Yale School of Management

Q: There’s tremendous attention on inflation these days. But the Federal Reserve and other central banks have been dealing with extraordinary circumstances for more than four years. Would you walk us through the challenges, the responses, and what we have learned, starting with the shutdown from the COVID pandemic? While “unprecedented” is a term that can be overused, when the pandemic hit in 2020, it was an unprecedented shock. It…

Teresa Chahine: Welcome back, everyone. I’m here with Peter Hagan, the Digital Health Director of Commonwealth Care Alliance, and he’s here to talk to us about his former role in Iora Health, which was one of the startups that really pioneered the value-based care model in public health. Thank you so much, Pete, for being here with us today. Peter Hagan: Thank you for having me. Teresa Chahine: You’re able…

“If you care about climate change, you have to care about buildings,” said Jessica Bailey, CEO of Nuveen Green Capital. Her work scaling a financing mechanism called C-PACE (Commercial Property-Assessed Clean Energy) has helped building owners fund over $7 billion in clean energy and efficiency projects. Yet, she added, “I think of what we do as stealth sustainability.” Since most developers are focused on the bottom line, “we had to…

Howie and Harlan are joined by Scott Berkowitz ’03, cardiologist and chief population health officer at Johns Hopkins Medicine, to discuss the necessity of moving from fee-for-service to value-based care delivery to improve outcomes for all. Harlan highlights the dangers of misinformation about Ivermectin. Howie reports on the potential conflicts of interest created by device manufacturers’ payments to cardiologists. Links: Johns Hopkins Medicine: Home Johns Hopkins Community Health Partnership “Association…

Since this season of the podcast is all about the HOW of learning through experience, I wanted to talk to Annie Murphy Paul who basically wrote the book on learning outside the brain. She’s the author of several books, and I love to talk with people after they have had a chance to learn through the experience of their book being out in the world. In this episode, we focus…

Q: Nanoracks was founded in 2009. What was it like to launch a space startup at that point? There were very few space startups and credibility was low. Nanoracks was one of the first, if not the first company, knocking on the door at NASA saying, “Hey, if you give us some room on the International Space Station (ISS), we'll figure out how to use it.” A lot of people…

(This opinion essay was originally published on Newsweek on March 29, 2024.) We represent a group of 25 Yale faculty who have just returned from a five-day visit to Israel. Our mission was to learn from and make meaningful academic connections with our Israeli counterparts. Much of what we learned and observed astounded us. The environment is challenging, yet the Israeli academic enterprise has proven breathtakingly resilient. Imagine operating a…

Howie and Harlan are joined by Atheendar Venkataramani, a physician, health economist, and director of the Perelman School of Medicine’s Opportunity for Health Lab, to discuss the powerful role of economic opportunity in population health outcomes. Harlan reports on two studies where treatments’ unexpected benefits leapt ahead of understanding why they work. Howie reflects on the business model of the pharma industry and the market reaction to anti-obesity drugs. Links:…

Q: What is the scale of the mental health need in the U.S.? It’s estimated that more than one in five adults live with a mental illness. And if you add addiction—substance use disorder—that number gets much larger. It’s also pretty alarming that 55% of adults with mental illness go untreated. That’s devastating for those individuals and their families and friends. There are impacts on productivity, employment, even lifespan, and…

Q: What project are you undertaking with your academic career? I study the economics of education. My goal is to understand how education shapes big-picture outcomes like inequality, upward mobility, and economic growth. I’m looking across educational levels from early childhood through college to think about the value of education both as instrumental to our economic lives and as an intrinsic good. I want to help provide evidence for which…

Howie and Harlan are joined by Kate McEvoy, executive director of the National Association of Medicaid Directors, to discuss the programs’ underappreciated advances in holistically addressing health, housing, and food security. Reflecting on the upcoming election, Harlan notes that facts matter, whether in medicine or politics. Howie reports on the dangers of glyoxylic acid in hair straightening products. Links: “Trump Leads Biden in Six of Seven Swing States, WSJ Poll…

People seem to really like their iPhones. What is the harm to consumers from the behavior that prompted the EU regulation and the Department of Justice lawsuit? The iPhone is indeed a great product. I have one myself. Perhaps the easiest way to explain it is to consider how we would all feel if Motorola had been able to prevent the innovation that became the iPhone 20 years ago and,…

