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- 2023
- Working Paper
Is Pay Transparency Good?
By: Zoë Cullen
Countries around the world are designing pay transparency policies with the intention of combating pay discrimination. Are these policies working as intended? Most focus on revealing pay gaps between co-workers within a firm, with the goal of arming workers with...
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Keywords:
Pay Transparency;
Trends;
Transition;
Communication Strategy;
Wages;
Policy;
Europe;
North America;
Australia
- January 2023
- Article
Firm-Induced Migration Paths and Strategic Human-Capital Outcomes
By: Prithwiraj (Raj) Choudhury, Tarun Khanna and Victoria Sevcenko
Firm-induced migration typically entails firms relocating workers to fill value-creating positions at destination locations. But such relocated workers are often exposed to external employment opportunities at their destinations, possibly triggering turnover. We...
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- January–February 2023
- Article
Rethink Your Employee Value Proposition: Offer Your People More Than Just Flexibility
By: Mark Mortensen and Amy C. Edmondson
A lot of leaders believe that the formula for attracting and keeping talent is simple: Just ask people what they want and give it to them. The problem is, that approach tends to address only the material aspects of jobs that are top of employees’ minds at the moment,...
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- 2022
- White Paper
The Partnership Imperative: Community Colleges, Employers, & America's Chronic Skills Gap
By: Joseph B. Fuller and Manjari Raman
The nature of work has changed dramatically across
industries in the last few decades due to rapid and
repeated waves of automation. Nowhere is this more
evident than in middle-skills positions—those that
require less than a four-year college degree but more
than...
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- December 13, 2022
- Article
6 Ways Companies Fail to Help Workers Grow
By: Joseph Fuller, Matthew Sigelman and Nik Dawson
The authors recently studied Fortune 250 companies and ranked them based on the lived experience of three million of their U.S. workers. One of their key findings was that even top-ranked firms fail to deliver consistently on worker advancement. To understand why this...
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- December 2022
- Article
Competition, Contracts, and Creativity: Evidence from Novel Writing in a Platform Market
By: Yanhui Wu and Feng Zhu
A growing number of people today are participating in the gig economy, working as independent contractors on short-term projects. We study the effects of competition on gig workers' effort and creativity on a Chinese novel-writing platform. Authors produce and sell...
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- November 2022
- Case
Para: Pay Transparency and Gig Drivers’ Rights
By: Christopher Stanton and George Gonzalez
The case presents the founding vision and early days of a young startup that seeks to empower delivery drivers with tools and transparency. The company's flagship mobile app has been taken up by tens of thousands of delivery drivers across major U.S. cities who use it...
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- 2022
- Article
How Does Working from Home during COVID-19 Affect What Managers Do? Evidence from Time-Use Studies
By: Thomaz Teodorovicz, Raffaella Sadun, Andrew L. Kun and Orit Shaer
We assess how the sudden and widespread shift to working from home during the pandemic impacted how managers allocate time throughout their working day. We analyze the results from an online time-use survey with data on 1,192 knowledge workers (out of which 973 are...
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Keywords:
Time-use;
Working-from-home;
COVID;
Managers;
Knowledge Workers;
Health Pandemics;
Time Management
- 2022
- Working Paper
Communicating Corporate Culture in Labor Markets: Evidence from Job Postings
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...
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- 2022
- White Paper
The American Opportunity Index: A Corporate Scorecard of Worker Advancement
By: Matt Sigelman, Joseph Fuller, Nik Dawson and Gad Levanon
The American Opportunity Index: A Corporate Scorecard of Worker Advancement is a new effort to give companies and other stakeholders a set of robust tools that measure how well major employers are doing in fostering economic mobility for workers and how they could do...
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- September 15, 2022
- Article
Work-From-Anywhere as a Public Policy: 3 Findings from the Tulsa Remote Program
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Evan Starr and Thomaz Teodorovicz
The adoption of work-from-anywhere by organizations might help smaller towns and communities across the country attract talent and reverse brain drain, by incentivizing remote workers to migrate to such locations. We evaluate how the Tulsa Remote program, which...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
Perceived Job Difficulty Influences Unionization Support for Workers in Low-Wage Jobs
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...
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- August 2022
- Case
Southwick Social Ventures
By: Henry McGee, Mel Martin and Amy Klopfenstein
In 2021, the HBS Impact Investment Fund student team had found a promising potential investment in Southwick Social Ventures (SSV), a worker and management-owned trouser manufacturer. With a 100% immigrant workforce, the co-operative was focused on reviving...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
The Impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act on the U.S. Economy
By: Joe Long, Carlo Medici, Nancy Qian and Marco Tabellini
This paper studies the impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned Chinese immigration to the United States after 1882, across U.S. counties between 1870 and 1940. We find that the Act reduced labor supply for both the Chinese and other groups (i.e., white and...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Satisfaction of Workers in Low-Wage Jobs
How did job satisfaction change during the pandemic for workers in low-wage jobs, and how did workers’ experiences compare to those in professional jobs? Using nationally representative survey data, we show that the pandemic increased the dissatisfaction of workers in...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
Training, Communications Patterns, and Spillovers Inside Organizations
By: Miguel Espinosa and Christopher T. Stanton
We study direct productivity changes and spillovers after a randomized training program for the frontline workers in a Colombian government agency. While trained workers improved their individual production, we also find substantial spillovers that affected managers'...
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- Article
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
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...
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- 2022
- Article
Values and Inequality: Prosocial Jobs and the College Wage Premium
By: Nathan Wilmers and Letian Zhang
Employers often recruit workers by invoking corporate social responsibility, organizational purpose, or other claims to a prosocial mission. In an era of substantial labor
market inequality, commentators typically dismiss these claims as hypocritical: prosocial...
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- May 2022
- Article
The Impact of COVID-19 on Digital Communication Patterns
We explore the impact of COVID-19 on employees’ digital communication patterns through an event study of lockdowns in 16 large metropolitan areas in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. Using de-identified, aggregated meeting and email meta-data from 3,143,270...
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- 2022
- Book
Democratize Work: The Case for Reorganizing the Economy
By: Isabelle Ferreras, Julie Battilana and Dominique Méda
What happens to a society—and a planet—when capitalism outgrows democracy? The tensions between democracy and capitalism are longstanding, and they have been laid bare by the social effects of COVID-19. The narrative of “essential workers” has provided thin cover for...
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