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Publications
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- July 2025
- Case
Microsoft’s Performance Across Three CEOs
By: George Serafeim
This case traces Microsoft’s evolution from its founding through 2024. Students analyze how changes in operating segments both reflected and shaped Microsoft’s strategy, culture, and financial communication. The case provides rich quantitative exhibits (segment... View Details
Keywords: Financial Accounting; Financial Statement Analysis; Disclosure; Disclosure Strategy; Disclosure Tone; Organizational Transformations; Transformation; AI; Digital; Organizational Change; Accounting; Financial Statements; Strategy; Organizational Structure; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Information Technology Industry; Information Technology Industry; United States
- 2025
- Working Paper
Heterogeneous Beliefs and Stock Market Fluctuations
By: Odhrain McCarthy and Sebastian Hillenbrand
This paper examines the role of heterogeneous investor beliefs in explaining stock market puzzles. Using survey data, we show that individual investors and investment professionals, such as equity analysts and strategists, form distinct beliefs. These groups rely on... View Details
- June 2025
- Case
Accounting for OpenAI at Microsoft
By: Jonas Heese, Joseph Pacelli, Nicole Zelazko and Michael Norris
In early 2025, Microsoft was evaluating the impact of its $14 billion investment in OpenAI. As OpenAI’s computing needs expanded, Microsoft positioned Azure as the exclusive provider for training and inference of their large language models. Despite the scale of the... View Details
Keywords: Accounting; Financial Reporting; Revenue Recognition; Corporate Finance; Capital; Investment; Revenue; AI and Machine Learning; Valuation; Governance; Information Technology Industry; Information Technology Industry; Information Technology Industry; Information Technology Industry; United States
- June 2025
- Article
Integral Outside: The Financial Curb Market, the Electric Telegraph, and the Politics of Pricing in Second Empire France
Financial markets in nineteenth-century France were far more complex than an analysis of the official Bourse or its state-authorized brokers would suggest. Most financial transactions occurred on an illegal yet tacitly tolerated curb market called the coulisse, which... View Details
- March 2025 (Revised April 2025)
- Case
Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News
The case examines the Dominion Voting Systems and Fox News defamation settlement based upon statements made on air in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. View Details
Keywords: (General) Management; Business Earnings; Financial Statements; Change Management; Disruption; Volatility; Transition; Crime and Corruption; Cost vs Benefits; Decision Making; Decision Choices and Conditions; Decisions; Demographics; Ethics; Values and Beliefs; Corporate Finance; Cost; Governance; Governance Compliance; Governance Controls; Policy; Political Elections; Business History; Information; Law; Legal Liability; Laws and Statutes; Management; Marketing; Advertising; Media; Performance; Problems and Challenges; Society; Public Opinion; Social Issues; Media and Broadcasting Industry; United States
- 2025
- Working Paper
Blockchain Adoption and Audit Quality
By: Mei Luo, Daniel Rabetti and Shuangchen Yu
This study examines the impact of blockchain adoption in the corporate setting. Specifically, we provide comprehensive empirical support to recent theory (Cao, Cong, and Young, 2024) proposing that blockchain adoption positively affects endogenous audit quality and... View Details
- February 2025
- Article
Improving Customer Compatibility with Tradeoff Transparency
By: Ryan W. Buell and MoonSoo Choi
Through a large-scale field experiment with 393,036 customers considering opening a credit card account with a nationwide retail bank, we investigate how providing transparency into an offering’s tradeoffs affects subsequent rates of customer acquisition and long-run... View Details
- January 2025
- Case
AI Meets VC: The Data-Driven Revolution at Quantum Light Capital
By: Lauren Cohen, Grace Headinger and Sophia Pan
Ilya Kondrashov, CEO of Quantum Light Capital, was driven to harness AI for identifying high-potential scale-ups. Collaborating with Nik Storonsky, founder of Revolut, the duo observed that most venture capital (VC) decisions were heavily influenced by emotion, with... View Details
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence; Business Finance; Data Analysis; Angel Investors; Cognitive Biases; Scale; Venture Capital; Investment; Business Model; Forecasting and Prediction; Technological Innovation; Innovation Strategy; Behavior; Cognition and Thinking; Public Opinion; Private Sector; Business Strategy; Competitive Advantage; Business Earnings; Behavioral Finance; AI and Machine Learning; Analytics and Data Science; Business Startups; Financial Services Industry; London; United Kingdom
- January 2025
- Case
Cyber Oversight: SolarWinds Board of Directors
By: Lynn S. Paine
In 2020, just two years after its IPO, information technology company SolarWinds discovered that it was the victim of an attack on its information systems by Russian hackers. The incident, known as the Sunburst attack, was costly for the company, and certain... View Details
