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,…
“We’ve had a change, perhaps a permanent change, in the usage of space,” said Yale SOM’s Andrew Metrick. Swipe card data show about half as many people coming into offices as pre-pandemic. “There ain’t no way we’re going to keep the same amount of commercial real estate if that stays steady,” he explained, adding that estimates have office building valuations down about 30%. Compared with home mortgages, commercial loans have…
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 three longtime advocates for Mideast peace, from both Democratic and Republican presidential administrations, we believe that a silver lining could eventually emerge from the shocking invasion of Israel by Hamas and the tragic slaughter of over 1,300 civilians. Despite Hamas’ intention to prevent wider Mideast peace from emerging from the Biden Administration’s effort to broker normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and Saudi’s mixed signals on their willingness to…
As Mark Twain might say, reports of the death of G-7 Russian oil price cap have been greatly exaggerated. Devised by the U.S. Treasury Department and adopted by all the G-7 and European Union countries, the novel oil price cap was designed following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to limit the price of Russian crude oil to $60 per barrel while simultaneously ensuring global market stability. Over the past several…
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…
Even in the best of times, a hospital emergency department (ED) is an environment of controlled chaos. Patients come in at irregular intervals with a wide range of symptoms, from a bloody finger to cardiac arrest. There’s only a limited number of rooms. Who gets to see the doctor first and who will have to wait, sometimes for hours? “The crowding in EDs is an increasing trend over the last…
Coming from a public health background myself, the intention of the class is to provide a framework for utilizing entrepreneurial pathways to achieve public health goals. My own public health training was largely about analyzing problems and less about envisioning, creating, and implementing solutions. I wanted public health students to have that training, as well as MBA students at the School of Management. They may not think of themselves as…
As the great illusionist Harry Houdini once said, “The secret of showmanship consists not of what you really do, but what the mystery-loving public thinks you do.” Entrepreneurial huckster Vivek Ramaswamy has graduated from being the court jester of corporate governance to now becoming a serious contender for the GOP presidential nomination as some 5% of primary Republican voters indicate they are entertained by his antics. As one of the…
Q: In 2012, you and Yvon Chouinard co-authored The Responsible Company: What We’ve Learned from Patagonia’s First 40 Years. Now, you have released The Future of the Responsible Company: What We’ve Learned from Patagonia’s First 50 Years. Why the new book? So much of what is going on in the world is heartbreaking and scary. But there’s also so much learning going on. We now have the potential to…
The Horatio Alger Myth has resurfaced in headlines this summer in political controversy that shows little insight into the true character behind this myth of American success. Alger was a scandalized failure whose recreated image was later manufactured by publicity seeking publishers in the 1920s several decades after his death. Is that really something partisans of either persuasion should celebrate? The failed writer Horatio Alger of the 19th century…
On average, women earn 79 cents on the dollar compared to men—a figure that has been repeated by economists and politicians for years. It has proven a simple way to underscore a persistent and complex problem in the United States. Although factually correct, the finding that women make less than 80% of what men do doesn’t tell the full story about gender in the workplace. Mushfiq Mobarak, professor of economics,…
The last time we talked about returning to the office, you suggested that we take this opportunity to think about the workplace—not just how to organize workers and cubicles, and whether we mask, and what the hybrid policy is, but to assess how our organization works, and how we‘re working together as a team. Now it’s 2023. Do you think that those conversations are still needed? Absolutely. For the most…
Why did the Chinese central bank cut rates? The modest monetary easing of mid-August—just 10 to 15 basis points off short-term repo rates —is a limited response to a Chinese economy that is under serious downward pressure. Most, including myself, were expecting sustained momentum in the economy in 2023 to be driven by a snapback from the COVID-related lockdowns of late 2022. While there was evidence of such a bounce…
In early 2020, as restrictions imposed to contain the coronavirus swept across the world, concerns about “lockdown fatigue” followed closely in their wake. As early as spring and early summer in the U.S., media commentators worried that lockdown policies were chafing, and that a critical mass of weary rule-breakers could render such policies ineffective. But were the fears about the diluting effects of lockdown fatigue warranted? After all, it was…