The Stock Market and Bank Risk-Taking

A focus on short-term stock prices induces publicly traded banks to increase risk relative to privately-held banks, according to this paper by Antonio Falato and David Scharfstein.

Where Could More Regulation Help Small Businesses? Online Lending.

The regulatory system overseeing the financial technology industry is a tangle of multiple agencies and inconsistent rules. Karen Mills and Brayden McCarthy propose a six-point plan to regulate online lending.

Fiscal Risk and the Portfolio of Government Programs

Samuel G. Hanson, David S. Scharfstein, and Adi Sunderam develop a new model for government cost-benefit analysis, showing that distortionary taxation impacts the optimal scale and pricing of government programs.

Challenging the Belief that Liability Laws Kill Medical Device Innovation

Many policymakers believe lliability laws need reforming so that medical device makers are free to innovate without threat of costly lawsuits. But new research by Hong Luo and Alberto Galasso suggests innovation is not thwarted--just rechanneled.

How Newspapers Can Turn a Profit Online? That's Classified

How Newspapers Can Turn a Profit Online? That's Classified

Explaining the Persistence of Gender Inequality: The Work-Family Narrative as a Social Defense against the 24/7 Work Culture

This study by Irene Padavic, Robin J. Ely, and Erin M. Reid argues that women's advancement is slowed because of social defenses at the organizational level, along with wider cultural beliefs that are resistant to change.

November 22, 2016

Résumé whitening ... Breakfast at the Paramount ... AnswerDash looks for answers.

Standardized Color in the Food Industry: The Co-Creation of the Food Coloring Business in the United States, 1870–1940

Research by Ai Hisano shows how food manufacturers, dye makers, and regulators co-created the food coloring business in the United States. Food-coloring practices became integrated into an entire strategy of manufacturing and marketing in the food industry.

Sovereign Risk, Currency Risk, and Corporate Balance Sheets

Wenxin Du and Jesse Schreger lay out a case for why a country might be more likely to default on its sovereign debt than allow inflation to eat it away.

November 15, 2016

Why gender inequality persists ... Is hiring best left to a hiring manager? ... Understanding brand portfolio strategy.

Algorithmic Foundations for Business Strategy

Mihnea Moldoveanu uses tools and models from computational complexity theory and the algorithmics of hard problems that are new to the strategy field in order to address how strategic process and structure adapt to the complex strategic scenarios and predicaments.

5 Lessons I Hope Marketers Don't Learn from Donald Trump

5 Lessons I Hope Marketers Don't Learn from Donald Trump

Managing Reputation: Evidence from Biographies of Corporate Directors

Ian D. Gow, Aida Sijamic Wahid, and Gwen Yu analyze biographies of 12,895 board directors published in proxy statements to see how directors make strategic disclosure choices about their past and current experience in biographies.

6 Lessons from Donald Trump's Winning Marketing Manual

Donald Trump's upset election win offers six lessons for marketers looking to beat the odds and overcome powerful competitors, says John A. Quelch.

November 8, 2016

Winning the Chinese wine market ... Marketing food with color ... Using algorithmic models to study strategy.

Corporate Tax Strategies Mirror Personal Returns of Top Execs

Top executives who are inclined to reduce personal taxes might also benefit shareholders in their companies, concludes research by Gerardo Pérez Cavazos and Andreya M. Silva.

Ideological Segregation among Online Collaborators: Evidence from Wikipedians

Do online communities such as Wikipedia segregate into separate conversations when contributing to contestable knowledge involving controversial, subjective, and unverifiable topics? Research by Shane Greenstein, Yuan Gu, and Feng Zhu.

You're Fired: Managing Gray-Area Decisions

You're Fired: Managing Gray-Area Decisions

Government and Financial Tech Can Fix Cash Woes for Small Businesses

Karen Mills looks at how financial technology and government policies can be used to pull small businesses away from the cash flow edge.

Patent Disclosures and Standard-Setting

This article explores firms' strategies in response to intellectual property (IP) disclosure requirements-in particular, the choice between specific and generic disclosures of IP-and the optimal response by standard setting organizations, including the royalty rate setting.

