Publications
Publications
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(117,151)
- Faculty Publications (2,464)
- 2023
- Working Paper
ESG: From Process to Product
By: George Serafeim
ESG measurement, analysis, management, and communication is a process that the financial industry has turned into a product, resulting in many investment funds using the ESG label. This has caused confusion, generating demand for a framework that defines... View Details
- May 2023 (Revised November 2023)
- Case
Arcos Dorados: Decarbonizing McDonald’s in Latin America
By: George Serafeim, Michael W. Toffel, Jenyfeer Martinez Buitrago and Mariana Cal
This case describes the decarbonization strategy of Arcos Dorados—McDonald’s largest independent franchisee, operating in 20 countries and territories in Latin America and the Caribbean—and how the company measured its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, including those... View Details
Keywords: Environmental Accounting; Animal-Based Agribusiness; Plant-Based Agribusiness; Change Management; Forecasting and Prediction; Environmental Sustainability; Food; Growth Management; Supply Chain; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Strategy; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; Green Technology Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Latin America; North and Central America; South America
- May 2023 (Revised June 2023)
- Case
Harvard University and Urban Mining Industries: Decarbonizing the Supply Chain
By: Shirley Lu and Robert S. Kaplan
The case describes Harvard University’s consideration to decarbonize its supply chain by replacing cement with a low-carbon substitute called Pozzotive®. Developed and produced by Urban Mining Industries, Pozzotive® is a ground-glass material made with post-consumer... View Details
- 2023
- Article
Conduit Incentives: Eliciting Cooperation from Workers Outside of Managers' Control
By: Susanna Gallani
Can managers use monetary incentives to elicit cooperation from workers they cannot reward for their efforts? I study “conduit incentives,” an innovative incentive design, whereby managers influence bonus-ineligible workers’ effort by offering bonus-eligible employees... View Details
Keywords: Organizational Behavior Modification; Peer Monitoring; Persistence Of Performance Improvements; Crowding Out; Implicit Incentives; Compensation; Healthcare; Social Pressure; Image Motivation; Incentives; Motivation; Performance; Behavior; Motivation and Incentives; Compensation and Benefits; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Organizational Culture; Health Industry; California
- 2023
- Working Paper
Culture as a Signal: Evidence from a Natural Field Experiment
By: Wei Cai, Dennis Campbell and Jiehang Yu
The importance of culture as an informal management control system is increasingly acknowledged in academia. While prior research mainly focuses on the value of culture on internal stakeholders (e.g., employees), we examine whether culture serves as a credible signal... View Details
- May 2023
- Article
Decarbonizing Health Care: Engaging Leaders in Change
By: Vivian S. Lee, Kathy Gerwig, Emily Hough, Kedar Mate, Robert Biggio and Robert S. Kaplan
Health care leaders are often surprised to learn that their operations contribute
significantly to a warming climate. In addition to their roles as responders to and victims
of extreme weather events, health care organizations have an obligation to reduce... View Details
- May 2023
- Article
Do Internal Control Weaknesses Affect Firms' Demand for Financial Skills? Evidence from U.S. Job Postings
By: Janet Gao, Kenneth J. Merkley, Joseph Pacelli and Joseph H. Schroeder
Ineffective internal controls over financial reporting often relates to a lack of qualified personnel with sufficient accounting and technical expertise. In this study, we examine whether firms respond to internal control failures by increasing their demand for... View Details
- May 2023
- Article
Incentive Effects of Subjective Allocations of Rewards and Penalties
By: Wei Cai, Susanna Gallani and Jee-Eun Shin
We examine the incentive effects of subjectivity in allocating tournament-based rewards and punishments. We use data from a company where reward and punishment decisions are based on a combination of objective metrics and subjective performance assessments. Rankings... View Details
- April 2023 (Revised October 2023)
- Supplement
Driving Decarbonization at BMW – Instructor Spreadsheet Supplement
- April 2023 (Revised September 2023)
- Case
Apple's iPhone Revolution: Pioneering the Circular Economy
By: George Serafeim
When asked to identify an example of a circular economy business model that has generated billions in revenues for a company, ChatGPT, the famous chatbot that in 2022 rocked the world with its ability to perform a variety of tasks, immediately identified and... View Details
- April 2023
- Case
Strive Asset Management
By: Suraj Srinivasan, Lynn S. Paine and Aldo Sesia
Strive Asset Management, which launched in 2022, was actively targeting several leading U.S. companies in the upcoming 2023 proxy voting season to stop acquiescing to those large asset managers and other institutional shareholders who were pressing those companies to... View Details
- April 2023 (Revised October 2024)
- Teaching Note
Dwight D. Eisenhower: Changing the World
By: Robert Simons and Shirley Sun
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 121-047. View Details
- April 2023 (Revised July 2023)
- Case
Fermenting Accounting Problems at Vermont Kombucha Corp.
