Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,384)
- Faculty Publications (568)
- Article
Management Practices, Relational Contracts and the Decline of General Motors
By: Susan Helper and Rebecca Henderson
General Motors was once regarded as one of the best managed and most successful firms in the world, but between 1980 and 2009 its share of the U.S. market fell from 62.6% to 19.8%, and in 2009 the firm went bankrupt. In this paper we argue that the conventional... View Details
- Winter 2014
- Article
Retail Inventory: Managing the Canary in the Coal Mine!
By: Vishal Gaur, Saravanan Kesavan and Ananth Raman
Retail inventory is a statistic that is closely watched by retailers as well as their investors, lenders, and suppliers. Retailers not only benefit from inventory, but also bear the cost of excess inventory. Investors, lenders, and suppliers interpret this statistic... View Details
- September 2014
- Article
Metropolitan Blueprints of Colonial Taxation? Lessons from Fiscal Capacity Building in British and French Africa, 1880-1940
By: Ewout Frankema and Marlous van Waijenburg
The historical and social science literature is divided about the importance of metropolitan blueprints of colonial rule for the development of colonial states. We exploit historical records of colonial state finances to explore the importance of metropolitan identity... View Details
Keywords: Colonial Administration; Quantitative Sources; Governance; Money; Taxation; Trade; History; Africa
- August 2014 (Revised March 2016)
- Case
Thomas Cook Group on the Brink (A)
By: Benjamin C. Esty, Stuart C. Gilson and Aldo Sesia
Harriett Green, the newly appointed CEO of Thomas Cook Group, faces a daunting set of business and financial challenges at the 171-year old UK travel services company. The company has lost almost £600 million in the last three quarters; has seen its stock price fall... View Details
Keywords: Turnaround; Corporate Restructuring; Change Leadership; Female Ceo; Change Management; Communication Strategy; Borrowing and Debt; Cash Flow; Cost Management; Financial Liquidity; Financial Management; Executive Compensation; Leading Change; Crisis Management; Value Creation; Travel Industry; United Kingdom
- July 2014
- Case
BMVSS: Changing Lives through Innovation One Jaipur Limb at a Time (Abridged)
By: Srikant Datar, Saloni Chaturvedi and Caitlin Bowler
Bhagwan Mahaveer Viklang Sahayata Samiti (BMVSS) is an Indian not-for-profit organization engaged in assisting differently-abled persons by providing them with the legendary low-cost prosthesis, the Jaipur Foot, and other mobility-assisting devices, free of cost. Known... View Details
- July–September 2014
- Article
Investing in Superstars: Lessons from the World of Football [¿Cómo Invertir en Superestrellas? Lecciones del Mundo del Fútbol]
By: Anita Elberse
Markets for soccer players are winner-take-all markets in which a select few top players earn extremely high rewards. The search for effective talent strategies in these conditions has led clubs to pursue a superstar-acquisition model, a talent-development model, or a... View Details
- July 2014
- Article
Smart Money? The Effect of Education on Financial Outcomes
By: Shawn A. Cole, Anna Paulson and Gauri Kartini Shastry
Household financial decisions are important for household welfare, economic growth and financial stability. Yet, our understanding of the determinants of financial decision-making is limited. Exploiting exogenous variation in state compulsory schooling laws in both... View Details
- 2014
- Article
The Growth and Limits of Arbitrage: Evidence from Short Interest
By: Samuel G. Hanson and Adi Sunderam
We develop a novel methodology to infer the amount of capital allocated to quantitative equity arbitrage strategies. Using this methodology, which exploits time-variation in the cross section of short interest, we document that the amount of capital devoted to value... View Details
- March 2014
- Article
Cyclicality of Credit Supply: Firm Level Evidence
By: Bo Becker and Victoria Ivashina
Theory predicts that there is a close link between bank credit supply and the evolution of the business cycle. Yet fluctuations in bank-loan supply have been hard to quantify in the time series. While loan issuance falls in recessions, it is not clear if this is due to... View Details
- February 2014 (Revised March 2022)
- Case
School Specialty, Inc.