First Look - November 1, 2016

Luxury products that provide an alibi ... Selling a refrigerator to 80 percent of India ... Buying a product based on what's next to it.

Quantitative Easing Didn't Ease Housing Crisis for the Neediest

A new study by Marco Di Maggio and colleagues takes a deep dive into the efficacy of the Fed's quantitative easing strategy to understand how the various rounds of QE affected “the real economy.”

'Be Careless with That!' Availability of Product Upgrades Increases Cavalier Behavior Toward Possessions

Contrary to the notion that consumers highly value and care for their possessions, this research by Silvia Bellezza, Joshua M. Ackerman, and Francesca Gino demonstrates that consumers may become careless toward owned products when they know there are appealing upgrades coming. Such carelessness is driven by consumers' strong desire to justify decisions. The findings suggest opportunities for marketers and designers because planned obsolescence might benefit upgrade-minded consumers by making it easier for them to damage or detect functional flaws in owned products.

October 25, 2016

The challenge of explaining pivots to investors ... What's an innovation worth? ... How a manager's ethnic culture affects their communications with investors.

Bernie Madoff Explains Himself

Bernie Madoff Explains Himself

The Spectacular Fall and Fix of Healthcare.gov

The Spectacular Fall and Fix of Healthcare.gov

Global Talent Flows

Global migration patterns have become increasingly asymmetric and skewed along several dimensions, especially as skilled migration has become a greater force globally. This paper by William R. Kerr and colleagues,discusses the causes and consequences of high-skilled migration and the particular role of agglomeration/cluster economies.

Self-Employment Dynamics and the Returns to Entrepreneurship

Why do workers turn to entrepreneurship when many entrepreneurs appear to earn less than what they could earn in paid employment? Written by Eleanor W. Dillon and Christopher T. Stanton, this is the first paper to characterize how the value of resolving uncertainty about entrepreneurial earnings varies over the lifecycle after adjusting for tax differences between entrepreneurs and paid workers.

A Welfarist Role for Nonwelfarist Rules: An Example with Envy

Matthew Weinzierl proposes an argument for why policymakers should, as research has repeatedly shown most people do, consider multiple, often mutually contradictory principles when judging economic policy.

Break the Rules of How Business is Done

Making just small changes to how you do business inside and outside the company can help you attract bright employees and increase innovation, argues Julia B. Austin.

October 11, 2016

Creating the launch strategy for "Hamilton" ... Companies with committed middle managers perform better ... The earnings gap between being self-employed and working for someone else.

Why White-Collar Criminals Commit Their Crimes

Eugene Soltes spent seven years interviewing nearly 50 convicted corporate felons, including Bernard Madoff, Allen Stanford, and Dennis Kozlowski. Soltes shares what he learned in his new book, "Why They Do It: Inside the Mind of the White-Collar Criminal."

Sovereign Debt Portfolios, Bond Risks, and the Credibility of Monetary Policy

This paper by Wenxin Du, Carolin E. Pflueger, and Jesse Schreger examines and explains the relation between sovereign debt portfolios and government bond risks across countries.

The Munich Oktoberfest: From Local Tradition to Global Capitalism

The Munich Oktoberfest: From Local Tradition to Global Capitalism

Can the US Economy Regain the Growth and Prosperity of the Past?

There are widely contrasting visions for the future of the US economy, observes James Heskett. One sees a digital reinvention of markets that creates jobs and boosts prosperity for all. The other predicts modest gains that fall far short of past performance. What do YOU think?

Why Don't More People Get Flu Shots at Work?

The frontline battle station in the just-started influenza season is the workplace flu vaccine clinic. The problem: fewer than half of employees take advantage of them. John Beshears discusses why location makes a difference.

The Skills Gap and the Near-Far Problem in Executive Education and Leadership Development

Das Narayandas and Mihnea Moldoveanu argue that executive education programs are not equipping managers with skills needed to succeed in "volatile, uncertain, ambiguous, and complex business landscape."

September 27, 2016

How do VCs decide? ... Digitization disrupts executive education ... Longchamp: Moving a cultural icon upmarket.