By: Tatiana Sandino and Marshal Herrmann
Founded in 2005, Vermont Kombucha Corp. (V-Ko) was an early mover in the fledgling U.S. market for kombucha, a drink brewed for its health benefits. Early on, the company captured more than 90% of market share. Under the leadership of its founder and CEO, Joe Williams,... View Details
- April 3, 2023
- Article
Getting a Clearer View of Your Company’s Carbon Footprint
By: Robert S. Kaplan, Karthik Ramanna and Stefan Reichelstein
E-liability accounting is a new technique that will help customers factor in a product’s environmental footprint into their purchasing decisions and will help create a competition dynamic that leads to reduced carbon outputs. This article describes two pilot studies—by... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Corporate Website-based Measures of Firms' Value Drivers
By: Wei Cai, Dennis Campbell and Patrick Ferguson
We develop and validate new text-based measures of firms’ financial and non-financial value drivers. Using the Wayback Machine to access public US firms’ archived websites from 1995-2020, we scrape text from corporate homepages. We use Kaplan and Norton’s (1992)... View Details
- Spring 2023
- Article
Incentive Contract Design and Employee-Initiated Innovation: Evidence from the Field
By: Wei Cai, Susanna Gallani and Jee-Eun Shin
This study examines how the design of incentive contracts for tasks defined as workers’ official responsibilities (i.e., standard tasks) influences workers’ propensity to engage in employee-initiated innovation (EII). EII corresponds to innovation activities that are... View Details
- April 2023
- Article
The Stock Market Valuation of Human Capital Creation
By: Ethan Rouen and Matthias Regier
We develop a measure of firm-year-specific human capital investment from publicly disclosed personnel expenses (PE) and examine the stock market valuation of this investment. Measuring the future value of PE (PEFV) based on the relation between... View Details
- March 2023
- Background Note
A Primer on OKRs
By: Suraj Srinivasan and Li-Kuan (Jason) Ni
The OKR framework is a popular goal-setting and strategy execution tool that uses goal setting through “Objectives” and measuring performance using “Key Results” on a periodic basis to measure and drive performance. The OKR framework has been adopted and practiced at... View Details
Keywords: Business Organization; Talent and Talent Management; Framework; Corporate Governance; Goals and Objectives; Growth and Development; Growth and Development Strategy; Growth Management; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Management Practices and Processes; Management Skills; Management Systems; Measurement and Metrics; Outcome or Result; Performance Effectiveness; Performance Evaluation; Performance Expectations; Performance Productivity; Performance Efficiency
- March 2023
- Case
Ownership Works: Scaling a Profitable Social Mission
By: Ethan Rouen, Dennis Campbell and Andrew Robinson
Pete Stavros was on a high after his latest experiment with employee ownership. As the head of industrial investments for KKR, Stavros orchestrated the sale of CHI Overhead Doors, which turned into KKR’s best investment in more than two decades and created $360 million... View Details