Browsing HBS Scholarly Articles by Title
Now showing items 582-601 of 854
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Payout Taxes and the Allocation of Investment
(2012-08-31)ABSTRACT. When corporate payout is taxed, internal equity (retained earnings) is cheaper than external equity (share issues). If there are no perfect substitutes for equity finance, payout taxes may therefore have an effect ... -
The (Perceived) Meaning of Spontaneous Thoughts
(American Psychological Association, 2014)Spontaneous thoughts, the output of a broad category of uncontrolled and inaccessible higher-order mental processes, arise frequently in everyday life. The seeming randomness by which spontaneous thoughts arise might give ... -
Performance Feedback in Competitive Product Development
(2016-06-27)Performance feedback is ubiquitous in competitive settings where new products are developed. This paper introduces a fundamental tension between incentives and improvement in the provision of feedback. Using a sample of ... -
The Performance of Corporate Alliances: Evidence from Oil and Gas Drilling in the Gulf of Mexico
(Elsevier, 2013)I use data on oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico to measure how a corporate alliance—a group of firms that jointly develops an offshore tract—performs relative to a solo firm. I employ a regression discontinuity ... -
Performance Responses to Competition Across Skill-Levels in Rank Order Tournaments: Field Evidence and Implications for Tournament Design
(2014-01-13)Tournaments are widely used in the economy to organize production and innovation. We study individual contestant-level data from 2,796 contestants in 774 software algorithm design contests with random assignment. Precisely ... -
The Persistence of Broadband User Behavior: Implications for Universal Service and Competition Policy
(Elsevier BV, 2019-09)In several markets, firms compete not for consumer expenditure but consumer attention. We examine user priorities over the allocation of their time, and interpret that behavior in light of salient tensions in policy ... -
Perspectives on the Social Psychology of Creativity
(Wiley, 2012)Scholars began serious study into the social psychology of creativity about 25 years after the field of creativity research had taken root. Over the past 35 years, examination of social and environmental influences on ... -
Physician Beliefs and Patient Preferences: A New Look at Regional Variation in Health Care Spending
(American Economic Association, 2019-02)There is considerable controversy about the causes of regional variations in health care expenditures. Using vignettes from patient and physician surveys linked to fee-for-service Medicare expenditures, this study asks ... -
Platform Diffusion at Temporary Gatherings: Social Coordination and Ecosystem Emergence
(Wiley, 2021-02)Software platforms create value by cultivating an ecosystem of complementary products and services. Existing explanations for how a prospective complementor chooses platforms to join assume the complementor has rich ... -
Playing Favorites: How Firms Prevent the Revelation of Bad News
(2014-01-13)We explore a subtle but important mechanism through which firms manipulate their information environments. We show that firms control information flow to the market through their specific organization and choreographing ... -
Policy Bundling to Overcome Loss Aversion: A Method for Improving Legislative Outcomes
(Elsevier BV, 2012-01)Policies that would create net benefits for society but would also involve costs frequently lack the necessary support to be enacted because losses loom larger than gains psychologically. To reduce the harmful consequence ... -
The Political Economy of Bilateral Foreign Aid
(2012-09-17)Despite its developmental justification, aid is deeply political. This paper examines the political economy of aid allocation first from the perspective of the donor country, and then the political economy of aid receipt ... -
Political Identity and Trust
(2015-07-29)We explore how political identity affects trust. Using an incentivized experimental survey conducted on a representative sample of the U.S. population, we vary information about partners’ partisan identity to elicit trust ... -
The Political Influence of Voters’ Interests on SEC Enforcement
(Wiley, 2019-07)I examine whether political influence as a response to voters’ interest in employment levels is reflected in the enforcement actions of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). I find that large employers are less ... -
Political Reservations and Women’s Entrepreneurship in India
(Elsevier, 2014-10-28)We quantify the link between the timing of state-level implementations of political reservations for women in India with the role of women in India's manufacturing sector. While overall employment of women in manufacturing ... -
The Politics of M&A Antitrust
(2020-03)Antitrust regulators play a critical role in protecting market competition. We examine whether firms can use the political process to opportunistically influence antitrust reviews of corporate merger transactions. We exploit ... -
Popular Acceptance of Morally Arbitrary Luck and Widespread Support for Classical Benefit-Based Taxation
(2016-03-30)U.S. survey respondents’ views on distributive justice are shown to differ in two specific, related ways from what is conventionally assumed in modern optimal tax theory. A large share, and in some cases a large majority, ... -
Populism and the Return of the “Paranoid Style”: Some Evidence and a Simple Model of Demand for Incompetence as Insurance against Elite Betrayal
(2017-01-20)We present a simple model of populism as the rejection of “disloyal” leaders. We show that adding the assumption that people are worse off when they experience low income as a result of leader betrayal (than when it is the ... -
Positive and Normative Judgments Implicit in U.S. Tax Policy, and the Costs of Unequal Growth and Recessions
(2014-12-09)Calculating the welfare implications of changes to economic policy or shocks to the economy requires economists to decide on a normative criterion. One way to make that decision is to elicit the relevant moral criteria ... -
The Pot Calling the Kettle Black: Distancing Response to Ethical Dissonance
(American Psychological Association, 2013-11-14)Six studies demonstrate the "pot calling the kettle black" phenomenon whereby people are guilty of the very fault they identify in others. Recalling an undeniable ethical failure, people experience ethical dissonance between ...