Is Company Failure Inevitable?

Companies don't generally fail because of competition; it's out-of-touch leadership that kills them. "Lead and Disrupt" coauthor Michael L. Tushman discusses how companies must continue to invest in their core products while innovating in new areas.

Technological Leadership (de)Concentration: Causes in ICTE

This paper by Yasin Ozcan and Shane Greenstein characterizes long-term trends in the Information and Communications Technology equipment industryby analyzing the concentration in patents from 1976 to 2010, and comparing measured changes against popular assumptions about the size and scale of changes in innovation.

How Do Venture Capitalists Make Decisions?

This study by Paul A. Gompersand colleagues surveys 885 institutional VCs at 681 firms asking how they make decisions across eight areas: deal sourcing; investment selection; valuation; deal structure; post-investment value-added; exits; internal VC firm issues; and external VC firm issues.

Innovation Under Constraint: Constructing a Turnaround at Lego

Innovation Under Constraint: Constructing a Turnaround at Lego

Android and Competition Law: Exploring and Assessing Google's Practices in Mobile

Benjamin Edelman and Damien Geradin argue that Google's restrictions on device manufacturers wishing to develop commercially-viable Android devices harm competition.

Why Isn't Business Research More Relevant to Business Practitioners?

There's a pervasive paradox in academia: Research conducted at business schools often offers no obvious value to people who work in the world of business.

Political Dysfunction Makes America Less Competitive

The American economy is “failing the test of competitiveness," according to a new Harvard Business School study written by Michael E. Porter, Jan W. Rivkin, and Mihir A. Desai.

Web Surfers Have a Schedule and Stick to It

Note to Web owners: Consumers won't carve out more time to visit your site. So how do you attract them? Start by understanding their online habits, reports new research by Shane Greenstein and colleagues.

What Brands Can Do to Monitor Factory Conditions of Suppliers

For better or for worse, it's fallen to multinational corporations to police the overseas factories of suppliers in their supply chains-and perhaps make them better. Michael W. Toffel examines how.

How Netflix Built its House of Cards (and Changed TV Forever)

How Netflix Built its House of Cards (and Changed TV Forever)

Decision-Making by Precedent and the Founding of American Honda (1948–1974)

While the production and distribution of goods in a firm is commonly overseen by a hierarchy of management, decision-making within these organizations is often frenetic. Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and John Heilbron demonstrate empirically that the president of American Honda made important strategic decisions by following the precedent set by his boss and former mentor, Honda's chief strategist, Takeo Fujisawa-by making careful, educated guesses about how Fujisawa would have addressed similar issues.

Resolve Your Toughest Work Problems with 5 Questions

In Managing in the Gray, Joseph Badaracco offers managers a five-question framework for facing murky situations and solving tough problems at work.

The Twitter Election

Twitter is emerging as one of the most important players in the 2016 presidential election, write John Quelch and Thales Teixeira. But does it have the power to determine which candidate will win?

Behind the Apple Tax Situation, an Unprecedented Financial Policy

Behind the Apple Tax Situation, an Unprecedented Financial Policy

One Quarter of Entrepreneurs in the United States Are Immigrants

Immigrants are 15 percent of the overall United States population, but they become entrepreneurs at a much higher rate, according to new research by William Kerr and Sari Pekkala Kerr.

August 30, 2016

Using time and money to maximize happiness ... Documenting progress vs. process in cancer care ... Tackling the global water crisis.

Location Fundamentals, Agglomeration Economies, and the Geography of Multinational Firms

Research by Laura Alfaro and Maggie Xiaoyang Chen helps explain the location interdependence of multinational firms and how they agglomerate with one another.

Unpacking Team Diversity: An Integrative Multi-Level Model of Cross-Boundary Teaming

In a growing number of cases, cross-boundary teams span organizational boundaries, not just functional ones. Amy C. Edmondson and Jean-François Harvey explore how newly formed temporary groups may be able to develop rapidly into high-performance teams.

Behind IBM's High-Risk Decision to Put Watson on 'Jeopardy'

Behind IBM's High-Risk Decision to Put Watson on 'Jeopardy'

August 23, 2016

We get less productive when left to order our own tasks ... Demythologizing sustainable investing ... Can a great customer service company clone itself?

