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- Faculty Publications (1,036)
- January 2022
- Background Note
The Florange Law: Encouraging Long-Termism in Equity Markets?
By: Charles C.Y. Wang and Tonia Labruyere
This note provides background information on a French law (“the Florange law”) passed in 2014 that the French government said would encourage long-term shareholdings. The note describes the law, what led to it, the reactions it evoked, and similar initiatives in other... View Details
- January 2022 (Revised January 2022)
- Case
The Impact Developers Fund
- January 2022
- Article
Investing Outside the Box: Evidence from Alternative Vehicles in Private Equity
By: Josh Lerner, Jason Mao, Antoinette Schoar and Nan R. Zhang
This paper uses previously unexplored custodial data to examine the use of alternative investment vehicles in private equity (PE) over four decades. We document a steep increase in the capital directed to alternative vehicles, with these vehicles approaching a 40%... View Details
- January 2022
- Article
Pushed into a Crowd: Repositioning Costs, Resources, and Competition in the RTE Cereal Industry
By: Young Hou and Dennis Yao
This paper exploits a natural experiment involving self-regulation in the ready-to-eat (RTE) breakfast cereal industry to evaluate the performance impact of product repositioning. It then examines how a product's brand equity value declines with repositioning distance... View Details
- January 2022
- Article
Replicating Private Equity with Value Investing, Homemade Leverage, and Hold-to-Maturity Accounting
By: Erik Stafford
The contributions of asset selection and incremental leverage to buyout investment performance are more important than typically assumed or estimated to be. Buyout funds select small firms with distinct value characteristics. Public equities with these characteristics... View Details
- December 2021
- Case
Danish Crown: Feeding the Future
By: David E. Bell, Damien P. McLoughlin, Daniela Beyersdorfer and Mette Fuglsang Hjortshoej
Danish Crown, one of the world’s largest exporters of pork meat and one of Europe’s top five producers of beef, faced increasing headwinds in 2021, making CEO Jais Valeur feel like the core of the meat business was under attack. As a cooperative and prominent player in... View Details
Keywords: Agribusiness; Animal-Based Agribusiness; Food; Environmental Management; Climate Change; Environmental Sustainability; Nutrition; Cooperative Ownership; Change Management; Transition; Leadership; Leading Change; Marketing; Product Marketing; Corporate Strategy; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; Europe; Denmark
- December 2021 (Revised January 2023)
- Supplement
Katerra (B)
By: Lindsay N. Hyde, Thomas R. Eisenmann and Tom Quinn
In May 2020, SoftBank executives, having invested nearly $2 billion in Katerra, decided the vision of an end-to-end, vertically-integrated construction process was worth saving—with some major changes to company structure. The SoftBank Vision Fund invested $200 million... View Details
- November 2021 (Revised November 2023)
- Case
Hitting Home: Amazon and Mary's Place
By: Paul M. Healy, Debora L. Spar and Amy Klopfenstein
In 2020, Amazon, the $386 billion online retail behemoth, built an eight-story shelter for women and families experiencing homelessness on its expanding headquarters in Seattle, Washington. The shelter, operated in partnership with a non-profit organization known as... View Details
- November 2021
- Article
Venture Capitalists and COVID-19
By: Paul A. Gompers, Will Gornall, Steven N. Kaplan and Ilya A. Strebulaev
We survey over 1,000 institutional and corporate venture capitalists (VCs) at more than 900 different firms to learn how their decisions and investments have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. We compare their survey answers to those provided by a large sample of... View Details
- October 2021 (Revised May 2023)
- Case
Engine No. 1: An Impact Investing Firm Engages with ExxonMobil
By: Mark Kramer, Shawn Cole, Vikram S. Gandhi and T. Robert Zochowski
ExxonMobil, the world's fifth largest source of carbon emissions, remained committed to aggressively expanding its oil & gas business despite global warming. During the COVID pandemic this strategy resulted in massive losses as the price and demand for oil declined. ... View Details
- October 2021 (Revised May 2023)
- Case
Project Maji: Pricing Water in Sub-Saharan Africa
By: Elie Ofek, Marco Bertini, Dilyana Karadzhova Botha and Esel Çekin
In July 2021, Sunil Lalvani, founder and CEO of Project Maji, a non-profit social enterprise headquartered in Dubai that had already provided sustainable, clean water solutions to 80,000 people living in rural communities across Ghana and Kenya, was facing an important... View Details
- October 2021 (Revised October 2022)
- Case
The Opioid Settlement and Controversy Over CEO Pay at AmerisourceBergen
By: Suraj Srinivasan and Li-Kuan Ni
