candidates with outstanding records in PhD or DBA programs are encouraged to apply.
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