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Faculty & Research

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    • HBS Book

    We the Possibility: Harnessing Public Entrepreneurship to Solve Our Most Urgent Problems

    By: Mitchell Weiss

    The huge public challenges we face are daunting. At the same time, many of us have come to accept the notion that government can't do new things or solve tough challenges—it's too big and slow and bureaucratic. Not so. Entrepreneurial savvy in government is growing, transforming the public sector's response to big problems at all levels. The key is a shift from a mindset of "Probability Government"—overly focused on safe solutions and mimicking "best" practices—to "Possibility Government."

    • HBS Book

    We the Possibility: Harnessing Public Entrepreneurship to Solve Our Most Urgent Problems

    By: Mitchell Weiss

    The huge public challenges we face are daunting. At the same time, many of us have come to accept the notion that government can't do new things or solve tough challenges—it's too big and slow and bureaucratic. Not so. Entrepreneurial savvy in government is growing, transforming the public sector's response to big problems at all levels. The key...

    • Journal of Financial Economics 139, no. 2 (February 2021): 389–404.

    A Dynamic Theory of Multiple Borrowing

    By: Daniel Green and Ernest Liu

    Multiple borrowing—a borrower obtains overlapping loans from multiple lenders—is a common phenomenon in many credit markets. We build a highly tractable, dynamic model of multiple borrowing and show that, because overlapping creditors may impose default externalities on each other, expanding financial access by introducing more lenders may severely backfire.

    • Journal of Financial Economics 139, no. 2 (February 2021): 389–404.

    A Dynamic Theory of Multiple Borrowing

    By: Daniel Green and Ernest Liu

    Multiple borrowing—a borrower obtains overlapping loans from multiple lenders—is a common phenomenon in many credit markets. We build a highly tractable, dynamic model of multiple borrowing and show that, because overlapping creditors may impose default externalities on each other, expanding financial access by introducing more lenders may...

    • Health Care Initiative

    1928 Diagnostics: Fighting Antibiotics Resistance

    By: Ariel D. Stern and Daniela Beyersdorfer

    In 2019, the co-founders of the Swedish medical start-up 1928 Diagnostics, CEO Dr. Kristina Lagerstedt and COO Dr. Susanne Staaf, had to pick the right business model to commercialize their novel technology to hospitals and health care providers. Developed in partnership with research hospitals to help fight the global antibiotic resistance crisis, the firm’s cloud-based technology platform helped partners identify resistant genes and mutations in bacteria more quickly and accurately, allowing for easier outbreak cluster tracking in support of hospital infection control management, as well as better diagnostics and antibiotic selection. By 2019, they had raised $5 million, employed 16 people, and had their tool deployed at 24 partner sites in 10 different countries.

    • Health Care Initiative

    1928 Diagnostics: Fighting Antibiotics Resistance

    By: Ariel D. Stern and Daniela Beyersdorfer

    In 2019, the co-founders of the Swedish medical start-up 1928 Diagnostics, CEO Dr. Kristina Lagerstedt and COO Dr. Susanne Staaf, had to pick the right business model to commercialize their novel technology to hospitals and health care providers. Developed in partnership with research hospitals to help fight the global antibiotic resistance...

    • Featured Case

    Zameer Kassam Fine Jewelry: Engaging Clients

    By: Ryan W. Buell and Amy Klopfenstein

    Zameer Kassam Fine Jewelry (ZKFJ) designs custom engagement rings that tell the story of a couple’s relationship. The case describes the company’s process for engaging clients, which has historically been a relatively offline, high-touch experience. Obliged by social-distancing guidelines with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, Zameer Kassam and his team had been forced to take many facets of the business online. Although clients still seemed delighted by their rings, Kassam wondered what might be being lost for his clients and employees in this new virtual medium. On the other hand, perhaps there were aspects of the process that could be improved through online delivery? Such a transition could represent an opportunity to grow the business.

    • Featured Case

    Zameer Kassam Fine Jewelry: Engaging Clients

    By: Ryan W. Buell and Amy Klopfenstein

    Zameer Kassam Fine Jewelry (ZKFJ) designs custom engagement rings that tell the story of a couple’s relationship. The case describes the company’s process for engaging clients, which has historically been a relatively offline, high-touch experience. Obliged by social-distancing guidelines with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020,...