In 2020, AmerisourceBergen Corporation, a Fortune 50 company in the drug distribution industry, agreed to settle thousands of lawsuits filed nationwide against the company for its opioid distribution practices that critics alleged had contributed to the nationwide... View Details
Keywords: Opioids; Drug; Investors; Shareholder Activism; Investment Activism; Executive Compensation; Corporate Accountability; Corporate Governance; Governance Compliance; Governance Controls; Risk Management; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Business and Shareholder Relations; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Legal Liability; Distribution Industry; Health Industry; Pharmaceutical Industry; United States; West Virginia; Tennessee; Ohio; Pennsylvania
- October 2021
- Article
Shareholder Activism and Firms' Voluntary Disclosure of Climate Change Risks
By: Caroline Flammer, Michael W. Toffel and Kala Viswanathan
This paper examines whether—in the absence of mandated disclosure requirements—shareholder activism can elicit greater disclosure of firms’ exposure to climate change risks. We find that environmental shareholder activism increases the voluntary disclosure of climate... View Details
Keywords: Transparency; Reporting; Shareholder Engagement; Shareholder Activism; Climate Change; Risk and Uncertainty; Environmental Management; Investment Activism; Corporate Disclosure; Communication Strategy; Information Publishing; Measurement and Metrics; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Problems and Challenges; United States
- September 2021
- Case
Brown Capital Management
By: Luis M. Viceira, Emily R. McComb and Sarah Mehta
Set in July 2021, this case looks at several growth strategies under consideration at Brown Capital, the second-oldest Black-owned asset management firm in the U.S. Since its 1983 founding, Baltimore-based Brown Capital has specialized in small company growth... View Details
Keywords: Business Growth and Maturation; Growth and Development Strategy; Diversity; Race; Finance; Equity; Public Equity; Stocks; Financial Management; Financial Strategy; Investment; Investment Portfolio; Employee Stock Ownership Plan; Recruitment; Retention; Selection and Staffing; Employee Ownership; Strategy; Financial Services Industry; United States; Maryland; Baltimore
- 2021
- Working Paper
Accounting for Employment Impact at Scale
By: Adel Fadhel, Katie Panella, Ethan Rouen and George Serafeim
Using new data on workforce composition and wages, we systematically measure the employment impact at U.S. firms from 2008 to 2020, including 2,682 unique firms and 22,322 firm-year observations. We document significant variation across industries and firms within each... View Details
- September 2021 (Revised November 2022)
- Case
MAYA Capital
By: Robert F. White, Carla Larangeira and Pedro Levindo
MAYA Capital co-founders Lara Lemann and Monica Saggioro raised $41.5 million through a series of closings for their early-stage Latin American venture capital fund. The two women had met for the first time in mid-2016 when Lemann was contemplating scaling her angel... View Details
- September 2021
- Teaching Note
The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments): April 2021
By: Josh Lerner
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 821-125. View Details
- September 2021
- Case
Worldreader: Helping Readers Build a Better World
By: Marco Bertini, Elie Ofek and Julia Kelley
Founded in 2010, Worldreader was an international nonprofit organization that promoted reading to children around the world. For many years, Worldreader distributed e-readers to under-resourced communities and funded its operations primarily through philanthropic... View Details
Keywords: Subscription Model; Price; Financial Strategy; Education; Early Childhood Education; Learning; Geography; Geographic Scope; Global Range; Goals and Objectives; Marketing; Marketing Strategy; Markets; Organizations; Mission and Purpose; Social Enterprise; Non-Governmental Organizations; Nonprofit Organizations; Society; Social Issues; Strategy; Commercialization; Expansion; Segmentation; Education Industry; Africa; Asia; Latin America; Europe; North and Central America; South America
- Article
Business Investment in Education in Emerging Markets Since the 1960s
By: Valeria Giacomin, Geoffrey Jones and Erica Salvaj
This article examines non-profit investments by business in education in emerging markets between the 1960s and the present day. Using a sample of 110 interviews with business leaders from an oral history database, the study shows that more than three-quarters of such... View Details
- Article
Elevate Employees, Don't Eliminate Them
By: Ryan W. Buell
The last major global shock—the 2008 recession—led to what economists call a “jobless recovery” as companies found they could get by with fewer employees. But post-pandemic, the author writes, managers should focus on changing employees’ roles instead. He has five key... View Details