HBS Working KnowledgeHarvard Business School Working Knowledge offers business practitioners a first look at cutting-edge research and thinking from more than 200 HBS faculty.First Look: June 24, 2008- June 26, 2008 The old foreign aid paradigm—think the Marshall Plan—was based on one government pouring massive amounts of aid into another national economy. A much-improved approach for the 21st century, suggest Justin Muzinich and HBS professor Eric Werker, writing in the JuneJuly issue of Policy Review, would be to tap into the private sector. As they write, "Employing the tax system for development is a way to use government incentives to encourage and channel private transfers that will...http://hbswk.hbs.edu/rss/5961.html Bank Structure and the Terms of Lending to Small Businesses- June 26, 2008 Published:June 24, 2008Paper Released:June 2008Authors:Rodrigo Canales and Ramana Nanda Executive Summary: Access to "soft information" and the greater sensitivity of decentralized banks to the local institutional environment can have both positive and negative consequences for small firms. Hence there may be a dark side to decentralized bank lending in certain instances. This paper argues that the same ability..http://hbswk.hbs.edu/rss/5956.html Using Financial Innovation to Support Savers: From Coercion to Excitement- June 25, 2008 Published:June 23, 2008Paper Released:April 2008Authors:Peter Tufano and Daniel Schneider Executive Summary: This paper acknowledges the wide range of solutions to the problem of low family savings. Families, and of particular interest to the authors, low-income families, save for a wide variety of purposes, including identifiable reasons such as education and retirement and others that are more broad, like...http://hbswk.hbs.edu/rss/5922.html Innovative Ways to Encourage Personal Savings- June 25, 2008 Q&A with:Peter TufanoPublished:June 23, 2008Author:Martha Lagace Putting together the money for everything from a short-term emergency to retirement is hard enough, a challenge that low- and moderate-income families endure every day. Yet as HBS professor Peter Tufano describes, new and old products targeted at people who haven't saved in the past and who don't have much money to begin with can make savings more feasible or more fun, or both. Given the diversity of financial conditions,.http://hbswk.hbs.edu/rss/5908.html Accounting Information as Political Currency- June 21, 2008 Published:June 19, 2008Paper Released:May 2008Authors:Karthik Ramanna and Sugata Roychowdhury Executive Summary: The study of accounting and the political process has long been viewed through the political cost hypothesis, the basic premise of which is that firms manage earnings in order to extract first-order benefits (or avoid first-order costs) from regulators. This paper develops and tests a distinct, yet...http://hbswk.hbs.edu/rss/5954.html Evaluating the Impact of SA 8000 Certification- June 20, 2008 Published:June 18, 2008Paper Released:May 2008Authors:Michael J. Hiscox, Claire Schwartz, and Michael W. Toffel Executive Summary: The Social Accountability 8000 Standard (SA 8000), along with other types of certification standards and corporate codes of conduct, represents a new form of voluntary "private-governance" of working conditions in the private sector, initiated and implemented by companies, labor...http://hbswk.hbs.edu/rss/5946.html First Look: June 17, 2008- June 19, 2008 How should small firms think about loans in an environment of decentralized banking The answer depends on the level of competition between decentralized banks, according to new research by HBS professor Ramana Nanda and MIT Sloan coauthor Rodrigo Canales. Using loan data from Mexico, the scholars found that while banks could benefit from local knowledge to set the terms of loans, a lack of competition suggested that "the organizational structure of decentralized banks might allow them to...http://hbswk.hbs.edu/rss/5955.html |