Economics

Do something to fill the gap on your resume.

Twelve lessons on analyzing data, communicating information, and protecting your employees.

By pooling the resources of the poor and by sharing information, religious and financial institutions can work together to change inner-city economies.

Why should that be a surprise?

U.S. unemployment numbers came in just before Labor Day, and they are grim: 9.7 percent and rising. Small comfort that they were expected to be worse....

Scientists have a good sense of which family of viruses will cause the next pandemic.

“They gave us a whole can of soda” was how my octogenarian mother-in-law explained a recent experience when her plane was kept on the ground an extra hour for de-icing. Monica was not complaining; she was framing the delay as a positive. This veteran traveler knows that delays are inevitable. My mother-in-law’s attitude might serve […]

A country’s competitiveness, like a company’s, is not primarily a matter of sales: it is a matter of incomes, and incomes earned, not borrowed. To be competitive means to raise incomes as rapidly as competitors do and to make the investments necessary to keep up competitively in the future. From this perspective, U.S. competitiveness is […]

Executives who want to make their organizations better corporate citizens face many obstacles: If they undertake costly initiatives that their rivals...

The story of how one organization envisioned a future transformed.

They care about society at large.

For the last decade, the Gallup Organization has surveyed the people of China, as both consumers of goods and employees of the companies that produce those goods. The data provide a unique picture of changing consumer attitudes, market opportunities, and management challenges.

To the list of reasons to resent Wall Street, now add another: It’s a wet blanket on innovation. A new study by Mary Benner of the Wharton School (published this year in Organization Science) examines the way securities analysts research and report on incumbent firms in industries undergoing disruptive change. She finds that analysts tend […]

In many countries, diversified business groups substitute for the institutions that support effective markets in capital, labor, and goods and services. Their capacity for doing this must be strengthened through restructuring, not destroyed through dismantling.

There are many reasons for not working with jerks, as Bob Sutton has pointed out in his memorably-titled book The No Asshole Rule. But I think I’ve discovered another reason for not having them in your organization’s employ: they often make bad decisions. While all jerks don’t always make bad decisions, and non-jerks occasionally decide […]

The U.S. economy operates at only 18% of its digital potential.

Our forebears struggled, toiled, fought, and sweated for generations to create a future better, wealthier, stronger than their own. The gifts they handed down — democracy, markets, justice, opportunity, reason, equality, liberty — are the fundamental institutions — the building blocks — of enduring, authentic prosperity. So here’s a tiny hypothesis I’d like you to […]

Research on the Great Recession found that aggressive companies outperformed those that hunkered down.

It’s time to stop treating the situation as a short-term crisis.

It's hard to call yourself a green company if your cash assets are underwriting global warming.