Publications

September 2018 (Revised November 2018)
Case

An Innovative Anti-bribery Commitment?

By: Eugene Soltes

Reebonz, an online luxury goods platform based in Singapore that operates across the Asia-Pacific region, offers its investors the opportunity to redeem shares if either the firm or its founder are investigated by the U.S. or U.K governments with regard to complying... View Details

Keywords: Foreign Corrupt Practices Act; United Kingdom Bribery Act; Law; Leadership; Moral Sensibility; Financial Services Industry; Technology Industry; United States; United Kingdom; Asia

12 Mar 2014
Research & Ideas

Entrepreneurship and Multinationals Drive Globalization

used trust to support this organizational structure. The firm built a network of trustworthy individuals and business partners that enabled it, eventually, to separate the German parent company from its international affiliates. In... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Beauty & Cosmetics; Manufacturing; Consumer Products; Pharmaceutical

24 May 2004
Research & Ideas

When Reputation Trumps Regulation

A recent study by HBS assistant professor Jordan Siegel tests whether foreign firms can leapfrog their countries' weak legal institutions by listing equities in New York and voluntarily abiding by U.S. securities law. The study, which... View Details

Keywords: by Ann Cullen

16 Apr 2019
First Look

New Research and Ideas, April 16, 2019

against the backdrop of a turbulent industry and consider the implications for the anesthesiologist. Publisher's link: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=55974 March 2019 Management Science Open Source Software and Firm... View Details

Keywords: Dina Gerdeman

October 1995
Article

Start-ups, Spin-offs, and Internal Projects

By: James J. Anton and Dennis Yao

We examine the incentive problem confronting a firm and employee when the employee privately discovers a significant invention and faces a choice between keeping the invention private and leaving the firm to form a new company (start-up), or transferring knowledge and... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Projects; Motivation and Incentives; Rights; Employees; Innovation and Invention; Compensation and Benefits; Knowledge Sharing; Capital; Profit

Article

Consequences of Financial Reporting Failure for Outside Directors: Evidence from Accounting Restatements and Audit Committee Members

By: Suraj Srinivasan

I use a sample of 409 companies that restated their earnings from 1997 to 2001 to examine penalties for outside directors, particularly audit committee members, when their companies experience accounting restatements. Penalties from lawsuits and Securities and Exchange... View Details

Keywords: Outcome or Result; Business Earnings; Financial Statements; Lawsuits and Litigation; Labor; Markets; Financial Reporting; Accounting Audits; Cost; Reputation

SSRN

2015
Working Paper

Stability, Strategy-Proofness, and Cumulative Offer Mechanisms

By: John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers and Alexander Westkamp

We consider the setting of many-to-one matching with contracts, where firms may demand multiple contracts but each worker desires at most one contract. We introduce three novel conditions—observable substitutability, observable size monotonicity,... View Details

Keywords: Matching With Contracts; Stability; Strategy-proofness; Substitutability; Size Monotonicity; Cumulative Offer Mechanism; Contracts; Market Design; Marketplace Matching; Balance and Stability

August 2011
Article

Coming Clean and Cleaning Up: Does Voluntary Self-Reporting Indicate Effective Self-Policing

By: Michael W. Toffel and Jodi L. Short

Regulatory agencies are increasingly establishing voluntary self-reporting programs both as an investigative tool and to encourage regulated firms to commit to policing themselves. We investigate whether voluntary self-reporting can reliably indicate effective... View Details

Keywords: Environmental Sustainability; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Programs; Governance Compliance; Corporate Disclosure; Law Enforcement

20 Oct 2015
Working Paper Summaries

Internalizing Global Value Chains: A Firm-Level Analysis

Keywords: by Laura Alfaro, Pol Antras, Davin Chor & Paola Conconi

January 2015
Article

Competing with Privacy

By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Andres Hervas-Drane

We analyze the implications of consumer privacy for competition in the marketplace. We consider a market where firms set prices and disclosure levels for consumer information, and consumers observe both before deciding which firm to patronize and how much information... View Details

Keywords: Information Acquisition; Information Disclosure; Online Privacy; Privacy Regulation; Information; Rights; Internet and the Web; Competition; Internet and the Web; Corporate Disclosure; Ethics; Knowledge Acquisition

March 1992 (Revised December 1992)
Case

Salomon and the Treasury Securities Auction

By: Dwight B. Crane

Set in June 1991, two months prior to Salomon Brothers' announcement that the firm had violated the Treasury Department's rules governing the auctions of new Treasury securities. Salomon Vice Chairman John Meriwether must decide how to address problems that continue to... View Details

Keywords: Debt Securities; Managerial Roles; Ethics; Market Transactions; Bonds; Investment Banking; Crisis Management; Auctions; Legal Liability; Banking Industry

03 Nov 2009
First Look

First Look: Nov. 3

with our predictions, fragility strongly predicts future price volatility, and co-fragility predicts cross-stock return comovement. Download the paper via SSRN: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1490734 PublicationsIndia Transformed? Insights from... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

March 2006
Case

EMC Corporation: Proposed Acquisition of VMware

By: Constance E. Bagley, Carin-Isabel Knoop and Chris Lombardi

Involves the decision by the CEO of EMC Corp. whether to acquire VMware, a small software firm in California that makes virtualization software. Among the factors to be considered are a pending patent case involving WMare and Microsoft and integration challenges... View Details

Keywords: Patents; Decision Choices and Conditions; Lawsuits and Litigation; Applications and Software; Acquisition; Information Technology Industry; California

February 2003 (Revised June 2006)
Case

Arthur Andersen LLP

By: David F. Hawkins and Jacob Cohen

This case highlights the history of Arthur Andersen and the collapse of the firm following the Enron Corp. audit and the Department of Justice obstruction of justice conviction. View Details

Keywords: Accounting Audits; Financial Statements; Business Exit or Shutdown; Lawfulness; United States

2012
Working Paper

How Short-Termism Invites Corruption—And What to Do About It

By: Malcolm S. Salter

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

Keywords: Business and Shareholder Relations; Public Ownership; Performance Expectations; Economy; Crime and Corruption; Ethics; Trust; Financial Services Industry; United States

20 Oct 2009
First Look

First Look: October 20

Shareholders Using a Geographic Instrument Authors:Bo Becker, Henrik Cronqvist, and Rüdiger Fahlenbrach Abstract Large shareholders may play an important role for firm performance and policies, but identifying this empirically presents a... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

2006
Other Unpublished Work

Does Competition Increase Patent Litigation? Empirical Evidence of Strategic Patenting in the Telecom Equipment Industry

By: Juan Alcacer and Rachelle C. Sampson

Anecdotal evidence suggests that patent litigation has increased in the last 20 years as firms in knowledge intensive industries use patents more frequently to protect their knowledge stocks and managers focus on extracting new revenue streams from existing patent... View Details

Keywords: Patents; Competition; Lawsuits and Litigation

September 2001 (Revised July 2009)
Case

Buenos Aires Embotelladora S.A. (BAESA): A South American Restructuring

By: Stuart C. Gilson and Gustavo A. Herrero

In 1998, BAESA, PepsiCo's largest bottler and distributor outside North America, experienced severe financial difficulty and had to restructure its debt and business operations to avoid bankruptcy or liquidation. Based in Argentina, with operations throughout South... View Details

Keywords: Restructuring; Borrowing and Debt; Insolvency and Bankruptcy; Bonds; Stocks; Multinational Firms and Management; Laws and Statutes; United States; Argentina; Brazil