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    • COVID-19 Business Impact Center
      COVID-19 Business Impact Center
      Cold Call
      A podcast featuring faculty discussing cases they've written and the lessons they impart.
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      • 05 Jan 2021
      • Cold Call Podcast

      Using Behavioral Science to Improve Well-Being for Social Workers

      For child and family social workers, coping with the hardships of children and parents is part of the job. But that can cause a lot of stress. Is it possible for financially constrained organizations to improve social workers’ well-being using non-cash rewards, recognition, and other strategies from behavioral science? Assistant Professor Ashley Whillans describes the experience of Chief Executive Michael Sanders’ at the UK’s What Works Centre for Children’s Social Care, as he led a research program aimed at improving the morale of social workers in her case, “The What Works Centre: Using Behavioral Science to Improve Social Worker Well-being.”  Open for comment; 0 Comment(s) posted.

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      Development EconomicsRemove Development Economics →

      Page 1 of 31 Results →
      • 23 Jul 2020
      • Research & Ideas

      How Countries Use Financial Policy to Fight COVID-19

      by Rachel Layne

      Developing countries have fewer fiscal tools and policy options to combat COVID-19 damage to their economies, according to research by Alberto Cavallo and colleagues. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

      • 14 Apr 2020
      • Working Paper Summaries

      Contractual Restrictions and Debt Traps

      by Ernest Liu and Benjamin N. Roth

      Microfinance has failed to catalyze entrepreneurship in developing countries, despite abundant evidence of high return on investment opportunities. What can account for this? This study presents a theory in which firms that borrow from an informal lender may see their growth stalled and remain in the relationship indefinitely, even though they would have continued to grow in the absence of a lender.

      • 16 Dec 2019
      • Research & Ideas

      Taking on the Taboos That Keep Women Out of India's Workforce

      by Julia Hanna

      Giving women in rural India more control over household finances reduces the social stigma of working, says research by Natalia Rigol. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

      • 14 Nov 2019
      • Book

      Lifting the Lid on Turkey's Hidden Business History

      by Sean Silverthorne

      The business history of modern Turkey has been largely hidden from view, but a new book edited by Geoffrey Jones and Asli M. Colpan pulls back the covers. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

      • 14 Oct 2019
      • Working Paper Summaries

      Undisclosed Debt Sustainability

      by Laura Alfaro and Fabio Kanczuk

      Presenting a scenario in which non-Paris Club lending and borrowing is fully disclosed, this study illustrates that transparency has potential effects of decreased debt sustainability for investors such as China, and significant welfare gains for recipient countries. Effects are particularly strong if the debt is large.

      • 03 Jul 2019
      • Cold Call Podcast

      The Controversial History of United Fruit

      Re: Geoffrey G. Jones

      Geoffrey Jones discusses the overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala in 1954 in a US-backed coup supporting United Fruit Company and a key landmark in the history of globalization. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

      • 20 Mar 2019
      • Working Paper Summaries

      In the Shadows? Informal Enterprise in Non-Democracies

      by Kristin Fabbe, Allison Spencer Hartnett, and Steve L. Monroe

      With the informal economy representing a third of the GDP in an average Middle East and North African country, why do chronically indebted regimes tolerate such a large and untaxed shadow economy? Among this study’s findings, higher rates of public sector employment correlate with greater permissibility of firm informality.

      • 07 Dec 2018
      • Working Paper Summaries

      Oral History and Writing the Business History of Emerging Markets

      by Geoffrey Jones and Rachael Comunale

      Oral history is a valuable resource to explore how businesses developed and functioned in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, regions with a growing share of global economic activity and the majority of the world’s population. While oral history is not uncritical, it provides openings for opinions, voices, and judgements on events on which there was often silence.

      • 20 Sep 2018
      • Cold Call Podcast

      Did Entrepreneur Ernesto Tornquist Help or Hurt Argentina?