    • Featured Case

    Egon Zehnder: Beyond Search?

    By: Ashish Nanda and Margaret Cross

    In 2019, Egon Zehnder chair Jill Ader and CEO Edilson Camara faced a critical question: how should the global executive search firm approach its burgeoning advisory service offering? Since 2003, the firm’s advisory practice had grown as a conglomeration of grassroots experiments driven by the enthusiasm of some partners and the needs of some markets. Yet, in 2019, partners’ attitudes toward the practice varied greatly, with some viewing advisory as a natural extension of search that would position Egon Zehnder for future growth, and others perceiving it as a risky distraction from the firm’s core business. Ader and Camara believed the time was ripe for EZ partners to develop a shared perspective on the future of the practice within the firm.

    • Featured Case

    Egon Zehnder: Beyond Search?

    By: Ashish Nanda and Margaret Cross

    In 2019, Egon Zehnder chair Jill Ader and CEO Edilson Camara faced a critical question: how should the global executive search firm approach its burgeoning advisory service offering? Since 2003, the firm’s advisory practice had grown as a conglomeration of grassroots experiments driven by the enthusiasm of some partners and the needs of some...

    • HBS Working Knowledge

    In the Red: Overdrafts, Payday Lending, and the Underbanked

    By: Marco Di Maggio, Angela Ma, and Emily Williams

    Low-income customers turn to payday lenders and check cashers for basic financial needs when traditional banks push them out of the system through high overdraft fees and other penalties. Reducing overdraft fees improves consumers’ overall financial health and access to cheaper credit.

    • HBS Working Knowledge

    In the Red: Overdrafts, Payday Lending, and the Underbanked

    By: Marco Di Maggio, Angela Ma, and Emily Williams

    Low-income customers turn to payday lenders and check cashers for basic financial needs when traditional banks push them out of the system through high overdraft fees and other penalties. Reducing overdraft fees improves consumers’ overall financial health and access to cheaper credit.

    • HBS Working Paper

    Information Avoidance and Image Concerns

    By: Christine L. Exley and Judd B. Kessler

    A rich literature finds that individuals avoid information, even information that is instrumental to their choices. A common hypothesis posits that individuals strategically avoid information to hold particular beliefs or to take certain actions--such as behaving selfishly--with lower image costs. Building off of the classic "moral wiggle room" design, this paper provides the first direct test of whether individuals avoid information because of image concerns. We analyze data from 4,626 experimental subjects. We find that image concerns play a role in driving information avoidance, but a role that is substantially smaller than the common approach in the literature would suggest.

    • HBS Working Paper

    Information Avoidance and Image Concerns

    By: Christine L. Exley and Judd B. Kessler

    A rich literature finds that individuals avoid information, even information that is instrumental to their choices. A common hypothesis posits that individuals strategically avoid information to hold particular beliefs or to take certain actions--such as behaving selfishly--with lower image costs. Building off of the classic "moral wiggle room"...

Initiatives & Projects

Impact Investments

The Project on Impact Investments is dedicated to expanding knowledge on the impact investing sector by studying the universe of portfolio companies that seek to generate social benefits alongside financial returns.
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Seminars & Conferences

Mar 05
  • 05 Mar 2021

Hillary Stein, Harvard Business School

Mar 08
  • 08 Mar 2021

Sean Cao, Georgia State University

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Recent Publications

Does Observability Amplify Sensitivity to Moral Frames? Evaluating a Reputation-Based Account of Moral Preferences