- 2025
- Article
Statistical Inference for Heterogeneous Treatment Effects Discovered by Generic Machine Learning in Randomized Experiments
By: Kosuke Imai and Michael Lingzhi Li
Researchers are increasingly turning to machine learning (ML) algorithms to investigate causal heterogeneity in randomized experiments. Despite their promise, ML algorithms may fail to accurately ascertain heterogeneous treatment effects under practical settings with... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Scaling Core Earnings Measurement with Large Language Models
By: Matthew Shaffer and Charles CY Wang
We study the application of large language models (LLMs) to the estimation of core earnings, i.e., a firm's persistent profitability from its core business activities. This construct is central to investors' assessments of economic performance and valuations. However,... View Details
- September 2024 (Revised March 2025)
- Supplement
Wemade: (Re)Establishing Trust in Blockchain Games (B)
By: Jung Koo Kang, Charles C.Y. Wang, David Allen and Kwangmoon So
This supplement reviews Wemade's efforts to rebuild confidence in its business after its WEMIX coin was delisted from the major South Korean cryptocurrency exchanges on December 8, 2022. It outlines Wemade's strategy of transparency, which included partnerships with... View Details
- September 2024
- Exercise
Assessing the Value of Unifying and De-Duplicating Customer Data
By: Elie Ofek and Hema Yoganarasimhan
This exercise provides an opportunity for students to gain hands on experience with assessing the value of unifying various customer databases that a firm may have (e.g., across the different brands it markets) and of properly identifying customers to avoid duplication... View Details
- 2024
- Article
Neyman Meets Causal Machine Learning: Experimental Evaluation of Individualized Treatment Rules
By: Michael Lingzhi Li and Kosuke Imai
A century ago, Neyman showed how to evaluate the efficacy of treatment using a randomized experiment under a minimal set of assumptions. This classical repeated sampling framework serves as a basis of routine experimental analyses conducted by today’s scientists across... View Details
- June 2024 (Revised March 2025)
- Case
Wemade: (Re)Establishing Trust in Blockchain Games (A)
By: Jung Koo Kang, Charles C.Y. Wang, David Allen and Kwangmoon So
This case explores the fundamental challenges and accounting issues arising from the integration of blockchain technology into traditional business models. It features Wemade, a South Korean online gaming company that has staked its future on blockchain-based games.... View Details
- June 2024
- Case
Building Innovation at VINCI
By: Dennis Campbell, Aluna Wang and Carlota Moniz
This case study explores how the VINCI Group, a French multinational operating in concessions, energy, and construction, bolstered awareness and adoption rates of new technologies within the organization. Through its separate innovation hub, Leonard, VINCI aimed to... View Details
Keywords: Business Model; Business Organization; Decisions; Business Earnings; Business Strategy; Competition; Energy; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Values and Beliefs; Global Range; Global Strategy; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Multinational Firms and Management; Globalized Markets and Industries; Corporate Accountability; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Disruptive Innovation; Innovation and Management; Innovation Strategy; Technological Innovation; Knowledge Sharing; Organizational Culture; Technology Adoption; Innovation Leadership; Organizational Structure; Construction Industry; Energy Industry; Technology Industry; France; Europe
- June 2024
- Article
Going Digital: Implications for Firm Value and Performance
By: Wilbur Chen and Suraj Srinivasan
We examine firm value and performance implications of the growing trend of non-technology companies engaging in digital transformation. We measure digital activities in firms based on the disclosure of digital words in the business description section of 10-Ks. Digital... View Details
- June 2024
- Article
The Monitoring Role of Social Media
By: Jonas Heese and Joseph Pacelli
In this study, we examine whether social media activity can reduce corporate misconduct. We use the staggered introduction of 3G mobile broadband access across the United States to identify exogenous increases in social media activity and test whether access to 3G... View Details
- May 2024
- Case
A New Aiera for Equity Research
By: Joseph Pacelli, Charles CY Wang and James Barnett
Aiera (pronounced “era”) co-founder and CEO Ken Sena considers strategic pathways to growth for the artificial intelligence (AI)-powered platform used to source, verify, and transcribe earnings calls, company presentations, and other corporate events. View Details
- May 2024
- Article
Financial Innovation in the 21st Century: Evidence from U.S. Patents
By: Josh Lerner, Amit Seru, Nick Short and Yuan Sun
We develop a unique dataset of 24 thousand U.S. finance patents granted over the last two decades to explore the evolution and production of financial innovation. We use machine learning to identify the financial patents and extensively audit the results to ensure... View Details