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- 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
- 2025
- Working Paper
Cash Flow Volatility, Return Predictability and Stock Price Decompositions: Why You Should Scale Prices by Trend Cash Flows
By: Sebastian Hillenbrand and Odhrain McCarthy
We address two inconvenient facts in asset pricing: (i) valuation ratios are often more related to future cash flows than to returns, and (ii) they mostly fail to predict returns. We show that these issues arise because stock prices are scaled by cash flows that... View Details
- June 2025
- Case
TfL Pension Fund and the 2022 Gilt Market Crisis
By: Emil N. Siriwardane, Vincent Dessain, Emer Moloney and Carlota Moniz
On September 27, 2022, Padmesh Shukla, CIO of the Transport for London (TfL) Pension Fund, was keeping a careful eye on the turmoil in the U.K. sovereign bond (or gilt) market. When the new government announced the largest tax cuts the U.K. had seen in half a century,... View Details
Keywords: Financial Crisis; Macroeconomics; Assets; Asset Management; Borrowing and Debt; Corporate Finance; Capital Markets; Equity; Public Equity; Private Equity; Financial Liquidity; Financial Instruments; Debt Securities; Credit Derivatives and Swaps; Bonds; Stocks; Financial Strategy; Interest Rates; Governance; Governing and Advisory Boards; Crisis Management; Resource Allocation; Investment; Financial Services Industry; United Kingdom; England; London; Europe
- 2025
- Working Paper
Street Earnings: Implications for Asset Pricing
By: Sebastian Hillenbrand and Odhrain McCarthy
To address the excess volatility puzzle – the excessive movements in stock prices – researchers often study movements in valuation ratios. However, we demonstrate that movements in valuation ratios based on fundamental measures with high transitory volatility, such as... View Details
- June 2025
- Article
Passive Ownership and Price Informativeness
By: Marco Sammon
I show that passive ownership negatively affects the degree to which stock prices anticipate earnings announcements. Estimates across several research designs imply that the rise in passive ownership over the last 30 years has caused the amount of information... View Details
Keywords: Passive Ownership; ETFs; Market Efficiency; Price; Investment Funds; Stocks; Communication
- June 2025
- Case
Vail Resorts: Responding to Activist Pressure (A)
By: Benjamin C. Esty and Edward A. Meyer
On January 27, 2025, the head of a relatively small hedge fund named Late Apex Partners sent a highly critical letter to the board of directors of Vail Resorts, the world’s largest ski resort operator. In his letter, and the 88-slide presentation that accompanied his... View Details
Keywords: Corporate Finance; Capital Budgeting; Corporate Governance; Competitive Advantage; Competitive Strategy; Leading Change; Valuation; Investment Activism; Climate Change; Management Succession; Financial Management; Risk Management; Business and Shareholder Relations; Sports Industry; Entertainment and Recreation Industry; Travel Industry; United States; Australia; Canada
- Working Paper
Index Rebalancing and Stock Market Composition: Do Indexes Time the Market?
By: Marco Sammon and John J. Shim
Value-weighted indexes must rebalance in response to stock market composition changes, e.g., issuance, buybacks, and IPOs. In doing so, existing index funds implicitly engage in market timing. Index funds’ long-short rebalancing portfolios have a -3.5% annual return... View Details
- May 2025
- Case
'Net Zero in Action': Impact Investing at the McKnight Foundation
By: Lauren Cohen, Christina R. Wing and Sophia Pan
Elizabeth McGeveran, Vice President of Investments at the McKnight Foundation, reflected on how to effectively advance the organization’s net-zero strategy. The foundation had committed 10% of its endowment to building a portfolio of impact investments and was among... View Details
Keywords: Investment Fund; Philanthropy; Charitable Donations; Sustainability; Foundation; Impact Investing; ESG; Family Business; Forecasting and Prediction; Private Sector; Renewable Energy; Social Entrepreneurship; Climate Change; Environmental Sustainability; Green Technology; Financial Strategy; Investment Funds; Investment Portfolio; Institutional Investing; Corporate Accountability; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Mission and Purpose; Private Ownership; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Social Issues; Sustainable Cities; Financial Services Industry; Minnesota; United States
- 2025
- Working Paper
Corporate Actions as Moral Issues
By: Zwetelina Iliewa, Elisabeth Kempf and Oliver Spalt
