Publications

2008
Working Paper

Cost of External Finance and Selection into Entrepreneurship

By: Ramana Nanda

This paper examines the extent to which the positive relationship between personal wealth and entry into entrepreneurship is due to financing constraints. I exploit a tax reform and use unique micro-data from Denmark to study how exogenous changes in the cost of... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Entrepreneurship; Cost; Financing and Loans; Personal Finance; Human Capital; Wealth; Denmark

March 2020 (Revised March 2022)
Case

Wachtell Lipton: Focused Excellence

By: Ashish Nanda and Margaret Cross

For years, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz—a small, New York City law firm—has consistently boasted the highest profits per partner and one of the highest “prestige” ratings among U.S.-based law firms. The firm has remained loyal to a distinctive strategy ever since its... View Details

Keywords: Strategy; Law; Mergers and Acquisitions; Legal Services Industry; New York (city, NY)

Article

What Do Private Equity Firms Say They Do?

By: Paul A. Gompers, Steven N. Kaplan and Vladimir Mukharlyamov

We survey 79 private equity investors with combined assets under management (AUM) of over $750 billion about their practices in firm valuation, capital structure, governance, and value creation. Investors rely primarily on internal rate of return (IRR) and multiples to... View Details

Keywords: Private Equity; Valuation; Capital Structure; Value Creation

Find at Harvard

30 Jan 2008
Working Paper Summaries

Cost of External Finance and Selection into Entrepreneurship

Keywords: by Ramana Nanda

01 Sep 2015
News

China Syndrome

10 Dec 2010
News

Not for Profits

2011
Working Paper

What Do Development Banks Do? Evidence from Brazil, 2002-2009

By: Sergio G. Lazzarini, Aldo Musacchio, Rodrigo Bandeira-de-Mello and Rosilene Marcon

While some authors view development banks as an important tool to alleviate capital constraints in scarce credit markets and unlock productive investments, others see those banks as conduits of cheap loans to politically connected firms that could obtain capital... View Details

Keywords: Cost of Capital; Credit; Equity; Banks and Banking; Financing and Loans; Investment; Government and Politics; Data and Data Sets; Resource Allocation; Markets; Performance; Banking Industry; Brazil

January 2010 (Revised March 2013)
Case

HubSpot: Lower Churn through Greater CHI

By: F. Asis Martinez Jerez, Thomas Steenburgh, Jill Avery and Lisa Brem

HubSpot, a web marketing startup is under pressure from VCs to rapidly acquire new customers and to maintain a low level of customer churn. In the case, students explore the drivers of customer churn and uncover opportunities to increase customer retention across the... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Customer Relationship Management; Customer Satisfaction; Customer Value and Value Chain; Forecasting and Prediction; Consumer Behavior; Happiness; Consulting Industry

Research Summary

Overview

By: Jill J. Avery

I love brands and have been managing them and studying them for 25 years, as a brand manager and as an academic researcher and teacher. My research program focuses on brand management and customer relationship management and centers on themes relating to the meaning of... View Details

Research Summary

IDENTITY

In his work on identity, Professor Malter investigates when and why high-status affiliations make organizations and individuals less appealing to their audiences. In a study of the venture capital industry, he finds that a venture capital firm is less likely to... View Details

August 2007 (Revised July 2008)
Case

HCL Technologies (A)

By: Linda A. Hill, Tarun Khanna and Emily Stecker

When Vineet Nayar became president of HCL Technologies, a global IT services business, in April 2005, he knew the company needed drastic change. Since its founding as a hardware company in the 1970s, HCL had grown into an enterprise with $3.7 billion in revenues and a... View Details

Keywords: Customer Relationship Management; Multinational Firms and Management; Employee Relationship Management; Leading Change; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Competition; Information Technology Industry; Service Industry; India

October 2011 (Revised June 2014)
Case

inge watertechnologies, GmbH

By: Ramana Nanda, Carin-Isabel Knoop and Markus Mittermaier

Using the financing history and exit choices of a German clean-tech startup as a lens, this case explores the reasons why venture-backed entrepreneurship is much lower in Germany than the US, despite a robust SME sector and large-corporate innovation in Germany. It... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurial Finance; Finance; Venture Capital; Negotiation; Entrepreneurship; Technology Industry; Germany

May 2012
Article

Global, Local, and Contagious Investor Sentiment

By: Malcolm Baker, Jeffrey Wurgler and Yu Yuan

We construct investor sentiment indices for six major stock markets and decompose them into one global and six local indices. In a validation test, we find that relative sentiment is correlated with the relative prices of dual-listed companies. Global sentiment is a... View Details

Keywords: Business and Shareholder Relations; Globalization; Stocks; Markets; Capital; Financial Services Industry

Find at Harvard

August 2023
Case

Beamery: Using Skills and AI to Modernize HR

By: Boris Groysberg, Alexis Lefort, Susan Pinckney and Carolina Bartunek

Unicorn human relationships startup Beamery evaluates it's growth versus depth strategy as its strategic partners and customers could become future competitors in a quickly changing AI based human resources and talent management industry View Details

John Deighton is The Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration Emeritus at Harvard Business School. He is an authority on consumer behavior and marketing, with a focus on digital and direct marketing. He teaches in the area of Big Data in Marketing,... View Details

Keywords: marketing industry; marketing industry; marketing industry; marketing industry; marketing industry; marketing industry; marketing industry; marketing industry; marketing industry; marketing industry; marketing industry; marketing industry; marketing industry; marketing industry; marketing industry; marketing industry

February 2009 (Revised March 2013)
Case

Messer Griesheim (A)

By: Josh Lerner, Ann-Kristin Achleitner, Eva Lutz and Kerry Herman

In 2001, Allianz Capital Partners and Goldman Sachs acquired a majority stake in Messer Griesheim, a European industrial gas concern held by Hoechst. The dealmakers faced several challenges, including delicate corporate governance issues due to partial family ownership... View Details

Keywords: Mergers and Acquisitions; Restructuring; Venture Capital; Private Equity; Corporate Governance; Family Ownership; Chemical Industry; Industrial Products Industry; Europe

Zhongming Jiang is a Ph.D. student in Marketing (Quantitative) at Harvard Business School. His methodological interests include Bayesian {nonparametrics, causal inference, deep learning}, and probabilistic machine learning. Substantively, he is interested... View Details

December 2009
Article

Catering Through Nominal Share Prices

By: Malcolm Baker, Robin Greenwood and Jeffrey Wurgler

We propose and test a catering theory of nominal stock prices. The theory predicts that when investors place higher valuation on low-price firms, managers will maintain share prices at lower levels, and vice-versa. Using measures of time-varying catering incentives... View Details

Keywords: Stocks; Stock Shares; Investment; Investment Return; Price; Theory; Valuation

Find at Harvard

2009
Working Paper

Labor Regulations and European Private Equity

By: Ant Bozkaya and William R. Kerr

European nations substitute between employment protection regulations and labor market expenditures (e.g., unemployment insurance benefits) for providing worker insurance. Employment regulations more directly tax firms making frequent labor adjustments than other labor... View Details

Keywords: Venture Capital; Private Equity; Insurance; Investment; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Taxation; Employment; Europe