This commentary originally appeared in Fortune. Having known the past six CEOs of Boeing personally across multiple corporate governance crises, my phone has been ringing off the hook since the abrupt announcement of a massive shakeup in Boeing’s leadership ranks, including the retirement of CEO Dave Calhoun at the end of the year, the replacement of Board Chair Larry Kellner, the immediate resignation of Boeing Commercial Airplanes CEO Stan Deal,…

Howie and Harlan are joined by Margo Harrison, an OB-GYN and femtech entrepreneur, to discuss how innovative solutions to women’s health problems offer deeper understanding and expanded choices. Harlan and Howie each offer a caveat emptor for lightly regulated, unproven supplements and treatments such as Prevagen and hydration spas. Links: “Prevagen Review: A Word of Caution” “Prevagen®: Analysis of Clinical Evidence and Its Designation as a ‘#1 Pharmacist Recommended Brand’”…

Jiwoong Shin, professor of marketing at Yale SOM, likes to keep in touch with his former students. They tell him about what’s going on in the world and give him ideas for new research. In December 2019, one of those former students, now a restaurateur in New York and San Francisco, came back to New Haven and met up with Shin for dinner. Shin asked how things were going. There…

As Disney’s closely watched proxy fight barrels toward the finish line with shareholders casting their votes on April 3, critics of CEO Bob Iger have launched a fuselage of attacks, criticizing Iger’s track record and his plans for turning around Disney. But amidst widespread interest from non-business audiences, these criticisms often drown out the facts and fail to see the whole story before them. Here are five persistent but false…

How prevalent are bots as the 2024 election nears? Today’s bots are much more sophisticated, capable of creating and posting original content that makes them seem convincingly real. This technological leap means that, in the current election cycle, bots have the potential to be far more persuasive and impactful than before. Bots have been a concern in major elections since 2016. Initially, they were relatively straightforward to identify, mainly serving…

This commentary originally appeared in Fortune. In the first few months following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, we documented how the voluntary exits of over 1,000+ global companies from Russia (that we helped catalyze), paired with government sanctions such as the G7 oil price cap (that we helped the U.S. Treasury design), had a crippling initial impact on the Russian economy—building on our research on how economic pressure…

Howie and Harlan are joined by Yale health economist Zack Cooper to discuss his work on surprise medical bills and the impact of high healthcare costs on households, wages, and the economy. Harlan reports on Hippocratic AI’s efforts to develop AI nurses. Howie looks at the global effort to eradicate tuberculosis. Links: “Hippocratic AI banks $53M backed by General Catalyst, a16z, Memorial Hermann, UHS and other health systems” “Polaris: A…

The wizardry of ChatGPT captured the world’s attention when it was released in 2022 and became the most successful product launch in history. Since then, AI companies and startups have attracted billions in new investments, and the technology has continued to dazzle. Consumer-facing AI programs can now compose love ballads—or fabricate realistic video of cowboys riding unicorns and shooting water pistols—from simple text prompts. There are uncountable reasons to be…

Revenue fraud—when a company artificially inflates its revenue to meet investors’ expectations—can wreak havoc on financial markets, which rely on accurate information to function properly. In recent years, scholars have attempted to improve fraud detection methods by using machine learning, statistics, and even vocal emotion analysis software, which analyzes the speech of corporate executives on earnings calls. Yale School of Management Professor X. Frank Zhang and two co-authors have a…

Economic inequality continues to widen—and not just between people, but between places, too. The United States, for example, has seen a regional divergence since the 1970s, when the country began transitioning away from heavy manufacturing and toward a service-based economy, resulting in dampened economic prospects and living standards throughout the Rust Belt. The widening chasm between richer and poorer regions has motivated policymakers in multiple countries to offer incentives, like…

Howie and Harlan are joined by Robert Alpern, a Yale nephrologist and the former dean of the Yale School of Medicine, to discuss the importance of a fiscal base for enabling a medical school to deliver top-quality training, research, and clinical care. Harlan asks whether widespread norovirus is a reason to call it quits on shaking hands. Howie reports on a study of the increased mortality among those with ADHD.…

In the spring of 2022, a team of economists and public health researchers led by Mushfiq Mobarak, Niccolò Meriggi, and Maarten Voors spent weeks bumping along rough, gullied roads in rural Sierra Leone. It was hot and humid, but at least it was the dry season: Sierra Leone has the highest annual precipitation in West Africa, and most roads are unpaved, so when the downpours come, the roads become mud-slathered,…

