Publications

February 2009 (Revised June 2010)
Background Note

Note on Valuing Control and Liquidity in Family and Closely Held Firms

Most companies around the world are family controlled and/or closely held. The need to value these companies routinely arises in practice for a variety of reasons, e.g., to buy out minority shareholders; for gift and estate tax purposes; to tie executive compensation... View Details

Keywords: Family Business; Financial Liquidity; Governance Controls; Valuation

Educators

Teaching Interest

Overview

By: Lynn S. Paine

Ms. Paine currently teaches Boards of Directors and Corporate Governance in the second-year MBA program. She also co-chairs the HBS flagship programs for corporate directors Making Corporate Boards More Effective, Advanced Corporate Director Seminar, as well as its... View Details

Ashish Nanda

Ashish Nanda is Senior Lecturer and C. Roland Christensen Distinguished Management Educator at Harvard Business School. From 2018 to 2021, he was course head for the MBA Required Curriculum course in Strategy. Beginning in 2022, he is teaching an MBA Elective... View Details

2012
Book

Commentaries and Cases on the Law of Business Organization

By: William T. Allen, Reinier Kraakman and Guhan Subramanian

This fourth edition is completely updated throughout. It now includes excerpts from important recent cases such as "Air Products v. Airgas" and "In re CNX Gas" and provides commentary on current developments, such as "Say on Pay," proxy access and the Dodd-Frank Act of... View Details

Keywords: Business Organization; Laws and Statutes; Lawsuits and Litigation

07 Jun 2007
News

The bad dream of options expensing lingers

12 Sep 2017
News

What’s the Right Kind of Bonus to Motivate Your Sales Force?

05 Jul 2023
HBS Case

What Kind of Leader Are You? How Three Action Orientations Can Help You Meet the Moment

insights gleaned from teaching his MBA course, Leadership: Execution and Action Planning (LEAP), and from classroom observations of mid-career managers in executive education. Over the past decade, Raffaelli... View Details

Keywords: by Ben Rand

2007
Working Paper

The Impact of Shareholder Activism on Financial Reporting and Compensation: The Case of Employee Stock Options Expensing

By: Fabrizio Ferri and Tatiana Sandino

In this paper we examine the economic consequences of over 150 shareholder proposals to expense employee stock options (ESO) submitted during the proxy seasons of 2003 and 2004–the first case where the SEC has allowed an accounting matter to be subject to an advisory... View Details

Keywords: Executive Compensation; Financial Reporting; Employee Stock Ownership Plan; Corporate Governance; Investment Activism; Business and Shareholder Relations

March 2020 (Revised June 2020)
Case

Social Salary Setting at Spiber

By: Ashley Whillans and John Beshears

Can a “set your own salary” system boost employee happiness and motivation? Spiber made synthetic silk built from proteins mimicking the proteins found in spider silk, the world’s toughest known material by weight. Kazuhide Sekiyama and Junichi Sugahara established... View Details

Keywords: Compensation and Benefits; Motivation and Incentives; Happiness; Negotiation Tactics; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Biotechnology Industry; Japan; United States

Educators

2017
Working Paper

Rethinking Measurement of Pay Disparity and its Relation to Firm Performance

By: Ethan Rouen

I develop measures of firm-level pay disparity and examine their relation to firm accounting performance. Using comprehensive compensation data for a large sample of firms, I find no statistically significant relation between the ratio of CEO-to-mean employee... View Details

Keywords: Pay Disparity; Pay Ratio; CEO Pay Ratio; Income Inequality; Executive Compensation; Wages; Equality and Inequality; Business Ventures; Performance

SSRN

Read Now

November 2019
Article

The Relevance of Broker Networks for Information Diffusion in the Stock Market

By: Marco Di Maggio, Francesco Franzoni, Amir Kermani and Carlo Sommavilla

This paper shows that the network of relationships between brokers and institutional investors shapes information diffusion in the stock market. We exploit trade-level data to show that central brokers gather information by executing informed trades, which is then... View Details

Keywords: Broker Networks; Institutional Investors; Asset Prices; Business and Shareholder Relations; Institutional Investing; Information; Knowledge Dissemination; Financial Markets; Asset Pricing

June 2018
Teaching Note

Meridian Systems (Brief Case)

By: Frank V. Cespedes and Michael J. Roberts

Teaching Note for HBS No. 918-533. The key issues discussed in the Meridian teaching note concern sales force deployment: decisions about how to focus sales efforts with respect to territories, customers, and products. The teaching note explains the strengths and... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Sales; Strategy; Salesforce Management; Organizational Structure; Technological Innovation; Marketing Strategy

November 2003 (Revised March 2004)
Case

Dewberry Capital

By: William J. Poorvu

In 2003, key executives of Dewberry Capital, a fast-growing, Atlanta-based real estate company, are evaluating their growth strategy and the resultant organizational issues. John Dewberry, the entrepreneurial founder of the firm, has developed a portfolio of... View Details

Keywords: Buildings and Facilities; Selection and Staffing; Business Growth and Maturation; Entrepreneurship; Growth and Development Strategy; Real Estate Industry; Atlanta

November 2001 (Revised April 2003)
Case

Camp Dresser & McKee: Getting Incentives Right

By: Ashish Nanda

"If you try to use money to motivate behavior, you are in a powerful and dangerous place, especially with engineers and scientists," remarked Tom Furman, CEO of Camp Dresser & McKee, Inc. (CDM), a consulting environmental engineering firm. Historically, CDM had... View Details

Keywords: Motivation and Incentives; Compensation and Benefits; Service Industry

Educators

25 Mar 2021
Research & Ideas

Steer Clear of the Blind Spots That Derail Experiments

Should companies let employees keep working remotely after the COVID-19 pandemic ends? Assessing the impact of remote work has involved a lot of guesswork for business leaders, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Consider the Chinese travel company Ctrip, now known as... View Details

Keywords: by Danielle Kost

November 7, 2019
Article

WeWork’s Saga Is a Cautionary Tale about Golden Parachutes and CEO Pay

By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter

While the WeWork saga has dealt another blow to already-low public confidence in business, it should also strengthen cries for fundamental changes to a system that offers supersized compensation for undersized performance. View Details

Keywords: Executive Compensation; Change; Compensation and Benefits; Corporate Accountability; Initial Public Offering