Faculty & Research

• HBS Book

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 ranking of global universities. Yet in historical terms, America’s preeminence is relatively new, and there is no reason to assume that U.S. schools will continue to lead the world a century from now. Indeed, America’s supremacy in higher education is under great stress, particularly at its public universities.

• Social Psychological & Personality Science 13, no. 8 (November 2022): 1187-1198

Although income is an important predictor of life satisfaction, the precise forces that drive this relationship remain unclear. We propose that financial resources afford individuals a path to reducing the distressing impact of everyday hassles, in turn increasing one’s life satisfaction. More specifically, we hypothesize that financial scarcity is associated with greater distress intensity in everyday life. Further, we propose that lower perceived control helps explain why financial scarcity predicts higher distress intensity and lower life satisfaction.

• Social Enterprise Initiative

In fall 2021, a team of students from the HBS Impact Investing Fund considered Neurologic Optimal Wellness Physical Therapy (NOW PT) for a potential investment. Dr. Banks, the founder of NOW PT, drove to visit patients. She sought an investment from the fund to open a brick-and-mortar clinic. However, the students believed that Dr. Banks might be more successful if she continued providing mobile PT services. At the conclusion of the case, the students must perform due diligence to test their hypothesis. What should their priorities be as they begin the due diligence process?

• Featured Case

In 2022, the leaders of In-Q-Tel (IQT) considered what was next for the unique mission-driven organization. Since 1999, IQT had one mission: to be the most sophisticated source of strategic technical knowledge and capabilities to the U.S. government and its allies. IQT played a dual role for the national security community: to both inform the Intelligence Community (IC) with technology insights and to deliver cutting-edge capabilities. Its technical team identified sectors of interest, followed by investment professionals engaging with companies that had promising applications for the U.S. government.

• Featured Case

In May 2014, Alex Frommeyer, cofounder and CEO of Kentucky-based Beam Dental, a seed-stage startup that developed connected toothbrushes that tracked brushing habits, needed to decide which strategy to pitch to a venture capital firm. The first pitch deck played to the founders’ strengths as engineers and requested funds to develop a market-leading, next-generation connected toothbrush. The second pitch deck requested capital to start a dental insurance company, an industry in which the founders had limited knowledge, that would distribute the toothbrush and offer premium credits for healthy brushing habits.

• HBS Working Paper

A company’s culture represents one of the most important factors that job seekers consider. In this study, we examine how firms craft their job postings to convey their cultures and whether doing so helps attract employees. We utilize state-of-the art machine learning methods to develop a comprehensive dictionary of corporate values across the near-universe of job postings. Our descriptive analysis reveals that firms are more likely to advertise corporate culture in their postings when their culture is strong, as evidenced from strong external ratings and infrequent employment violations. In addition, culture information is more prevalent among job postings for positions in which the labor pool is tighter.

• Working Paper

Unionization is a critical way that workers in low-wage jobs have pushed large companies to improve labor conditions. In this research, we highlight a novel factor that prevents people from supporting unionization for workers in low-wage jobs: the perceived difficulty of these jobs. Across four studies (N=1,239), we document an association between perceptions of job difficulty and support for the collective organizing of workers across a range of low-wage jobs. We show that manipulating perceptions of the difficulty of one’s job can improve support for worker unionization efforts. These findings suggest that one mechanism to increase support for worker unionization efforts is through the language used to describe low-wage jobs.