Howie and Harlan are joined by Robert Rohrbaugh, professor of psychiatry and deputy dean for professionalism and leadership at the Yale School of Medicine, to discuss his work training doctors in antiracist practices and ensuring the wellbeing of clinicians during the pandemic. Harlan reports on the problematic history of medical journals promoting eugenics; Howie highlights a cyberattack that has paralyzed Change Healthcare, the country’s largest payments processing hub. Links: Antiracist…

Harlan Krumholz: Welcome to Health & Veritas. I’m Harlan Krumholz. Howard Forman: And I’m Howie Forman. We’re physicians and professors at Yale University. We’re trying to get closer to the truth about health and healthcare. Harlan and I have intentionally set aside several episodes each year to cover a broader range of important news in the healthcare and health realm. And so I want to start off today with something…

With the new year comes our annual tradition of recognizing three CEOs for their accomplishments over the last 12 months—as well as three CEOs who are on the hot seat after a year of struggles. Such an effort at accountability can teach us a lot about the future, as glancing backward is often a valuable guide to the path forward. While there can be surprise technological and market disruptions, classical…

Sometimes, political reporters without a background in business journalism make egregious errors in their coverage of the business exodus from Vladimir Putin’s Russia—and even fall for the strongman’s Potemkin Village-like economic façade. A recent article, entitled “How Putin Turned a Western Boycott Into a Bonanza”, wrongly suggested that the historic business exits of over 1,000 multinational companies from Russia have somehow been a huge win for the Russian war effort,…

Should we hold accountable companies that fail to meet their climate commitments? There is important research by Professor Kelly Shue that shows in some cases, investing in “brown firms”—or firms that are transitioning to lower emissions in greenhouse gas-intense sectors—has a greater benefit to the environment than investing in firms that are already green with low emissions. So we need to be smart about which GHG emissions commitments of net-zero…

Today, the images and videos circulating, especially across social media, are offering a very poor representation of the truth of what happened on October 7 in Israel. This is partly due to the Israeli government’s understandable efforts to protect the privacy and dignity of the victims, and abstaining from publishing evidence of the atrocities committed to the public. At the same time, the content that is flooding social platforms now…

Q: What’s the state of the art market? Over the last decade, the size of the art market has maintained a relatively constant level, remaining close to the $60 billion mark. Although this seems like a large number, it significantly falls short when compared to FedEx’s revenue, which exceeded $90 billion last year. So all participants in the art world, including auction houses, galleries, and art advisors, collectively generate less…

Amid heightened fears of a wider conflict in the Middle East, our focus must turn to deterring and punishing terrorist aggressors in the region, led by Iran, instead of trying to appease the terrorists by making dangerous concessions. Oil represents the best leverage over Iran, even though it has been overlooked by media commentators, and strengthening sanctions on Iranian oil can help preserve peace. Iran is driving the Middle East…

The theory has held for decades: give people a choice and you’re also giving them an illusory sense of control. For example, a much-cited 1975 study found that if people are allowed to pick the numbers on a lottery ticket rather than having them randomly assigned, they’re more likely to think their ticket will win—even though every ticket carries the same odds. “We didn’t start our project questioning this assumption,”…

As computers evolved from room-sized contraptions wrangled by specialists to machines that displaced typewriters on more and more desks, the change was met with excitement, anxiety, hype, and skepticism. Workers feared being replaced by machines; managers weren’t sure, despite the eyewatering expense of equipping everyone with a computer, whether the devices actually made workers more productive. Today, businesses face a similar choice. A nascent, probably transformative technology is emerging. Generative…

Q: You are two of the co-authors of a paper, “The Bias Time Out: A Practical Tool for Advancing DEIB in the Healthcare Space” that proposes a real-time process for reducing errors and negative outcomes due to bias. How did you develop this tool? Dr. Cecelia Calhoun: Five of us came together as clinical and administrative healthcare leaders. We shared stories about our work in care delivery, hospital management, workforce…

Last week, three questions dominated the coverage of indefatigable Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s high-profile visit to the United Nations in New York and meetings with President Joe Biden and bipartisan legislators in Washington: How much longer will this war last? How will it end? And what are Ukraine’s prospects as a society afterward? Freshly back from a visit to Kyiv sponsored by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation’s Yalta European Strategy forum,…

As anyone who is planning to move to a new city or neighborhood with a school-aged child knows, not all public schools are created equal. Some have shinier athletic facilities or bigger classrooms or newer equipment in the science and computer labs, all indications to anxious parents that their children will receive a superior education, which will better equip them to prosper and succeed in life. New athletic fields and…