Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,832)
- Faculty Publications (266)
- January 2013 (Revised October 2014)
- Case
Barclays and the LIBOR Scandal
By: Clayton S. Rose and Aldo Sesia
In June of 2012, Barclays plc admitted that it had manipulated LIBOR—a benchmark interest rate that was fundamental to the operation of international financial markets and that was the basis for trillions of dollars of financial transactions. Between 2005 and 2009... View Details
- 2013
- Chapter
Behavioral Corporate Finance: A Current Survey
By: Malcolm Baker and Jeffrey Wurgler
We survey the theory and evidence of behavioral corporate finance, which generally takes one of two approaches. The market timing and catering approach views managerial financing and investment decisions as rational managerial responses to securities mispricing. The... View Details
- 2013
- Chapter
Capturing History: The Case of the Federal Radio Commission in 1927
By: David Moss and Jonathan Lackow
In the study of regulation (and political economy more generally), there is a danger that historical inferences from theory may infect historical tests of theory. It is imperative, therefore, that historical tests always involve a vigorous search not only for... View Details
- Article
On Derivatives Markets and Social Welfare: A Theory of Empty Voting and Hidden Ownership
By: Jordan M. Barry, John William Hatfield and Scott Duke Kominers
In the past twenty-five years, derivatives markets have grown exponentially. Large, modern derivatives markets increasingly enable investors to hold economic interests in corporations without owning voting rights, and vice versa. This leads to both empty... View Details
- 2012
- Article
A Field Study on the Acceptance and Use of a New Accounting System
By: V.G. Narayanan, Ranjani Krishnan and Jamshed J. Mistry
This study examines the attitudes, use, and acceptance of a new accounting system in a pharmaceutical corporation that switched from an Activity Based Costing System to the Theory of Constraints System (TOC). Using structuration theory as a framework, we posit that... View Details
- November 2012
- Article
The Organization of Firms Across Countries
By: Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
We argue that social capital as proxied by trust increases aggregate productivity by affecting the organization of firms. To do this we collect new data on the decentralization of investment, hiring, production, and sales decisions from Corporate Headquarters to local... View Details
Keywords: Decentralization; Social Capital; Theory Of The Firm; Firm Objectives, Organization, And Behavior; Business Economics; Management Of Technological Innovation And R＆D; Technological Change: Choices And Consequences; Diffusion Processes; Organizational Structure; Performance Productivity; Trust; Technology Adoption; Multinational Firms and Management
- 2012
- Working Paper
Can Implicit Regulation Change Financial Market Behavior? Evidence from Spitzer's Attack on Market Timers
This paper explores a natural experiment setup from the 2003-2004 mutual fund scandals to evaluate the effectiveness of implicit regulation on financial markets behavior. On average, buy-and-hold investors lost 218 basis points annually from 1998 to 2002 to market... View Details
- September 2012
- Article
The Bedside Manner of Homo Economicus: How and Why Priming an Economic Schema Reduces Compassion
By: Andrew Molinsky, Adam M. Grant and Joshua D. Margolis
We investigate how, why and when activating economic schemas reduces the compassion that individuals extend to others in need when delivering bad news. Across three experiments, we show that unobtrusively priming economic schemas decreases the compassion that... View Details
- Article
Regulation and UK Retailing Productivity: Evidence from Microdata
By: Jonathan Haskel and Raffaella Sadun
We explore the effects of planning regulation on the UK retail sector between 1997 and 2003 using micro-data from the UK census. We document a shift to smaller shops following a 1996 regulatory change that increased the costs of opening large stores. Our analysis... View Details
- June 2012 (Revised July 2013)
- Exercise
Competition Simulator Exercise: Instructions
In the Competition Simulator Exercise, students explore through trial and error some important economic foundations of competitive strategy and managerial economics. In particular, the nine simulator exercises let students explore horizontal differentiation with and... View Details
- February 2012
- Article
Management Practices across Firms and Countries
By: Nicholas Bloom, Christos Genakos, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
For the last decade we have been using double-blind survey techniques and randomized sampling to construct management data on over 10,000 organizations across 20 countries. On average, we find that in manufacturing American, Japanese, and German firms are the best... View Details
Keywords: Management Practices and Processes; Competency and Skills; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Organizations; Developing Countries and Economies; Economic Sectors; Performance; Business and Shareholder Relations; Private Equity; Multinational Firms and Management; United States; Germany; Japan; China; India
- 2012
- Book
The Rise of the Modern Firm
By: Geoffrey Jones and Walter A. Friedman
This authoritative volume focuses on the rise of modern firms, from their early history to the present day. It considers the role of laws and contracts in shaping the growth and influence of business enterprises. It presents entrepreneurs, executives and the firms they... View Details
- 2012
- Chapter
Lessons for the Financial Sector from 'Preventing Regulatory Capture: Special Interest Influence, and How to Limit It'
By: Daniel Carpenter, David Moss and Melanie Wachtell Stinnett
In the wake of the global financial crisis of 2007–09, regulatory capture has
become at once a diagnosis and a source of discomfort. The word “capture” has been used by dozens upon dozens of authors—ranging from
pundits and bloggers to journalists and leading... View Details
- 2011
- Working Paper
Management Practices Across Firms and Countries
By: Nicholas Bloom, Christos Genakos, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
For the last decade we have been using double-blind survey techniques and randomized sampling to construct management data on over 10,000 organizations across 20 countries. On average, we find that in manufacturing, American, Japanese, and German firms are the best... View Details
- Article
Stability and Competitive Equilibrium in Matching Markets with Transfers
By: John William Hatfield and Scott Duke Kominers
This note surveys recent work in generalized matching theory, focusing on trading networks with transferable utility. In trading networks with a finite set of contractual opportunities, the substitutability of agents’ preferences is essential for the guaranteed... View Details
Keywords: Matching; Networks; Joint Ventures; Stability; Competitive Equilibrium; Core; Efficiency; Economics; Theory
- August 2011 (Revised October 2014)
- Case
High Wire Act: Credit Suisse and Contingent Capital (A)
By: Clayton S. Rose and Aldo Sesia
Late in 2010, Credit Suisse CEO Brady Dougan and his team closed in on the decision of whether or not to issue contingent capital, which Swiss regulators would require by 2019. There were a number of substantial issues facing Dougan and his team, including whether... View Details
- 2011
- Chapter
The Economics of Housing Finance Reform
By: David S. Scharfstein and Adi Sunderam
This paper analyzes the two leading types of proposals for reform of the housing finance system: (i) broad-based, explicit, priced government guarantees of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and (ii) privatization. Both proposals have drawbacks. Properly-priced... View Details
- 9 May 2011 - 11 May 2011
- Conference Presentation
How Firms Respond to Mandatory Information Disclosure
By: Anil Doshi, Michael Toffel and Glen W. S. Dowell
When new institutional pressures arise, which organizations are particularly likely to resist or
acquiesce? When subjected to new information disclosure mandates, an increasingly popular form
of market-based government regulation, which types of organizations are... View Details
- 2011
- Working Paper
The Institutional Logic of Great Global Firms
Theories of the firm have been dominated by a legacy of ideas from early industrialization that pose zero-sum opposition between capital and labor (or capital and nearly everything else), differentiating the economy from society and often posing irreconcilable... View Details
- January 2011 (Revised April 2011)
- Case
CME Group
By: Forest L. Reinhardt and James Weber
The case describes CME Group, the world's largest commodities exchange, futures and options on futures contracts, history, regulation, and the strategic choices the company faced. CME Group was formed from the oldest and most well-known exchanges in the world. Traders... View Details