Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,339)
- Faculty Publications (314)
- November 2012
- Case
Occupy Wall Street
By: Rakesh Khurana and Eric Baldwin
This case examines the Occupy Wall Street movement, which emerged in late 2011 in response to the fallout from the global financial crisis of 2008 and the economic downturn that followed. Occupy Wall Street was born out of a sense of frustration with both a global... View Details
- September 2012 (Revised January 2013)
- Case
J.C. Penney's 'Fair and Square' Pricing Strategy
By: Elie Ofek and Jill Avery
As a he gets ready to release 2nd quarter 2012 results, Ron Johnson, the new CEO of department store J.C. Penney, is reconsidering the dramatic changes he initiated for the business model and brand image of his company. A new pricing scheme he put in place in February,... View Details
- June 2012
- Article
Pricing to Create Shared Value
By: Marco Bertini and John T. Gourville
Many companies are in competition with their customers to extract as much value as possible from every transaction. Pricing is their weapon of choice, and consumers fight back by rooting out and disseminating pricing policies that seem unfair. The problem is that... View Details
- 2012
- Working Paper
Reaching for Yield in the Bond Market
By: Bo Becker and Victoria Ivashina
Reaching-for-yield—the propensity to buy riskier assets in order to achieve higher yields—is believed to be an important factor contributing to the credit cycle. This paper analyses this phenomenon in the corporate bond market. Specifically, we show evidence for... View Details
- 2012
- Article
A Reduced-Form Approach to Behavioral Public Finance
By: Sendhil Mullainathan, Joshua Schwartzstein and William Congdon
Research in behavioral public finance has blossomed in recent years, producing diverse empirical and theoretical insights. This article develops a single framework with which to understand these advances. Rather than drawing out the consequences of specific... View Details
- 2012
- Working Paper
How Short-Termism Invites Corruption—And What to Do About It
Researchers and business leaders have long decried short-termism: the excessive focus of executives of publicly traded companies-along with fund managers and other investors-on short-term results. The central concern is that short-termism discourages long-term... View Details
- March 2012 (Revised October 2012)
- Case
Hayman Capital Management
By: Robin Greenwood, Julie Messina and Jared Dourdeville
In late December 2011, Hayman Capital founder and portfolio manager Kyle Bass was reviewing Japanese government budget projections for 2012. The projections appeared contrary to Hayman Capital's views on Japan, where the fund had built a bearish position. Japan had the... View Details
- January 2012 (Revised March 2012)
- Case
Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA)'s Entry into the Retirement Market
By: Lauren Cohen and Christopher Malloy
This case examines Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA)'s decision to enter the retirement market with their new "Dimensional Managed DC" product, a complete retirement solution that aimed to provide investors with what they really wanted: the same standard of living in... View Details
- Article
Market Heterogeneity and Local Capacity Decisions in Services
By: Dennis Campbell and Frances X. Frei
We empirically document factors that influence how local operating managers use discretion to balance the tradeoff between service capacity costs and customer sensitivity to service time. Our findings, using data from one of the largest financial services providers in... View Details
- December 2011
- Article
Prices or Knowledge? What Drives Demand for Financial Services in Emerging Markets?
By: Shawn A. Cole, Thomas Sampson and Bilal Zia
Financial development is critical for growth, but its micro-determinants are not well understood. We test leading theories of low demand for financial services in emerging markets, combining novel survey evidence from Indonesia and India with a field experiment. We... View Details
- November 2011
- Article
How Great Companies Think Differently
Corporate leaders have long subscribed to the belief that the sole purpose of business is to make money. That narrow view, deeply embedded in the American capitalist system, molds the actions of most corporations, constraining them to focus on maximizing short-term... View Details
- September 2011
- Module Note
Orientation to Leadership Intelligence Days, 2011
By: Joshua D. Margolis and Anthony J. Mayo
Julie Bornstein, senior vice president of Sephora Direct, is seeking to double her budget for social media and other digital marketing initiatives for 2011. A number of digital efforts implemented in the past two years seem to be bearing fruit and there is a desire to... View Details
- Fall 2011
- Article
A Brief Postwar History of U.S. Consumer Finance
By: Gunnar Trumbull and Peter Tufano
In this brief history of U.S. consumer finance since World War II, the sector is defined based on the functions delivered by firms in the form of payments, savings and investing, borrowing, managing risk, and providing advice. Evidence of major trends in consumption,... View Details
- Article
How Institutional Investors Frame Their Losses: Evidence on Dynamic Loss Aversion from Currency Portfolios
By: Kenneth A. Froot, John Arabadjis, Sonya Cates and Stephen Lawrence
Currency investors exhibit a tendency to cut risk by pairing both longs and shorts following losses and a weaker tendency to add risk following gains. By differentiating between position level, portfolio level, and aggregate cross-portfolio losses in currency... View Details
- July 2011 (Revised January 2012)
- Teaching Note
Demand Media (TN)
By: John Deighton and Leora Kornfeld
Teaching Note for 512021. View Details
- June 2011 (Revised June 2012)
- Case
Sephora Direct: Investing in Social Media, Video, and Mobile
By: Elie Ofek and Alison Berkley Wagonfeld
Julie Bornstein, senior vice president of Sephora Direct, is seeking to double her budget for social media and other digital marketing initiatives for 2011. A number of digital efforts implemented in the past two years seem to be bearing fruit and there is a desire to... View Details
- April 2011 (Revised September 2011)
- Case
BlackRock Solutions
By: Kenneth A. Froot and Scott Waggoner
The BlackRock Solutions case examines the different functions and economics of a global asset manager's value chain, with particular emphasis on the "money management" and the "investment systems platform" businesses. Students analyze why BlackRock decided to unbundle... View Details
Keywords: Investment Management; Strategic Vision; Organizational Behavior; Economies Of Scale And Scope; Unbundling Of Services; Strategic Planning; Risk Management; Financial Management; Asset Management; Competitive Advantage; Value; Corporate Strategy; Organizational Culture; Investment; Financial Strategy
- April 2011 (Revised April 2011)
- Module Note
Investor Demand
By: Robin Greenwood
This conceptual note describes a series of cases on the investor demand approach to investment strategy and management. The cases demonstrate how and why securities market dislocations are driven by non-fundamental demand. I use the cases to progressively build a... View Details
Keywords: Investment
- March 2011 (Revised January 2015)
- Case
H Partners and Six Flags
By: Robin Greenwood and Michael Gorzynski
Rehan Jaffer, the founder of hedge fund H Partners, is considering what to do with his investment in Six Flags. H Partners had invested a significant amount of the firm's capital in the senior bonds of U.S.-based Six Flags, following that company's bankruptcy filing. View Details