Once a Castle, Home is Now a Debtors' Prison
| Published: | February 2, 2012 |
|---|---|
| Feature: | Op-Ed |
| Forum: | open for comment; 6 Comments posted |
Forget the notion of the home as "castle." Twenty-two percent of Americans owe more on their mortgages than the value of their homes. Nicolas P. Retsinas offers ideas for how these "debtors' prisons" can be turned into productive housing.
Income Inequality and Social Preferences for Redistribution and Compensation Differentials
| Author: | William R. Kerr |
|---|---|
| Published: | January 20, 2012 |
| Paper Release Date: | December 2011 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Market-based factors have substantially increased inequality in the United States over the last three decades. If the inequality caused by these mechanisms reduces social preferences regarding distributive equality, the inequality can become amplified and entrenched. The potential thus exists for the formation of a "vicious cycle" where increases in disparity weaken concern for wage equality or redistribution. This weakened concern affords greater future compensation differentials, a shrinking of the welfare state, and so on that further increase inequality and again shift preferences. Alternatively, changes in social preferences can counteract inequality increases. William Kerr characterizes how changes in inequality affect social attitudes towards government-led redistribution and compensation differentials. The results of this study provide mixed evidence regarding the vicious-cycle hypothesis. Kerr's findings suggest that social preferences regarding inequality adjust to desire more redistribution while allowing greater labor market inequality.
Income Inequality: What's the Right Amount?
| Published: | January 4, 2012 |
|---|---|
| Feature: | What Do YOU Think? |
| Forum: | closed | 67 Comments posted |
Summing Up Comments were large in number and broad of opinion reflecting on Professor Jim Heskett's question, Does income inequality promote or stunt economic growth? Is there a "right" right amount of income disparity?
Published in 2011
Only Capitalists Can Save Capitalism
| Published: | November 30, 2011 |
|---|---|
| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
| Forum: | open for comment; 9 Comments posted |
Capitalism appears to be going through a crisis of confidence, evident in everything from Occupy Wall Street to middle-class riots across the globe. The fix? Capitalists themselves. An interview with the authors of Capitalism at Risk, Joseph L. Bower, Herman B. "Dutch" Leonard, and Lynn S. Paine.
The Organization of Firms Across Countries
| Authors: | Nicholas Bloom, Rafaella Sadun, and and John Van Reenen |
|---|---|
| Published: | November 23, 2011 |
| Paper Release Date: | August 2011 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Economists have been paying increasing attention to the role that culture plays in a firm's overall performance. This paper focuses on how trust—a key cultural factor—affects firms' decision-making process, size, and productivity. Research was conducted by Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University, Rafaella Sadun of the Harvard Business School, and John Van Reenen of the London School of Economics.
Fairness, Efficiency, and Flexibility in Organ Allocation for Kidney Transplantation
| Authors: | Dimitris Bertsimas, Vivek F. Farias, and Nikolaos Trichakis |
|---|---|
| Published: | October 28, 2011 |
| Paper Release Date: | October 2011 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
For many people who suffer end-stage renal disease, a kidney transplant is considered a potentially life-saving gift. Allocation policies for kidneys from deceased donors are thus of central importance and have to accomplish major objectives in alleviating human suffering, prolonging life, and providing nondiscriminatory, fair, and equal access to organs for all patients. In this paper, the authors focused on national allocation policies in the United States and the recent effort to revise the current policy. Their design of a national allocation policy focuses on perhaps the simplest, most common and currently used priority method, namely a point system. They also present four case studies in which they designed new policies under different scenarios.
Market Interest in Nonfinancial Information
| Authors: | Robert G. Eccles, Michael P. Krzus, and George Serafeim |
|---|---|
| Published: | October 21, 2011 |
| Paper Release Date: | September 2011 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
During the past two decades, there have been many ideas for improving business reporting of nonfinancial information such as on a company's environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance. Using data from Bloomberg, authors Robert G. Eccles, Michael P. Krzus, and George Serafeim provide insights into market interest in nonfinancial information at a level of granularity not available until now. They identify exactly what information is of greatest interest, contrasting both the global and U.S. market across the full spectrum of ESG information and for each component of ESG, as well as Carbon Disclosure Project metrics. They also show variation in interest across asset classes and firm types, and present preliminary explanations for these differences.
High Ambition Leadership
| Published: | September 15, 2011 |
|---|---|
| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
| Forum: | open for comment; 3 Comments posted |
Higher-ambition business leaders skillfully integrate both economic and social value. Professor Emeritus Michael Beer explains what makes them special, and how you can learn what they know, in his new book, Higher Ambition: How Great Leaders Create Economic and Social Value. Q&A plus book excerpt.
Who Is Governing Whom? Senior Managers, Governance and the Structure of Generosity in Large U.S. Firms
| Authors: | Christopher Marquis and Matthew Lee |
|---|---|
| Published: | July 29, 2011 |
| Paper Release Date: | May 2011 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Analyzing several Fortune 500 firms over the period of 10 years, Christopher Marquis and Matthew Lee discuss the factors that influence corporate philanthropy, using the subject to theorize about and test how structural features of organizations help senior leaders to shape firm strategy.
