Experience Faculty & Research

This week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced a further retreat from U.S. leadership on refugee protection, reducing the cap on refugee admissions next year to 30,000. That’s down 80,000 from the last year of the Obama administration. Since the end of World War II, the U.S. has played a leading role protecting refugees, reflecting broad bipartisan support for policies that provided safe haven to those fleeing religious and political persecution. Read More...

I often forget I am straight.  I just don’t think about it much.  When asked what I did this weekend, or when setting family photos on my desk at work, I have no reason to wonder if what I say will make someone uncomfortable, or lead to a “joke” at my expense, or cause a co-worker to suddenly think I am attracted to them.  Our culture is set up for straight people like me to be ourselves with very little thought. But for some gay colleagues, a simple question about the weekend or a decision of how to decorate the workspace carries significant stress—how to act, who to trust, what to share. Read More...

Raucous West Virginia rallies notwithstanding, President Trump has thus far failed to deliver on his campaign promise to resuscitate the coal industry. This is mainly for lack of political will in his administration to address the climate-change elephant in the room.  Read More...

As we mark the tenth anniversary of the global financial crisis, there have been plenty of postmortems examining its causes, its consequences and whether the necessary lessons have been learnt. Read More...

Four years ago, Gap, the clothing giant, boldly announced it would begin garment production in Myanmar. Promising to apply “best practices” on human rights, a company spokesperson called Gap’s production agreement “a historic moment for Myanmar.” Today, the case for Gap’s continued presence in that country is much harder to justify. Read More...

Technology has advanced rapidly along several related fronts. In just the last few years, there have been dramatic improvements in robotics, sensors, and machine vision, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) can now perform better, per Stanford’s AI Index, than humans on multiple dimensions, including image recognition, speech recognition, translation, and strategy games such as Go, Poker and chess. Read More...

Before he died, Senator John McCain wrote a loving farewell statement to his fellow citizens of “the world’s greatest republic, a nation of ideals, not blood and soil.” Senator McCain also described our democracy as “325 million opinionated, vociferous individuals.” How can that many individuals bind themselves together to create a great nation? What special skills do we need to develop to compensate for our lack of shared ancestry? Read More...

The entry of cryptocurrencies into global finance as a decentralized transaction medium and asset class may offer a new channel for financial secrecy, and many already believe that illicit transactions are behind a large chunk of crypto. Read More...

President Donald Trump’s attack on Google has received a lot of attention over the past couple of days. But the outburst really is nothing new. It echoes a highly cynical conservative campaign to demonize Google, Twitter and Facebook as stealthy liberal agents seeking to suppress right-leaning views. Read More...

Blockchain is all the rage. We are constantly bombarded by reports of how it will change the world (e.g. Casey et al. 2018). While it may alter many aspects of our lives, our suspicion is that they will be in areas that we experience only indirectly. That is, blockchain technology mostly will change the implementation of invisible processes – what businesses think of as their back-office functions. Read More...

Just before the collapse of the US investment bank Lehman Brothers triggered a financial crisis that would engulf the world economy, the Commission on Growth and Development published an assessment of emerging-economy growth strategies, aimed at drawing lessons from previous research and experience. Over a decade later, many – if not most – of those lessons remain unheeded. Read More...

Last Friday, President Trump asked the SEC to examine the elimination of quarterly financial reports. The President mentioned an executive (apparently Indra Nooyi, outgoing CEO of PepsiCo (PEP)) who told him that eliminating quarterly reporting will enhance executives’ long-term orientation, thereby increasing investments and jobs. A panacea. I believe terminating quarterly reports is the right move, but for the wrong reasons. Read More...

Last week, President Donald Trump suggested in a tweet that companies could report results every six months instead of quarterly. "That would allow greater flexibility & save money. I have asked the SEC to study!" he tweeted. Quarterly reporting seems like a good thing — transparency ensures informed decision-making by investors. And critics of Trump's idea have cited concerns over a lack of transparency leading to increased investor risk. Read More...

This morning President Trump directed the Security and Exchange Commission to explore extending financial reporting deadlines from three months to six. In a morning tweet, he said this suggestion came from top business leaders who told him that this “would allow greater flexibility & save money.” Indeed. But at a time when public confidence in all institutions, including business, is declining, this is exactly the wrong direction for government to go. Read More...

Like many foreigners visiting the United States in the late 1990s and early 2000s, we were pleasantly surprised to discover that nearly everything — from laptops to Internet to airplane tickets — was cheaper. Where we grew up, in Mexico and France, it cost at least 30 percent more to fly or connect to the Internet. Read More...