By: Valerio Capraro, Jillian J. Jordan and Ben Tappin
  • 2021 |
  • Working Paper |
  • Faculty Research
A growing body of work suggests that people are sensitive to moral framing in economic games involving prosociality, suggesting that people hold moral preferences for doing the “right thing”. What gives rise to these preferences? Here, we evaluate the explanatory power of a reputation-based account, which proposes that people respond to moral frames because they are motivated to look good in the eyes of others. Across four pre-registered experiments (total N = 9,601), we investigated whether reputational incentives amplify sensitivity to framing effects. Studies 1-3 manipulated (i) whether moral or neutral framing was used to describe a Trade-Off Game (in which participants chose between prioritizing equality or efficiency) and (ii) whether Trade-Off Game choices were observable to a social partner in a subsequent Trust Game. These studies found that observability does not significantly amplify sensitivity to moral framing. Study 4 ruled out the alternative explanation that the observability manipulation from Studies 1-3 is too weak to influence behavior. In Study 4, the same observability manipulation did significantly amplify sensitivity to normative information (about what others see as moral in the Trade-Off Game). Together, these results suggest that moral frames may tap into moral preferences that are relatively deeply internalized, such that the power of moral frames is not strongly enhanced by making the morally-framed behavior observable to others.
Citation
Related
Capraro, Valerio, Jillian J. Jordan, and Ben Tappin. "Does Observability Amplify Sensitivity to Moral Frames? Evaluating a Reputation-Based Account of Moral Preferences." Working Paper, January 2021.

Why Do Successful Women Feel So Guilty

By: Debora Spar
  • June 2012 |
  • Editorial |
  • The Atlantic
Citation
Related
Spar, Debora. "Why Do Successful Women Feel So Guilty." The Atlantic (June 2012).

Building Cities' Collaborative Muscle

By: Jorrit De Jong, Amy C. Edmondson, Mark Moore, Hannah Riley-Bowles, Jan Rivkin, Eva Flavia Martínez Orbegozo and Santiago Pulido-Gomez
  • Spring 2021 |
  • Article |
  • Stanford Social Innovation Review (website)
The most pressing social problems facing cities today require multiagency and cross-sector solutions. We offer tools and techniques to facilitate the process of diagnosing and solving problems by breaking down silos to build up cities.
Citation
Related
De Jong, Jorrit, Amy C. Edmondson, Mark Moore, Hannah Riley-Bowles, Jan Rivkin, Eva Flavia Martínez Orbegozo, and Santiago Pulido-Gomez. "Building Cities' Collaborative Muscle." Stanford Social Innovation Review (website) (Spring 2021).

The U.S. Home Improvement Sector in 2020

By: Jose Alvarez and David Lane
  • March 2021 |
  • Case |
  • Faculty Research
Provides an overview of the U.S. home improvement sector in 2020, reviewing sources of growth in the decade ending in 2020, with special attention to the impact of Covid-19 on market leaders Home Depot and Lowe’s and the spike in online revenues for both. Also noted are ongoing supply chain and efficiency improvements at Home Depot, and ongoing turnaround efforts by African American CEO Marv Ellison at Lowe’s.
Citation
Educators
Related
Alvarez, Jose, and David Lane. "The U.S. Home Improvement Sector in 2020." Harvard Business School Case 521-032, March 2021.

A Diplomatic Counterrevolution: Indonesian Diplomacy and the Invasion of East Timor

By: Mattias Fibiger
  • March 2021 |
  • Article |
  • Modern Asian Studies
This article reinterprets the Indonesian invasion of East Timor as a "diplomatic counterrevolution." Using the central archival records of the Suharto regime for the first time in English-language scholarship, it argues that Indonesian diplomats pursued diplomacy in Southeast Asia, non-aligned and Afro-Asian networks, Western capitals, international institutions, and global capital markets to secure international support for their impending invasion of East Timor. The success of this diplomatic offensive tipped the balance of power in Jakarta away from advocates of restraint like Adam Malik and toward advocates of annexation like Ali Murtopo. The diplomacy behind Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor reveals that the architecture of globalization, lauded by some scholars as inherently liberatory, was far more agnostic—capable of being turned to counterrevolutionary purposes in addition to revolutionary ones. And it suggests that diplomacy itself had been counterrevolutionized, as geopolitical and geoeconomic change combined to make the international system, particularly the states of the Global South, far more hostile to state-making claims and transformative worldmaking projects.
Citation
Related
Fibiger, Mattias. "A Diplomatic Counterrevolution: Indonesian Diplomacy and the Invasion of East Timor." Modern Asian Studies 55, no. 2 (March 2021): 587–628.

