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- Faculty Publications (70)
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- 2022
- Working Paper
Banking on Transparency for the Poor: Experimental Evidence from India
By: Erica M. Field, Natalia Rigol, Charity M. Troyer Moore, Rohini Pande and Simone G. Schaner
Do information frictions limit the benefits of financial inclusion drives for the rural poor? We evaluate an experimental intervention among recently banked poor Indian women receiving government cash transfers via direct deposit. Treated women were provided automated...
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- March 2022 (Revised May 2022)
- Case
Reclaiming the Land of Purple: Purpl’s Mission to Unlock Finance in Lebanon
By: Lauren Cohen and Grace Headinger
Karl Naim, Co-Founder and CEO of Purpl, embarked on a venture to lower remittance costs for his native Lebanon. Since October 2019, the Lebanese economy had entered a free fall as its banking sector collapsed and large swathes of its population were plunged into...
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Keywords:
Business Startup;
Fintech;
Inflation;
Deflation;
Cross-border Frictions;
Remittances;
Business Startups;
Diasporas;
Financial Crisis;
Money;
Entrepreneurship;
Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues;
Poverty;
Financial Institutions;
Banking Industry;
Financial Services Industry;
Technology Industry;
Lebanon
- March 2022
- Case
Sonder Holdings Inc: Using Technology to Solve Hospitality’s Frictions
By: John Deighton and Leora Kornfeld
- February 2022
- Case
Leading The UK Vaccine Task Force
By: Amy C. Edmondson and Claudia Pienica
This case describes the first six months of the UK Vaccine Taskforce, under the leadership of Kate Bingham. With a career spent in the private sector as a biotech investor, Bingham’s appointment within the government was considered unusual. The overarching brief given...
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Keywords:
COVID-19;
Vaccine;
Government;
Health Pandemics;
Health Care and Treatment;
Science;
Innovation and Invention;
Groups and Teams;
Leadership;
Decision Making;
Government and Politics;
Health;
Innovation and Management;
Governance;
Change;
Health Industry;
Financial Services Industry;
Public Administration Industry;
Europe;
United Kingdom
- 2022
- Article
Alleviating Time Poverty Among the Working Poor: A Pre-Registered Longitudinal Field Experiment
By: A.V. Whillans and Colin West
Poverty entails more than a scarcity of material resources—it also involves a shortage of time. To examine the causal benefits of reducing time poverty, we conducted a longitudinal feld experiment over six consecutive weeks in an urban slum in Kenya with a sample of...
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Keywords:
Time;
Subjective Well Being;
Administrative Costs;
Friction;
Poverty;
Well-being;
Money;
Perception;
Kenya
- Article
Geographic Mobility, Immobility, and Geographic Flexibility—A Review and Agenda for Research on the Changing Geography of Work
I review and integrate a wide range of literature that has examined how geographic mobility of high-skilled workers creates value for organizations and individuals. Drawing on this interdisciplinary literature, I document that geographic mobility creates value by...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Segmented Arbitrage
We use arbitrage activity in equity, fixed income, and foreign exchange markets to characterize the frictions and constraints facing intermediaries. The average pairwise correlation between the twenty-nine arbitrage spreads that we study is 22%. These low correlations...
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- 2021
- Chapter
Building Small Business Utopia: How Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Can Increase Small Business Success
By: Karen G. Mills and Annie Dang
Small business lending has remained unchanged for decades, laden with frictions and barriers that prevent many small businesses from accessing the capital they need to succeed. Financial technology, or “fintech,” promises to change this trajectory. In 2010, new fintech...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
How Important is Editorial Gatekeeping? Evidence from Top Biomedical Journals
We examine editors' influence on the scientific content of academic journals by unpacking the role of three major forces: journals' missions, aggregate supply of and demand for specific topics, and scientific homophily via editorial gatekeeping. In a sample of top...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Nonbank Lending and Credit Cyclicality
By: Quirin Fleckenstein, Manasa Gopal, German Gutierrez and Sebastian Hillenbrand
We document three facts about nonbank lending in the syndicated loan market. First, nonbank lending is more than twice as cyclical as bank lending. Second, declines in nonbank lending explain most of the declines in syndicated lending during the Great Recession and...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
Coupling and Coupling Compromises in Supplier Factories' Responses to Worker Activism
By: Yanhua Bird, Jodi L. Short and Michael W. Toffel
Many companies have adopted corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies in response to activist pressure, but ensuring the implementation of these policies is challenging. Recognizing the paucity of research on the effect of contentious activism on companies’...