Immigrant Entrepreneurship

Sari Pekkala Kerr and William R. Kerr construct a data platform using US Census Bureau administrative data to provide new statistics on the patterns of business formation by immigrant entrepreneurs and on the medium-term success of those businesses.

Venture Capital Data: Opportunities and Challenges

Steven N. Kaplan and Josh Lerner describe the available data and research on venture capital investments and performance, and comment on the challenges inherent in those data and research as well as possible opportunities to do better.

Liquidity Transformation in Asset Management: Evidence from the Cash Holdings of Mutual Funds

The study by Sergey Chernenko and Adi Sunderamproposes a novel measure of liquidity transformation: funds' cash management strategies.

Why College Rankings Keep Deans Awake at Night

Why College Rankings Keep Deans Awake at Night

Prospective Students Steer Clear of Schools Rocked by Scandal

Who says there is no such thing as bad publicity? When a college experiences a scandal, applications drop. Michael Luca explains what colleges and other businesses should learn when bad news dips the demand curve.

The Unintended Consequences of the Zero Lower Bound Policy

Marco Di Maggio and Marcin Kacperczyk study the impact of the zero lower bound interest rate policy on the industrial organization of the US money fund industry.

August 9, 2016

Developers dig into open offices ... Analyzing a medical technology startup ... Tracking the progress of immigrant entrepreneurship.

Shareholder Activism on Sustainability Issues

Testing the effect that environmental, social, and governance (ESG) proposals have on firms' subsequent ESG performance and market valuation, Jody Grewal, George Serafeim, and Aaron Yoon find that 42 percent are financially beneficial and associated with subsequent increases in environmental and social performance.

Ominous Background Music is Bad for Sharks

Experimental research reveals the influential power of music to determine how people feel about the most vilified predator in the ocean. Elizabeth Keenan and Andrew P. Nosal discuss the study “The Effect of Background Music in Shark Documentaries on Viewers' Perceptions of Sharks.”

How Can We Hold the “Leadership Industry” Accountable?

After reading the new book "Management BS," James Heskett asks whether there are significant disconnects between business theory and business reality. What do YOU think?

Financial Regulation in a Quantitative Model of the Modern Banking System

This study at the intersection of macroeconomics and banking explores the optimal regulation of banks. Studying and quantifying the effects of capital requirements in a model that features regulated (commercial) and unregulated (shadow) banks, the authors find that a higher capital requirement makes regulated banks safer, but does not affect the riskiness of shadow banks. The net benefit of such a policy would depend on the level of fragility of the unregulated banks.

August 2, 2016

Can rituals decrease performance anxiety? ... How to attract attention on the internet ... The risk of eliminating what you are known for.

Retail Execs Underplay Current Performance to Investors--but Why?

In quarterly earnings calls with investors and analysts, some retail managers may underplay how their companies are actually performing, according to recent research by Kenneth Froot and colleagues.

Can Paying Firms Quicker Affect Aggregate Employment?

When the United States federal government accelerated payments to a subset of small-business government contractors, each accelerated dollar of sales led to an almost 10 cent increase in payroll, according to research by Jean-Noel Barrot and Ramana Nanda.

Where is TripAdvisor for Doctors?

Would you give your doctor a poor rating just as you might flunk a bad meal or hotel? What if you needed that physician's services again? John A. Quelch discusses why it's difficult to create a TripAdvisor for doctors.

Where will Pokémon Go with Your Personal Information?

Pokémon Go is a game sensation, no doubt about that. But users should worry about where their personal information is going as well. Willy Shih discusses what happens when technology wizardry meets personal privacy.

July 26, 2016

Looking under Disney's 'tentpole' strategy ... The right way to show distress at work ... Quick payment boosts employment growth.

Who is to Blame for 'The Great Training Robbery'?

Companies spend billions annually training their executives, yet rarely realize all the benefit they could, argue Michael Beer and colleagues. He discusses a new research paper, "The Great Training Robbery."