Targeted Price Controls on Supermarket Products

By: Alberto Cavallo and Diego Aparicio
  • March 2021 |
  • Article |
  • Review of Economics and Statistics
We study the impact of targeted price controls for supermarket products in Argentina from 2007 to 2015. Using web scraping, we collected daily prices for controlled and non-controlled goods and measured the differential effects on inflation, product availability, and price dispersion. We first show that, although price controls are imposed on goods with significant CPI weight, they have a temporary effect on aggregate inflation and no downward effect on other goods. Second, contrary to common beliefs, we find that controlled goods are consistently available for sale. Third, firms compensate for price controls by introducing new product varieties at higher prices. This behavior, which increases price dispersion within narrow categories, is consistent with a standard vertical differentiation model in the presence of price controls.
Citation
Related
Cavallo, Alberto, and Diego Aparicio. "Targeted Price Controls on Supermarket Products." Review of Economics and Statistics 103, no. 1 (March 2021): 60–71.

On the Direct and Indirect Real Effects of Credit Supply Shocks

By: Laura Alfaro, Manuel García-Santana and Enrique Moral-Benito
  • March 2021 |
  • Article |
  • Journal of Financial Economics
We explore the real effects of bank-lending shocks and how they permeate the economy through buyer-supplier linkages. We combine administrative data on all Spanish firms with a matched bank-firm-loan dataset of all corporate loans from 2003 to 2013 to estimate firm-specific credit supply shocks for each year. We compute firm-specific measures of exposure to bank lending shocks of customers (upstream propagation) and suppliers (downstream propagation). Our findings suggest that credit supply shocks have sizable direct and downstream propagation effects on employment, investment, and output, especially during the 2008-2009 crisis, but no significant impact on employment during the expansion. We provide evidence that both trade credit extended by suppliers and price adjustments in general equilibrium explain downstream propagation of credit shocks.
Citation
Related
Alfaro, Laura, Manuel García-Santana, and Enrique Moral-Benito. "On the Direct and Indirect Real Effects of Credit Supply Shocks." Journal of Financial Economics 139, no. 3 (March 2021): 895–921.

The Impact of the General Data Protection Regulation on Internet Interconnection

By: Ran Zhuo, Bradley Huffaker, KC Claffy and Shane Greenstein
  • March 2021 |
  • Article |
  • Telecommunications Policy
The Internet comprises thousands of independently operated networks, where bilaterally negotiated interconnection agreements determine the flow of data between networks. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) imposes strict restrictions on processing and sharing of personal data of EU residents. Both contemporary news reports and simple bilateral bargaining theory predict reduction in data usage at the application layer and would negatively impact incentives for negotiating interconnection agreements at the internet layer due to reduced bargaining power of European networks and increased bargaining frictions. Considerable empirical evidence at the application layer confirms this prediction. Using a large sample of interconnection agreements between networks around the world in 2015–2019, we empirically investigate the impact of the GDPR on interconnection behavior of network operators in the European Economic Area (EEA) compared to network operators in non-EEA OECD countries. All evidence estimates precisely zero effects across multiple measures: the number of observed agreements per network, the inferred agreement types, and the number of observed IP-address-level interconnection points per agreement. We also find economically small effects of the GDPR on the entry and the observed number of network customers. We conclude that the short-run costs for GDPR are concentrated at the application layer.
Citation
Related
Zhuo, Ran, Bradley Huffaker, KC Claffy, and Shane Greenstein. "The Impact of the General Data Protection Regulation on Internet Interconnection." Telecommunications Policy 45, no. 2 (March 2021).
More Publications

In The News

    • 03 Mar 2021
    • New York Times

    Return-to-Office Plans Are Set in Motion, but Virus Uncertainty Remains

    Re: Tsedal Neeley
    • 02 Mar 2021
    • Cold Call

    Can Historic Social Injustices be Addressed Through Reparations?

    Re: Mihir Desai
    • 02 Mar 2021
    • CNBC

    Work is the single most important way of proving your worth’ in the U.S., says professor—why it’s making us miserable

    Re: Ashley Whillans
    • 01 Mar 2021
    • Harvard Business School

    HBS Announces Spring 2021 Cohort of Executive Fellows

    Re: Len Schlesinger, Jeffrey Rayport, Eugene Soltes & Karim Lakhani
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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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