Rupert Murdoch and the Seeds of Moral Hazard
| Published: | July 19, 2011 |
|---|---|
| Feature: | Views on News |
| Forum: | open for comment; 12 Comments posted |
Harvard Business School faculty Michel Anteby, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, and Robert Steven Kaplan explore the moral, ethical, and leadership issues behind Rupert Murdoch's News of the World fiasco.
Are You a Level-Six Leader?
| Published: | July 6, 2011 |
|---|---|
| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
| Forum: | open for comment; 78 Comments posted |
Asking the question, whom do you serve? is a powerful vector on which to build a useful typology of leadership. Visiting professor Modesto Maidique offers a six-level Purpose-Driven Model of Leadership ranging from Sociopath to Transcendent.
Fame, Faith, and Social Activism: Business Lessons from Bono
| Published: | June 20, 2011 |
|---|---|
| Feature: | Lessons from the Classroom |
| Forum: | open for comment; 20 Comments posted |
Many executives struggle to balance work, family, and community, but for rock star Bono the effort is spread across the globe. In the HBS case "Bono and U2," professor Nancy F. Koehn discusses key business lessons to be learned from the famous band.
The Institutional Logic of Great Global Firms
| Author: | Rosabeth Moss Kanter |
|---|---|
| Published: | June 7, 2011 |
| Paper Release Date: | May 2011 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
In practice, many large firms are now realizing the importance of humanism in corporate management. But in academia, much of management theory is still stuck on the ideas of early industrialization - focusing solely on the idea that the only real value is financial value. In this paper, Rosabeth Moss Kanter discusses how social logic guides the practices of many high-performing companies. Kanter suggests that such successful practices should provoke the creation of new economic theory, which will in turn provoke other firms to take note. She puts forth several propositions to make the case.
Signing at the Top: The Key to Preventing Tax Fraud?
| Published: | June 2, 2011 |
|---|---|
| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
| Forum: | open for comment; 4 Comments posted |
In filling out self-reported documents such as tax forms, we declare the information truthful with our signature, but usually we sign at the end of the form. Researchers Francesca Gino and Lisa Shu discuss whether governments and companies can bolster honesty simply by moving the honesty pledge and signature line to the top of the form, before people encounter the opportunity to cheat.
The Consequences of Mandatory Corporate Sustainability Reporting
| Authors: | Ioannis Ioannou and George Serafeim |
|---|---|
| Published: | May 17, 2011 |
| Paper Release Date: | March 2011 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
The number of firms reporting sustainability information has grown significantly in the past decade, both due to voluntary actions and to mandates from several national governments and stock exchange authorities. In this paper, London Business School's Ioannis Ioannou and Harvard Business School's George Serafeim investigate whether mandatory sustainability reporting has any effect on a company's tendency to engage in socially responsible management practices.
How 'Political Voice' Empowers the Powerless
| Published: | May 5, 2011 |
|---|---|
| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
| Forum: | open for comment; 4 Comments posted |
Women in India often are targets of verbal abuse, discrimination, and violent crimes—crimes that are underreported. Fortunately, an increase in female political representation seems to be giving female crime victims a voice in the criminal justice system, according to new research by Harvard Business School professor Lakshmi Iyer and colleagues.
Searching for Better Practices in Social Investing
| Published: | April 21, 2011 |
|---|---|
| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
| Forum: | open for comment; 9 Comments posted |
Social change requires innovation, not just in organizational practices but in funding practices, as well. This was a key message at "Social Investing: Emerging Trends in a Changing Landscape," a recent panel discussion at Harvard Business School in which several professional philanthropists explored how best to support social change.
Testing Coleman's Social-Norm Enforcement Mechanism: Evidence from Wikipedia
| Authors: | Mikolaj J. Piskorski and Andreea Gorbatai |
|---|---|
| Published: | January 20, 2011 |
| Paper Release Date: | December 2010 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
| Forum: | open for comment; 4 Comments posted |
Harvard Business School professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski and doctoral candidate Andreea Gorbatai look to the editing process on Wikipedia to test and validate the well-accepted (but little-verified) theory of sociologist James Coleman that social norm violations decline as network density increases. Support for Coleman's mechanism would alert us to the importance of punishments for norm violations and rewards for such punishments, and thus help us to design social systems in which norms are observed.
Funding Unpredictability Around Stem-Cell Research Inflicts Heavy Cost on Scientific Progress
| Published: | January 5, 2011 |
|---|---|
| Feature: | Op-Ed |
| Forum: | open for comment; 6 Comments posted |
Funding unpredictability in human embryonic stem-cell research inflicts a heavy cost on all scientific progress, says professor William Sahlman.
Published in 2010
Friends in High Places
| Authors: | Lauren Cohen and Christopher Malloy |
|---|---|
| Published: | December 9, 2010 |
| Paper Release Date: | October 2010 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Research supports the old adage that says it's not what you know; it's whom you know--especially when it comes to the voting behavior of US politicians. In a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, Harvard Business School professors Lauren Cohen and Christopher Malloy study the congressional voting record from 1989 to 2008. They show that personal connections among Congress members reliably affect how they will vote on pending legislation.