How Small Investors Can Bet Big on Brands They Love

How Small Investors Can Bet Big on Brands They Love

July 19, 2016

What happens to white-collar criminals? ... The real story behind Kodak's fade ... Has Walmart reached the end of its run?

Towards a Prescriptive Theory of Dynamic Capabilities: Connecting Strategic Choice, Learning, and Competition

This paper by Gary P. Pisano explores how firms' choices about capability investments shape competitive outcomes.

Beyond Symbolic Responses to Private Politics: Examining Labor Standards Improvement in Global Supply Chains

Research by Andrea R. Hugill, Jodi L. Short, and Michael W. Toffel fids that global supply chain factories improve their working conditions to a greater extent when their buyers take a cooperative approach to monitoring them, when the auditors are more highly trained, and when global supply chain factories face greater risk of poor conditions being exposed.

More Effective Sports Sponsorship-Combining and Integrating Key Resources and Capabilities of International Sports Events and Their Major Sponsors

This field-based study by Ragnar Lund and Stephen A. Greyser of the Union of European Football Associations and its main international sporting event, the European Championships, explores key organizational capabilities that underlie value creation and enhancement in an event's portfolio of sponsorship relationships.

How Uber, Airbnb, and Etsy Attracted Their First 1,000 Customers

Thales Teixeira studies three of the most successful “platform” startups to understand the chicken-and-egg challenge of how companies can attract their first customers.

July 12, 2016

Rising education costs dampen entrepreneurship ... The economic implications of biosimilars ... How to reduce government error in GDP forecasts.

Notes on Developing a Strategy and Designing a Company

Geared for practical use by managers, these notes are drawn from Kevin J. Boudreau's notes from his MBA and executive MBA courses in business strategy over the past decade.

How to Fix a Broken Global Team

How to Fix a Broken Global Team

How Do We Pay for the Costs of Globalization?

Globalization creates many benefits, but not many of those accrue to local labor, says James Heskett. Who will pay for the costs of retraining workers and rebuilding communities where jobs have been sent offshore? What do YOU think?

The Impact of Campus Scandals on College

Research by Michael Luca, Patrick Rooney, and Jonathan Smith finds links between news coverage of negative incidents at top United States colleges and a drop in applications.

Is Your Org Chart Stuck in a Rut? Try a Scientific Experiment

Harvard Business School's Organizational Lab helps businesses solve operational problems by changing the way their company is organized. Ethan Bernstein and Clayton Christensen explain how academics and business leaders can work together to create a better org chart.

June 28, 2016

Is it time for Dinr? ... How Costa Rica built an ecotourism trade ... Starting a new fund in energy startups.

Indian Spiced Vegetarian Sloppy Joes (or “Pav Bhaji”)

Ever since I was a kid, “Pav Bhaji” was pure comfort food for me. Traditionally, it's a mix of potatoes, peas, carrots, and Indian spices, served on a warm, toasted, buttered, fluffy white bun as kind of an open-faced sloppy joe. It's like Indian street food, and it tastes delicious.

And while I do love the traditional version, it's not the healthiest thing to eat on a regular basis. It's basically refined carbs, regular carbs, and then more carbs, with a little bit of fat from the butter and cooking oil thrown in. There's very little fiber and virtually no protein in the original so it doesn't work as a filling meal. But it tastes SO good!

So I was on a mission: make a healthier “pav bhaji” recipe that tastes just as good as the original, but gives you way more bang for your nutritional buck.

This recipe fits the bill! It looks pretty similar to the traditional version, and tastes the same, but has TONS of secret healthy add-ins that will keep you full, happy, and satisfied for hours.

What are the secrets?

Red lentils to start. When cooked down they become totally mushy and soft, and take on the flavor of anything they're cooked with. Those little gems bring protein and fiber to the recipe and you won't even notice them in the dish! To add to that, I dumped in a bunch of veggies: cauliflower, zucchini, and mixed vegetables, and cut the potato-to-other-veggies-in-the-dish ratio way down. There are still potatoes, just not as many as the traditional recipe would call for. And of course, all of the warm, aromatic Indian spices that you'd see in any self-respecting pav bhaji BlogThis!