Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(2,002)
- Faculty Publications (349)
- March 2009
- Supplement
Bausch & Lomb, Inc.: Pressure to Perform (B)
By: Robert L. Simons
This case breaks the existing (and still available) Bausch & Lomb, Inc.: Pressure to Perform case into an (A) and a (B) case. The (B) case can be used in class to demonstrate the serious consequences of overly aggressive accounting. The (B) case should be used after... View Details
- March 2009
- Article
Earnings Management and Corporate Tax Shelters, and Book-Tax Alignment
By: Mihir Desai and Dhammika Dharmapala
This paper reviews recent evidence analyzing the link between earnings management and corporate tax avoidance and considers the implications for how policymakers should evaluate the financial reporting environment facing firms. A real-world tax shelter is dissected to... View Details
- March 2009
- Article
The Impact of Shareholder Activism on Financial Reporting and Compensation: The Case of Employee Stock Options Expensing
By: F. Ferri and Tatiana Sandino
We examine the economic consequences of more than 150 shareholder proposals to expense employee stock options (ESO) submitted during the proxy seasons of 2003 and 2004, the first case in which the SEC allowed a shareholder vote on an accounting matter. Our results... View Details
- 2009
- Other Unpublished Work
The Pecora Hearings
By: David Moss, Cole Bolton and Eugene Kintgen
In 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, the Senate Banking Committee began a much-publicized investigation of the nation's financial sector. The hearings, which came to be known as the Pecora hearings after the Banking Committee's lead counsel Ferdinand... View Details
- November 2008 (Revised November 2024)
- Case
The Fall of Enron
By: Paul Healy and Krishna Palepu
The case traces the rise of Enron, covering the company's business innovations, personnel management, and risk management processes. It then examines the company's dramatic fall including the extension of its trading model into questionable new businesses, the... View Details
- November 2008
- Journal Article
Can Research Committees Add Value for Investors? An Analysis of Lehman Brothers' Ten Uncommon Values® Recommendations
By: Boris Groysberg, Paul M. Healy and Yang Gui
Since 1949 Lehman Brothers has used an investment committee to select the top ten recommendations made by its analysts each year. We examine the performance of this committee's recommendations and find that on average its selections generated abnormal returns of 2.7%... View Details
- October 2008 (Revised October 2009)
- Case
New Century Financial Corporation
By: Krishna G. Palepu, Suraj Srinivasan and Aldo Sesia
After years of rapid growth and stock price appreciation, New Century Financial Corporation, one of the largest subprime loan originators in the U.S., reported accounting problems in early 2007. The resulting liquidity crisis forced the company to file for Chapter 11... View Details
- 2008
- Working Paper
Just Keep My Money! Supporting Tax-time Savings with U.S. Savings Bonds
By: Peter Tufano
This paper reports the results of a 2007 experiment testing if specific process simplification can foster increased take-up rates for savings products, particularly by low-to-moderate income (LMI) households. Tax refund recipients at certain H&R Block tax preparation... View Details
- 2008
- Working Paper
Signaling Firm Performance Through Financial Statement Presentation: An Analysis Using Special Items
By: Edward J. Riedl and Suraj Srinivasan
This paper investigates whether managers' presentation of special items within the financial statements reflects economic performance or opportunism. Specifically, we assess special items presented as a separate line item on the income statement (income statement... View Details
- July–August 2008
- Article
Interview with a Quality Leader: Regina E. Herzlinger on Consumer-Driven Healthcare
Regina E. Herzlinger is the Nancy R. McPherson Professor of Business Administration Chair at the Harvard Business School, Cambridge, MA. She received her bachelor's degree from MIT and her doctorate from the Harvard Business School The first woman to be tenured and... View Details
- June 2008
- Article
'Thar' She Blows: Can Bubbles Be Rekindled with Experienced Subjects?
By: Reshmaan Hussam, David Porter and Vernon Smith
We report 28 new experiment sessions consisting of up to three experience levels to examine the robustness of learning and “error” elimination among participants in a laboratory asset market and its effect on price bubbles. Our answer to the title question is: “yes.”... View Details
- 2008
- Working Paper
Welfare Payments and Crime
By: C. Fritz Foley
This paper tests the hypothesis that the timing of welfare payments affects criminal activity. Analysis of daily reported incidents of major crimes in twelve U.S. cities reveals an increase in crime over the course of monthly welfare payment cycles. This increase... View Details
- April 2008 (Revised October 2008)
- Case
TD Canada Trust (A): The Green and the Red
By: Dennis Campbell and Brent Kazan
The case series illustrates the role of performance measurement and analytics in translating TD-Canada Trust's service model of "comfortable banking" into operational terms. In 2000, in a banking market where consumers and regulators were typically hostile to mergers... View Details
- 2008
- Working Paper
Consumer Demand for Prize-Linked Savings: A Preliminary Analysis
By: P. Tufano, Nick Maynard and Jan-Emmanuel De Neve
This paper reports on a small-scale survey of the potential American demand for prize-linked savings accounts, an account that awards prizes as part of the saving product's return. In October 2006, Centra Credit Union launched a prize-linked savings pilot. As part of... View Details
- December 2007
- Article
Applying Modern Risk Management to Equity and Credit Analysis
By: Robert C. Merton
Traditional conventions of accounting and actuarial science distort the valuation of capital risk in corporations with pension plans because under these conventions, pension assets and liabilities are not included in balance sheet calculations. The modern risk... View Details
- November 2007
- Case
The 1995 Release of the Institutional Investor Research Report: The Impact of New Information
By: Boris Groysberg, Nitin Nohria and Derek Haas
In 1995, Institutional Investor magazine began selling a complete ranking of the best equity research analysts. This report allowed research firms to assess the relative quality of each analyst across the industry, and this enabled firms to know nearly as much about... View Details
- 2007
- Book
An Experiment in Fair Value Accounting? The State of the Art in Research and Thought Leadership on Accounting for Life Assurance in the UK and Continental Europe
By: Joanne G Horton, Richard H. Macve and George Serafeim
"Fair value" is currently the central topic of debate in the development of accounting standards. While it has now been defined to mean an exit price in US GAAP, the IASB is still considering its own definition, and some commentators are arguing for versions of entry... View Details
- 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
- February 2007 (Revised March 2007)
- Case
UBS and Climate Change--Warming Up to Global Action?
By: Felix Oberholzer-Gee, Forest L. Reinhardt and Elizabeth Raabe
Marco Suter, Executive Vice-Chairman, UBS Board of Directors, carefully studied the chart on his desk. It showed the public commitment of major financial institutions to help mitigate global warming. Evidently, UBS lagged behind its competitors. The graph was part of a... View Details