By: Stuart C. Gilson and Kristin Mugford
Set in 2013, School Specialty was a financially troubled supplier of educational products to primary and secondary schools in the United States. The company planned to file Chapter 11 in order to address its excessive debt load, but needed to arrange... View Details
- January 2014
- Case
Maricopa, Inc.: Finding the Right Treatment for Growth
The founders of Maricopa, Inc., a startup that sold proprietary hair-care products directly to salons, were preparing a board presentation to address the young company's inability to meet financial projections. While the products had caught on with customers, the... View Details
- 2014
- Working Paper
Management Practices, Relational Contracts and the Decline of General Motors
By: Susan Helper and Rebecca Henderson
General Motors was once regarded as one of the best managed and most successful firms in the world, but between 1980 and 2009 its share of the US market fell from 62.6 to 19.8 percent, and in 2009 the firm went bankrupt. In this paper we argue that the conventional... View Details
- 2014
- Case
Microfinance Services in Rural Areas--Farmers' Self-reliance Branch of CFPA Microfinance in Shangyi County
By: F. Warren McFarlan, Siqun Yang and Meihua Shen
Microfinance is introduced into China in the 1990s. It had gone through 3 phases since the beginning, namely the pilot phase when all Microfinance practices are sponsored by charity funds based on projects, the promotion phase when the government subsidized some... View Details
- 2014
- Teaching Note
Microfinance Services in Rural Areas--Farmers' Self-reliance Branch of CFPA Microfinance in Shangyi County (TN)
By: F. Warren McFarlan, Yang Siqun and Shen Meihua
Microfinance is introduced into China in the 1990s. It had gone through 3 phases since the beginning, namely the pilot phase when all Microfinance practices are sponsored by charity funds based on projects, the promotion phase when the government subsidized some... View Details
- Winter 2013
- Article
Fear of Rejection? Tiered Certification and Transparency
By: Emmanuel Farhi, Josh Lerner and Jean Tirole
The sub-prime crisis has shone a harsh spotlight on the practices of securities underwriters, which provided too many complex securities that proved to ultimately have little value. This uproar calls attention to the fact that the literature on intermediaries has... View Details
- November 2013 (Revised January 2015)
- Case
Restructuring JAL
By: Malcolm Baker, Adi Sunderam, Nobuo Sato and Akiko Kanno
Hideo Seto, the recently appointed chairman of the investment committee of the Enterprise Turnaround Initiative Corporation, must decide whether to push JAL group, Japan's largest airline, into bankruptcy or to act as a sponsor in an out-of-court restructuring. The... View Details
- November 2013
- Supplement
Arch Wireless, Inc. (B): Food for Vultures
By: Stuart C. Gilson
In 2002, a hedge fund investor acquires the distressed bank debt of a bankrupt wireless paging company and converts his holding into common stock of the reorganized entity. Determining his likely return from this investment is challenging, given that the entire... View Details
- Article
Financial Incentives for Exercise Adherence in Adults: Systematic Review and Meta-analysis
By: Marc S. Mitchell, Jack M. Goodman, David A. Alter, Leslie K. John, Paul I. Oh, Maureen T. Pakosh and Guy E. Faulkner
Context
Less than 5% of U.S. adults accumulate the required dose of exercise to maintain health. Behavioral economics has stimulated renewed interest in economic-based, population-level health interventions to address this issue. Despite widespread implementation of... View Details
- October 2013 (Revised December 2013)
- Teaching Note
Blackstone and the Sale of Citigroup's Loan Portfolio Teaching Note
By: Victoria Ivashina and David Scharfstein
- October 2013 (Revised November 2013)
- Case
Blackstone and the Sale of Citigroup's Loan Portfolio
By: Victoria Ivashina and David Scharfstein
The credit boom that preceded the 2007-2009 financial crisis led to several lending practices that exposed banks to large risks. In particular, when the financial crisis unraveled, there were several billion dollars' worth of leveraged buyout (LBO) loans that were... View Details