Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,156)
- Faculty Publications (476)
- February 2011 (Revised January 2017)
- Case
Countrywide plc
By: Stuart C. Gilson and Sarah L. Abbott
One of the world's leading investors in distressed companies, Oaktree Capital Management, is contemplating a "loan to own" investment in the debt of Countrywide plc, a financially troubled residential real estate agent based in the U.K. Only sixteen months earlier,... View Details
- February 2011 (Revised December 2022)
- Supplement
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
By: Stuart C. Gilson and Sarah Abbott
One of the leading publishers of textbooks and other educational materials for the U.S. K-12 educational instruction market has suffered a dramatic decline in sales and profits in the wake of the 2008-2009 financial market crisis and economic recession, and it now... View Details
- January 2011 (Revised July 2019)
- Case
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
By: Stuart C. Gilson and Sarah L. Abbott
One of the leading publishers of textbooks and other educational materials for the U.S. K-12 educational instruction market has suffered a dramatic decline in sales and profits in the wake of the 2008-2009 financial market crisis and economic recession, and is now... View Details
- 2012
- Working Paper
Issuer Quality and Corporate Bond Returns
By: Robin Greenwood and Samuel G. Hanson
We show that the credit quality of corporate debt issuers deteriorates during credit booms, and that this deterioration forecasts low excess returns to corporate bondholders. The key insight is that changes in the pricing of credit risk disproportionately affect the... View Details
- December 2010 (Revised March 2011)
- Case
The Euro in Crisis: Decision Time at the European Central Bank
By: J. Gunnar Trumbull, Dante Roscini and Diane Choi
This case traces the origins and evolution of the European Central Bank, with attention to its 2010 decision concerning the purchase of Greek sovereign debt. View Details
- December 2010 (Revised June 2018)
- Case
The Pecora Hearings
By: David Moss, Cole Bolton and Eugene Kintgen
In 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, the Senate Banking Committee began a much-publicized investigation of the nation's financial sector. The hearings, which came to be known as the Pecora hearings after the Banking Committee's lead counsel Ferdinand Pecora,... View Details
- December 2010
- Case
Financing Higher Education in Australia
By: David A. Moss and Stephanie Lo
Even before Australian lawmakers abolished university tuition in 1973, students in Australia had long benefited from low tuition and large government subsidies. By the early 1980s, however, the nation's universities faced growing budget challenges and an apparent... View Details
- 2010
- Working Paper
A Brief Postwar History of U.S. Consumer Finance
By: Andrea Ryan, Gunnar Trumbull and Peter Tufano
This article describes the consumer finance sector in the US since World War II. We first define the sector in terms of the functions delivered by firms (payments, savings/investing, borrowing, managing risk, and providing advice.) We provide time series evidence on... View Details
- December 2010
- Article
Nominal versus Indexed Debt: A Quantitative Horse Race
By: Laura Alfaro and Fabio Kanczuk
The main arguments in favor of and against nominal and indexed debt are the incentive to default through inflation versus hedging against unforeseen shocks. We model and calibrate these arguments to assess their quantitative importance. We use a dynamic equilibrium... View Details
- 2010
- Working Paper
Regulating for Legitimacy: Consumer Credit Access in France and America
Theories of legitimate regulation have emphasized the role of governments either in fixing market failures to promote greater efficiency or in restricting the efficient functioning of markets in order to pursue public welfare goals. In either case, features of markets... View Details
- October 2010 (Revised January 2011)
- Case
Charter Communications Bankruptcy
By: Paul A. Gompers and Emily Weisburst
Charter Communications' bankruptcy presents an opportunity for some of its creditors to convert their debt holdings into equity. A mutual fund manager must determine how to maximize his debt investment in Charter given the restructuring and decide whether to... View Details
- September 2010 (Revised December 2010)
- Case
Santander Consumer Finance
By: J. Gunnar Trumbull, Elena Corsi and Andrew Barron
A Spanish company has to decide if they should expand into the fragmented European consumer finance market and has to make important organizational strategy decisions in the midst of the world economic downturn that followed the 2007 U.S. credit crunch. Since 2002, the... View Details
- September 2010
- Article
Bank Lending During the Financial Crisis of 2008
This paper documents that new loans to large borrowers fell by 47% during the peak period of the financial crisis (fourth quarter of 2008) relative to the prior quarter and by 79% relative to the peak of the credit boom (second quarter of 2007). New lending for real... View Details
- 2010
- Working Paper
Crashes and Collateralized Lending
By: Jakub W. Jurek and Erik Stafford
This paper develops a parsimonious static model for characterizing financing terms in collateralized lending markets. We characterize the systematic risk exposures for a variety of securities and develop a simple indifference-pricing framework to value the systematic... View Details
- 2010
- Other Unpublished Work
International Capital Allocation, Sovereign Borrowing, and Growth
By: Laura Alfaro, Sebnem Kalemli-Ozcan and Vadym Volosovych
The key in the investigation of "where" and "why" capital flows, relative to the neoclassical benchmark, is how we measure these flows. The macro literature has been using three main yardsticks: the current account balance, returns to capital, and the volume of net... View Details
- fall 2010
- Article
Lawsuits and Empire: On the Enforcement of Sovereign Debt in Latin America
By: Faisal Z. Ahmed, Laura Alfaro and Noel Maurer
The re-occurring phenomenon of sovereign default has prompted an enormous theoretical and empirical literature. Most of this research has focused on why countries ever chose to pay their debts (or why private creditors ever expected repayment). The problem originates... View Details
- August 2010 (Revised September 2010)
- Case
Paradise Travel Advisory Service
By: Paul W. Marshall, Charles Anthony Miller and Collins Pettus Ward
New managers in a troubled company are faced with developing and implementing a plan to increase revenue in a travel service business. View Details
- 2011
- Working Paper
Cyclicality of Credit Supply: Firm Level Evidence
By: Bo Becker and Victoria Ivashina
Theory predicts that there is a close link between bank credit supply and the evolution of the business cycle. Yet fluctuations in bank-loan supply have been hard to quantify in the time-series. While loan issuance falls in recessions, it is not clear if this is due to... View Details
- June 2010 (Revised November 2013)
- Case
Momentive Performance Materials, Inc.
By: Victoria Ivashina and David Scharfstein
After nearly violating its loan covenants in 2009, Momentive Performance Materials, backed by its financial sponsor Apollo Global Management, took a variety of actions to restructure its debt. The restructuring steps included an open market repurchase of publicly held... View Details