Faculty & Research

Facilitating faculty research and case development on an international scale

Our unprecedented network of research centers and regional offices in key areas of the world enable faculty to work with leaders, industry, government, and academia worldwide, and to learn from business challenges and innovations wherever they occur. Through sustained work in the field, faculty are provided the opportunity to immerse themselves in the culture and values – as well as intricacies and nuances – that lead to truly meaningful and insightful global research.

Research Centers & Offices

More than half the faculty are actively involved in international research, developing high-impact cases and course materials on relevant global issues and innovations.

New Research

May 23, 2017
Article
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

Community trust reduces myopic decisions of low-income individuals

By: Jon M. Jachimowicz, Salah Chafik, Sabeth Munrat, Jaideep C. Prabhu and Elke U. Weber

Why do the poor make shortsighted choices in decisions that involve delayed payoffs? Foregoing immediate rewards for larger, later rewards requires that decision makers (i) believe future payoffs will occur and (ii) are not forced to take the immediate reward out of financial need. Low-income individuals may be both less likely to believe future payoffs will occur and less able to forego immediate rewards due to higher financial need; they may thus appear to discount the future more heavily. We propose that trust in one’s community—which, unlike generalized trust, we find does not covary with levels of income—can partially offset the effects of low income on myopic decisions. Specifically, we hypothesize that low-income individuals with higher community trust make less myopic intertemporal decisions because they believe their community will buffer, or cushion, against their financial need. In archival data and laboratory studies, we find that higher levels of community trust among low-income individuals lead to less myopic decisions. We also test our predictions with a 2-y community trust intervention in rural Bangladesh involving 121 union councils (the smallest rural administrative and local government unit) and find that residents in treated union councils show higher levels of community trust and make less myopic intertemporal choices than residents in control union councils. We discuss the implications of these results for the design of domestic and global policy interventions to help the poor make decisions that could alleviate poverty.

Forthcoming
Article
Journal of Financial Economics

How Do Venture Capitalists Make Decisions?

By: Paul A. Gompers, William Gornall, Steven N. Kaplan and Ilya A. Strebulaev

We survey 885 institutional venture capitalists (VCs) at 681 firms to learn how they make decisions across eight areas: deal sourcing, investment selection, valuation, deal structure, post-investment value-added, exits, internal firm organization, and relationships with limited partners. In selecting investments, VCs see the management team as more important than business-related characteristics such as product or technology. They also attribute more of the likelihood of ultimate investment success or failure to the team than to the business. While deal sourcing, deal selection, and post-investment value-added all contribute to value creation, the VCs rate deal selection as the most important of the three. We also explore (and find) differences in practices across industry, stage, geography, and past success. We compare our results to those for CFOs (Graham and Harvey 2001) and private equity investors (Gompers, Kaplan, and Mukharlyamov forthcoming).

2019
Working Paper

The Impact of Professionals' Contributions to Online Knowledge Communities on Their Workplace Knowledge Work

By: Hila Lifshitz - Assaf and Frank Nagle

Knowledge work is becoming increasingly challenging as pace of change in the knowledge frontier is increasing. Organizations have created multiple mechanisms to minimize knowledge gaps and increase learning such internal training, mentorship programs as well as encouraging their professionals to exchange knowledge outside the boundaries of the organization. Reaching outside the organizational boundaries for knowledge exchange has changed dramatically in the last decade with the rise of online professionals communities. In the case of computer science and software engineering it has become a norm to learn and as questions that used to be kept within the boundaries of the organizations, externally, with a community of external professionals help answer and learn. It is less clear whether contributing to such online communities helps improve professionals’ knowledge work or becomes a competing or distracting force from their work place knowledge work. This is the empiric puzzle our study has set to explore. We conducted a mixed method study combining qualitative data from more than 100 interviews with software professionals with a unique quantitative dataset measuring software professionals’ code productivity in their workplace by the hour/every week for one to two years.

See all research

Global Colloquium for participant-centered learning

For senior faculty at top business schools in emerging economies who want to be trained in interactive methods of teaching and learning. GloColl comprises a seven-day session held on the HBS campus, followed by a three-day session held in two cities in Asia, Europe, or Latin America each year.

→More information

In the News

- 01 Aug 2019
- Bloomberg
China Races Ahead of the U.S. in the Battle for 5G Supremacy

Re: Shane Greenstein
- 25 Jul 2019
- Entrepreneur
Startup and Standup

By: Tarun Khanna
- 19 Jul 2019
- Bloomberg
The Day India’s Banks Died

Re: Shawn Cole

01 Aug 2019
Bloomberg

China Races Ahead of the U.S. in the Battle for 5G Supremacy

Re: Shane Greenstein

25 Jul 2019
Entrepreneur

Startup and Standup

By: Tarun Khanna

19 Jul 2019
Bloomberg

The Day India’s Banks Died

Re: Shawn Cole

→More News