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- Faculty Publications (853)
- June 2020 (Revised February 2021)
- Case
Accounting for Leases at American Airlines (A)
By: Jonas Heese, Gerardo Pérez Cavazos and Julia Kelley
In March 2020, as coronavirus reduced demand for air travel, an analyst was forecasting American Airlines’ (American’s) first quarter financial results. To develop a forecast, she needed to familiarize herself with Accounting Standards Update (ASU) 2016-02, “Leases... View Details
Keywords: Accounting; Financial Reporting; Financial Statements; Finance; Governance; Corporate Accountability; Corporate Governance; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Governing and Advisory Boards; Leasing; Accounting Industry; Air Transportation Industry; North and Central America; United States
- June 2020 (Revised February 2021)
- Supplement
Accounting for Leases at American Airlines (B)
By: Jonas Heese, Gerardo Pérez Cavazos and Julia Kelley
This is a supplement to the “Accounting for Leases at American Airlines (A)” case. The (B) case describes American Airlines’ financial results for the first quarter of 2020, as well as the continuing effects of coronavirus on the airline industry. View Details
Keywords: Accounting; Financial Reporting; Financial Statements; Finance; Governance; Corporate Accountability; Corporate Governance; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Governing and Advisory Boards; Leasing; Health Pandemics; Accounting Industry; Air Transportation Industry; North and Central America; United States
- 2021
- Conference Presentation
An Algorithmic Framework for Fairness Elicitation
By: Christopher Jung, Michael J. Kearns, Seth Neel, Aaron Leon Roth, Logan Stapleton and Zhiwei Steven Wu
We consider settings in which the right notion of fairness is not captured by simple mathematical definitions (such as equality of error rates across groups), but might be more complex and nuanced and thus require elicitation from individual or collective stakeholders.... View Details
- June 2020
- Article
Lazy Prices
By: Lauren Cohen, Christopher J. Malloy and Quoc Nguyen
We explore the implications of a subtle "default" choice that firms make in their regular reporting practices, namely that firms typically repeat what they most recently reported. Using the complete history of regular quarterly and annual filings by U.S. corporations... View Details
- May 21, 2020
- Editorial
Primary Care Is Hurting: Why Aren't Private Insurers Pitching In?
By: Leemore S. Dafny and J. Michael McWilliams
Primary care clinicians are the front line for patients with suspected infection. We rely on them to diagnose, triage, and manage patients with potential or confirmed COVID infections. They are also responsible for keeping non-COVID medical conditions under control... View Details
- May 2020
- Case
Big Boom Beverages: Fight or Flight?
By: Stephen A. Greyser and William Ellet
Four college friends market a beverage that combines ingredients like those in a drink they consumed in college bars. It includes a caffeinated energy drink, malt liquor, and a soft drink flavoring. They launch the business, Big Boom Beverages (BBB), with their own... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Anchors Aweigh: Analysis of Anchor Limited Partner Investors in Impact Investment Funds
By: Shawn A. Cole, T. Robert Zochowski, Fanele Mashwama and Heather McPherson
This note describes results from a survey of “anchor investors” in impact funds. Anchor investors
are described as “generally the first investor to make a substantial capital commitment to a fund,”
(according to the Global Impact Investing Network, “GIIN”) and their... View Details
- May 2020
- Article
Inventory Auditing and Replenishment Using Point-of-Sales Data
By: Achal Bassamboo, Antonio Moreno and Ioannis Stamatopoulos
Spoilage, expiration, damage due to employee/customer handling, employee theft, and customer shoplifting usually are not reflected in inventory records. As a result, records often report phantom inventory, i.e., units of good not available for sale. We derive an... View Details
- Article
Paper Versus Practice: A Field Investigation of Integrity Hotlines
By: Eugene Soltes
In an effort to motivate firms to more rapidly detect potential misconduct, legislators, regulators, and enforcement agencies incentivize firms to have integrity or “whistleblowing” hotlines. These hotlines provide individuals an opportunity to report alleged... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Scientific Production: An Exploration into Organization, Resource Allocation, and Funding