      Re: Geoffrey G. Jones

      Geoffrey Jones examines the career of Ernesto Tornquist, a cosmopolitan financier considered to be the most significant entrepreneur in Argentina at the end of the 19th century. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

      • 15 Aug 2018
      • Book

      Why Entrepreneurs Must Focus on Building Trust

      by Dina Gerdeman

      Legal and social institutions that support entrepreneurs often aren't well established in developing countries. Tarun Khanna's new book explains how businesses can make up for that by building trust. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

      • 20 Jun 2018
      • Working Paper Summaries

      Show or Tell? Improving Agent Decision Making in a Tanzanian Mobile Money Field Experiment

      by Jason Acimovic, Chris Parker, David F. Drake, and Karthik Balasubramanian

      Mobile money is popular in developing economies but many agents do not maintain proper inventory levels. This paper, based on a study of 4,771 agents in Tanzania, shows how training and ongoing guidance improve their inventory management. Agents who get in-person training and explicit inventory recommendations tend to stock out less.

      • 05 Dec 2017
      • Research & Ideas

      What We've Learned from 101 Entrepreneurs in Emerging Markets

      by Sean Silverthorne

      Harvard Business School’s project exploring the evolution of business leadership in emerging economies has reached an important milestone. Project leaders Geoffrey Jones and Tarun Khanna discuss what's been learned from the Creating Emerging Markets study so far. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

      • 18 Oct 2017
      • Research & Ideas

      How Economic Clusters Drive Globalization

      by Julia Hanna

      Historical research by Valeria Giacomin shows that industrial clusters, often cited in explaining local economic growth, have had a much wider impact, especially in developing countries. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

      • 29 Sep 2017
      • Working Paper Summaries

      International Business and Emerging Markets: A Long-Run Perspective

      by Geoffrey Jones

      This paper examines how strategies by Western multinational enterprises in emerging markets over the last century have been shaped by context. These strategies evolved from resolving logistical challenges to managing assertive governments. More recently the focus has been to locate activities in the lower end of global value chains, whilst responding to local competitors.

      • 15 Sep 2017
      • Working Paper Summaries

      Debt Redemption and Reserve Accumulation

      by Laura Alfaro and Fabio Kanczuk

      This study examines how reserve accumulation affects governments’ decisions to default. The analysis assumes that countries can accumulate reserves and borrow internationally using their own currency. Results suggest that the optimal level of international reserves is fairly large because their cost is mitigated by valuation-smoothing gains. The model matches some features of Brazil’s economic fluctuations.

      • 11 Sep 2017
      • Working Paper Summaries

      A Historical Approach to Clustering in Emerging Economies

      by Valeria Giacomin

      Clusters are geographically concentrated and interlinked agglomerations of specialized firms in a particular domain. This paper argues that long-term studies of clusters in developing countries are necessary to explain the relevance of clusters for the activities of multinational enterprises, making of global business, and building of an integrated marketplace.

      • 05 Sep 2017
      • Working Paper Summaries

      Structural Transformation: A Competitiveness-based View

      by Christian Ketels

      A critical challenge for many economies is how to accelerate structural change when market forces alone seem insufficient. This paper explores the relationship between two approaches. The Structural Transformation framework argues for identifying and supporting target sectors in line with ‘latent’ competitive advantages. The competitiveness framework emphasizes the need to systematically strengthen competitive advantages, with new sectors the outcome rather than the driver of competitiveness upgrading.

      • 18 Aug 2017
      • Working Paper Summaries

      Emerging Markets and the Future of Business History

      by Gareth Austin, Carlos Dávila, and Geoffrey Jones

      This paper argues that there are important commonalities about the business history of countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America despite differences between countries and within regions of each country. It is possible to discern a distinctive body of scholarship different from that on the West.

      • 26 Jun 2017
      • Working Paper Summaries

      Inventory Management for Mobile Money Agents in the Developing World

      by Karthik Balasubramanian, David F. Drake, and Douglas Fearing

      Mobile money agents in the developing world face a key inventory management challenge: How much cash and e-float should be held to minimize both stockouts and excess working capital? The authors develop two inventory models and show substantial inventory cost reduction with a large dataset of East African mobile money transactions.

      • 29 Jun 2016
      • Research & Ideas

      The $1 Trillion Link Between Mental Health and Economic Productivity

      by Carmen Nobel

      According to the World Health Organization, depression and anxiety disorders cost nearly $1 trillion annually. Nava Ashraf discusses the important link between mental health and economic productivity. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

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