Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(5,027)
- Faculty Publications (871)
- 2023
- Working Paper
The Market for CEOs: Evidence from Private Equity
By: Paul A. Gompers, Steven N. Kaplan and Vladimir Mukharlyamov
Most research on the CEO labor market studies public company CEOs while largely ignoring CEOs in private equity (PE) funded companies. We fill this gap by studying the market for CEOs among U.S. companies purchased by PE firms in large leveraged buyout transactions.... View Details
- Working Paper
Diversification as an Adaptive Learning Process: An Empirical Study of General-Purpose and Market-Specific Technological Know-How in New Market Entry
By: Dominika Kinga Randle and Gary P. Pisano
An enduring trait of modern corporations is their propensity to diversify into multiple lines of business. Penrosian theories conceptualize diversification as a strategy to exploit a firm’s fungible, yet “untradeable,” resources and point to redeployment of... View Details
- December 2022
- Article
I Don't 'Recall': The Decision to Delay Innovation Launch to Avoid Costly Product Failure
By: Byungyeon Kim, Oded Koenigsberg and Elie Ofek
Innovations embody novel features or cutting-edge components aimed at delivering desired customer benefits.
Oftentimes, however, we observe the need to recall new products shortly after their introduction. Indeed, a firm
may rush an innovation to market in an attempt... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
Regulatory Incentives for Innovation: The FDA's Breakthrough Therapy Designation
By: Amitabh Chandra, Jennifer Kao, Kathleen Miller and Ariel D. Stern
Regulators of new products confront a tradeoff between speeding a new product to market and collecting additional product quality information. The FDA’s Breakthrough Therapy Designation (BTD) provides an opportunity to understand if a regulator can use new policy to... View Details
- December 2022 (Revised August 2023)
- Case
Ribbit Capital and the Gauntlet Investment Opportunity
By: Shai Bernstein and Allison M. Ciechanover
Ten-year-old, Palo Alto-based Ribbit Capital is best-known for its global investments in fintech. The firm was also an early advocate of crypto and blockchain, having invested in more than two dozen startups in the space in the past decade. In the Spring of 2022,... View Details
- November 2022 (Revised March 2023)
- Case
OneSmart
By: Nien-he Hsieh, Meg Rithmire and Shu Lin
At the end of 2021, Xi “Steve” Zhang was facing an existential crisis for himself and his business. OneSmart was a premium educational company founded in 2008 offering K-12 afterschool tutoring for students nationwide under a number of brands. The company was founded... View Details
- November 2022
- Case
Ajax Health: A New Model for Medical Technology Innovation
By: Regina E. Herzlinger and Ben Creo
This case teaches key success factors for both startup and established MedTech firms. It examines how to structure a firm to maximize innovation and financial returns with organizational structures that better align the incentives for the different skill sets... View Details
- November 2022
- Article
A Language-Based Method for Assessing Symbolic Boundary Maintenance between Social Groups
By: Anjali M. Bhatt, Amir Goldberg and Sameer B. Srivastava
When the social boundaries between groups are breached, the tendency for people to erect and maintain symbolic boundaries intensifies. Drawing on extant perspectives on boundary maintenance, we distinguish between two strategies that people pursue in maintaining... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Sharing Models to Interpret Data
By: Joshua Schwartzstein and Adi Sunderam
To understand new data, we share models or interpretations with others. This paper studies such exchanges of models in a community. The key assumption is that people adopt the interpretation in their community that best explains the data, given their prior beliefs. An... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
The Evolution of ESG Reports and the Role of Voluntary Standards
By: Ethan Rouen, Kunal Sachdeva and Aaron Yoon
We examine the evolution of ESG reports of S&P 500 firms from 2010 to 2021. The
percentage of firms releasing these voluntary disclosures increased from 35% to 86%
during this period, although the length of these documents experienced more modest
growth. Using a... View Details
- October 2022
- Case
Colette Phillips and GetKonnected!: Creating Inclusive Ecosystems
By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Amy Chiu and Joyce Kim
Colette Phillips’ marketing firm had just won the City of Boston’s 2nd largest contract in history to a Black-owned company. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Get Konnected!, the networking organization for people of color that she founded 15 years earlier and led to... View Details