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- March 2021
- Article
International Trade and Social Connectedness
By: Michael Bailey, Abhinav Gupta, Sebastian Hillenbrand, Theresa Kuchler, Robert J. Richmond and Johannes Stroebel
We use de-identified data from Facebook to construct a new and publicly available measure of the pairwise social connectedness between 170 countries and 332 European regions. We find that two countries trade more when they are more socially connected, especially for...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Pricing of Climate Risk Insurance: Regulation and Cross-Subsidies
By: Ishita Sen and Ana-Maria Tenekedjieva
Homeowners’ insurance provides households financial protection from climate losses. To improve access and affordability, state regulators impose price controls on insurance companies. Using novel data, we construct a new measure of rate setting frictions for individual...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
The Effects of Temporal Distance on Intra-Firm Communication: Evidence from Daylight Savings Time
By: Jasmina Chauvin, Prithwiraj Choudhury and Tommy Pan Fang
Cross-border communication costs have plummeted and enabled the global distribution of work, but frictions attributable to distance persist. We estimate the causal effects of temporal distance, i.e., time zone separation between employees, on intra-firm communication,...
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- September 2020
- Case
The Black New Venture Competition
Black entrepreneurs encounter many unique obstacles when raising capital to start and grow a business. During their second year at Harvard Business School (HBS), MBA students Kimberly Foster and Tyler Simpson decided to do something to make a difference for...
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Keywords:
Startup;
Start-up;
Startup Financing;
Startups;
Start-ups;
African-American Protagonist;
African-american Entrepreneurs;
African-american Investors;
African-Americans;
African-American Women;
Black Leadership;
Black Inventors;
Black Entrepreneurs;
Harvard Business School;
Harvard;
Business And Society;
Early Stage Funding;
Early Stage Finance;
Technology Entrepreneurship;
Discrimination;
Technology Ventures;
Entrepreneurial Finance;
Entrepreneurial Financing;
Business Plan;
Business Startups;
Business Ventures;
Financing and Loans;
Business Growth and Maturation;
Diversity;
Gender;
Race;
Entrepreneurship;
Venture Capital;
Small Business;
Leadership;
Information Technology;
Competition;
Technology Industry
- September 2020
- Case
Keeping It in the Family at the Hayden Saw Company
By: V.G. Narayanan and John Masko
In 2019, Board Chair and third-generation shareholder Helen Fullerton was preparing for a meeting to discuss Ohio-based Hayden Saw Company’s (Hayden) future as a family business. As the company entered its fifth decade, the Hayden family was dealing with three distinct...
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- August 2020
- Article
Workplace Knowledge Flows
By: Jason Sandvik, Richard Saouma, Nathan Seegert and Christopher Stanton
We conducted a field experiment in a sales firm to test whether improving knowledge flows between coworkers affects productivity. Our design allows us to compare different management practices and to isolate whether frictions to knowledge transmission primarily reside...
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- July–August 2020
- Article
Make the Most of Your Relocation
Although the COVID-19 crisis has halted travel in recent months, geographic mobility has become critical for managers and knowledge workers hoping to advance in today’s globalized economy, and that trend is unlikely to reverse. Geographic mobility can pay off...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
How Resilient Is Venture-Backed Innovation? Evidence from Four Decades of U.S. Patenting
By: Sabrina T. Howell, Josh Lerner, Ramana Nanda and Richard Townsend
By comparing patenting among VC-backed firms to the universe of U.S. patents over the period 1976–2019, we document that while patents filed by VC-backed firms are of significantly higher quality and economic importance than the average patent, VC-backed innovation is...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Food Security and Human Mobility During the COVID-19 Lockdown
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Wesley W. Koo, Xina Li, Nishant Kishore, Satchit Balsari and Tarun Khanna
During the COVID-19 crisis, millions of migrants around the world face food insecurity. This could force migrants to travel during the pandemic, exposing them to health risks and accelerating the spread of the virus. Anecdotal evidence demonstrates the importance of...
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Keywords:
COVID-19;
Migrants;
Food Security;
Mobility;
Health Pandemics;
Food;
Distribution;
Policy;
Global Range