We examine nonpecuniary preferences across a broad set of corporate actions using a representative sample of the U.S. population. Our core findings, based on large-scale online surveys, are that (i) self-reported nonpecuniary concerns are large both for stock market... View Details
- 2024
- Case
EPCorp: Convincing the C-Suite
By: Jacob M. Cook
In EPCorp: Convincing the C-Suite, Shivani Bahl is attempting to sell EPCorp's CEO, Debbie Sullivan, on her ideas for not only a new website upgrade but also a more expansive vision on how data and Generative AI can be used to grow the company. Debbie is understandably... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
The Limits of Insurance Demand and the Growing Protection Gap
By: Parinitha Sastry, Tess Scharlemann, Ishita Sen and Ana-Maria Tenekedjieva
In a world with rising risk, how much are U.S. households willing to pay for homeowners insurance, and what does their demand imply for the future of insurance markets? We provide the first estimates of household willingness to pay for homeowners insurance and the... View Details
- April 2025
- Article
The Disappearing Index Effect
By: Robin Greenwood and Marco Sammon
The abnormal return associated with a stock being added to the S&P 500 has fallen from an average
of 7.4% in the 1990s to 0.3% over the past decade. This has occurred despite a significant increase in the
share of stock market assets linked to the index. A similar... View Details
- April 2025
- Article
The Fed and the Secular Decline in Interest Rates
In this paper I document a striking fact: a narrow window around Fed meetings fully captures the secular decline in U.S. Treasury yields since 1980. By contrast, yield movements outside this window are transitory and wash out over time. This is surprising because the... View Details
- March 2025
- Case
YouTube: Bidding for NFL Sunday Ticket
By: Anita Elberse and Crystal Yao
In December 2022, Erin Teague, a senior director and the global head of sports, movies and shows at YouTube, technology giant Alphabet Inc.’s video- sharing platform, received the news that Sundar Pichai, the chief executive officer of Alphabet and its subsidiary... View Details
- March 2025 (Revised April 2025)
- Case
WallStreetBets: Democratizing Retail Investing
By: Joseph Pacelli and Alexis Lefort
In summer 2024, Jaime Rogozinski anticipated the launch of a day-trading eSports event, a vision he had nurtured for years. Rogozinski, the founder of the influential subreddit WallStreetBets (WSB), created the forum in 2012 as a space for retail traders to explore... View Details
- February 2025 (Revised March 2025)
- Case
Accounting for Bitcoin at Block
By: Charles C.Y. Wang, Seil Kim and Sa-Pyung Sean Shin
Abstract: This case explores Block Inc.'s accounting practices for Bitcoin transactions and their impact on financial reporting. Following a 10% stock price drop after missing revenue estimates in Q3 2024, Block faced scrutiny over its Bitcoin-driven revenue model.... View Details
- February 2025 (Revised May 2025)
- Case
Align Partners and SM Entertainment: Korean Shareholder Activism Meets K-Pop (A)
By: Charles C.Y. Wang and Billy Chan
For years, institutional investors had experienced very limited success in influencing the management of listed companies through shareholder activist campaigns in Korea. The common practice of circular ownership and public resentment toward foreign shareholder... View Details
- February 2025
- Supplement
Align Partners and SM Entertainment: Korean Shareholder Activism Meets K-Pop (B)
By: Charles CY Wang and Billy Chan
For years, institutional investors had experienced very limited success in influencing the management of listed companies through shareholder activist campaigns in Korea. The common practice of circular ownership and public resentment toward foreign shareholder... View Details
- January 2025 (Revised March 2025)
- Case
Creating Value by Splitting Aster: Can One Minus One Equal Two?
By: V.G. Narayanan and Kairavi Dey
Aster DM Healthcare (Aster), founded by Dr. Azad Moopen in 1987, is a prominent healthcare conglomerate with operations spanning hospitals, clinics, retail pharmacies, and diagnostic centers across India and the GCC. After its 2018 listing on India’s National Stock... View Details
- November–December 2024
- Article
Scaling Up Transformational Innovations
By: Peter Koen, Ananya Sheth, Mike DiPaola and Linda A. Hill
For large companies operating in mature sectors—such as Procter & Gamble in consumer goods, Apple in consumer electronics, and Adobe in cloud software—driving growth is a perennial challenge. Growth through acquisition is always an option, but companies often quickly... View Details