Keywords: Diversity; Ecosystem; Inclusion; People Of Color; Network; Racial Bias; Gender Bias; Entrepreneurial Ecosystem; Entrepreneur; Change; Change Barriers; Change Leadership; Community; Innovation; Pandemic; Impact; Systemic Racism; Minority-owned Businesses; Social and Collaborative Networks; Equity; Race; Small Business; Prejudice and Bias; Boston
- 2024
- Working Paper
You've Got Mail! The Late 19th-Century U.S. Postal Service Expansion, Firm Creation, and Firm Performance
By: Astrid Marinoni and Maria P. Roche
This paper examines the impact of the expansion of the US Postal Service in the late 19th century
on firm creation and performance. Utilizing newly digitized archival data on historic business establishments,
post office locations, and road networks in California,... View Details
- October 2022 (Revised September 2024)
- Case
mPharma: Scaling Access to Affordable Primary Care in Africa
By: Regina E. Herzlinger and Ben Creo
mPharma hopes to scale up to create the largest pan-African healthcare company ever to provide much-needed primary care in retail pharmacies; a reliable, fairly priced supply of drugs; and micro-insurance for drugs. They must prioritize launching a telemedicine... View Details
Keywords: Africa; Pharmaceutical Companies; Pharmacy Benefit Manager; Health Care; Health Care And Treatment; Health Care Costs; Health Care Delivery; Health Care Entrepreneurship; Telehealth; Health Equity; Corporate Strategy; Social Entrepreneurship; Equity; Growth and Development Strategy; Expansion; Product Launch; Customer Value and Value Chain; Social Enterprise; Multinational Firms and Management; Pharmaceutical Industry; Health Industry; Africa
- 2022
- Working Paper
Buy Now, Pay Later Credit: User Characteristics and Effects on Spending Patterns
By: Marco Di Maggio, Justin Katz and Emily Williams
Firms offering "buy now, pay later" (BNPL) point-of-sale installment loans with minimal underwriting and low interest have captured a growing fraction of the market for short-term unsecured consumer credit. We provide a detailed look into the US BNPL market by... View Details
- 2022
- White Paper
The American Opportunity Index: A Corporate Scorecard of Worker Advancement
By: Matt Sigelman, Joseph Fuller, Nik Dawson and Gad Levanon
The American Opportunity Index: A Corporate Scorecard of Worker Advancement is a new effort to give companies and other stakeholders a set of robust tools that measure how well major employers are doing in fostering economic mobility for workers and how they could do... View Details
- September 2022
- Article
Experimentation and Start-up Performance: Evidence from A/B Testing
By: Rembrand Koning, Sharique Hasan and Aaron Chatterji
Recent scholarship has argued that experimentation should be the organizing principle for entrepreneurial strategy. Experimentation leads to organizational learning, which drives improvements in firm performance. We investigate this proposition by exploiting the... View Details
- August 2022 (Revised October 2023)
- Case
Bajaj Finance: Building an Omnipresent Financial Services Firm
By: Das Narayandas and Rachna Tahilyani
Bajaj Finance, India’s largest consumer finance firm with $20.9 billion of assets across 50.5 million customers, is on a journey to transform itself from a traditional firm that sells loans and other financial products through brick-and-mortar outlets to an omnipresent... View Details
- Article
Financing Constraints, Home Equity and Selection into Entrepreneurship
By: Thais Laerkholm Jensen, Søren Leth-Petersen and Ramana Nanda
We exploit a mortgage reform that differentially unlocked home equity across the Danish population and study how this impacted selection into entrepreneurship. We find that increased entry was concentrated among entrepreneurs whose firms were founded in industries... View Details
- Article
When the Local Newspaper Leaves Town: The Effects of Local Newspaper Closures on Corporate Misconduct
By: Jonas Heese, Gerardo Pérez Cavazos and Caspar David Peter
We examine whether the local press is an effective monitor of corporate misconduct. Specifically, we study the effects of local newspaper closures on violations by local facilities of publicly listed firms. After a local newspaper closure, local facilities increase... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Automating Short-Term Payroll Savings: Evidence from Two Large U.K. Experiments
By: Sarah Holmes Berk, James J. Choi, Jay Garg, John Beshears and David Laibson
Automatic enrollment is often used to increase retirement savings. What are the effects of using it (or, alternatively, requiring an active enrollment choice) to increase short-term savings? We evaluate two experiments in the U.K. at employers that enable workers to... View Details