By: Jerry Thursby, Marie Thursby, Karim R. Lakhani, Kyle R. Myers, Nina Cohodes, Sarah Bratt, Dennis Byrski, Hannah Cohoon and Maria Roche
Production of scientific knowledge is core to civilizational advancement in economic and material wellbeing of societies. Despite its fundamental importance, however, a systematic effort to quantitatively study the factors underlying scientific production, particularly... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Spreading the Health: Americans' Estimated and Ideal Distributions of Death and Health(care)
By: Sorapop Kiatpongsan and Michael I. Norton
The 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act intensified debates over the role of government in the distribution of healthcare. A nationally-representative sample of Americans reported their estimated and ideal distributions of healthcare (unmet need for... View Details
- April 2020 (Revised August 2020)
- Case
WeWork—November 2018
By: Paul A. Gompers, Patrick Sweeney and Alex Gachanja
In May 2017, SoftBank announced the official launch of the Vision Fund — which promptly became the largest technology-focused investment fund in the world, with nearly $100 billion in capital under its management. Reports from a few months prior hinted that SoftBank... View Details
- Article
Signing at the Beginning vs at the End Does Not Decrease Dishonesty
By: Ariella S. Kristal, A.V. Whillans, Max Bazerman, Francesca Gino, Lisa Shu, Nina Mazar and Dan Ariely
Honest reporting is essential for society to function well. However, people frequently lie when asked to provide information, such as misrepresenting their income to save money on taxes. A landmark finding published in PNAS (Shu, Mazar, Gino, Ariely, and Bazerman,... View Details
- March 21, 2020
- Editorial
When We're Wrong, It's Our Responsibility as Scientists to Say So
By: Ariella S. Kristal, A. V. Whillans, Max Bazerman, Francesca Gino, Lisa Shu, Nina Mazar and Dan Ariely
We tried to reproduce our 2012 paper on how to make people report their income more honestly—and we ended up refuting it. View Details
- February 2020
- Case
Highfields Capital and McDonald's
By: Mark Egan and Robin Greenwood
McDonald’s reported its fifth consecutive quarter of declining same-store sales growth in early 2015. Despite McDonald’s recent poor performance, Jonathon S. Jacobson, the founder and Chief Investment Officer of Boston-based Highfields Capital Management, had initiated... View Details
- February 2020
- Case
Fake News at DER SPIEGEL (A)
By: Aiyesha Dey, Jonas Heese and Tonia Labruyere
The case discusses the strategy of DER SPIEGEL, the leading news magazine in Germany, in the aftermath of the discovery of a fake reporting scandal. It had come to light that one of DER SPIEGEL’s own reporters had falsified and made up entire articles for years,... View Details
- 2020
- Chapter
Immigrant Networking and Collaboration: Survey Evidence from CIC
By: Sari Pekkala Kerr and William R. Kerr
Networking and the giving and receiving of advice outside of one's own firm are important features of entrepreneurship and innovation. We study how immigrants and natives utilize the potential networking opportunities provided by CIC, formerly known as the Cambridge... View Details
- February 2020 (Revised February 2022)
- Case
Sustainable Product Management at Solvay
By: George Serafeim, Vincent Dessain and Mette Fuglsang Hjortshoej
In November 2019, Ilham Kadri, CEO of Solvay, a Belgian specialty chemicals and advanced materials group, with annual revenues of more than €10 billion in 2018, announced the group’s mid-term strategy, eight months after she took the helm as Solvay’s 11th CEO. The case... View Details
Keywords: Sustainability; Sustainable Business And Innovation; Sustainability Management; Sustainable Development; Management Accounting; Innovation; Carbon Emissions; Sustainability Reporting; Sustainability Targets; Target-setting; Product; Management; Transformation; Growth and Development Strategy; Climate Change; Environmental Sustainability; Chemical Industry; Europe; Belgium
- 2020
- Working Paper
A Framework for Product Impact-Weighted Accounts
By: George Serafeim and Katie Trinh
While there has been significant progress in the measurement of an organization’s environmental and social impacts from its operations, metrics to evaluate the impact of products once they come to market lag far behind. In this paper, we provide a framework for... View Details
- February 3, 2020
- Article
Should Your Family Business Have a "No In-Laws" Policy?
By: Christina R. Wing and Rohit K. Gera
Should in-laws, even if they’re highly qualified, work in the family business? While there’s no “one-size-fits-all” guideline, if you are considering involving in-laws in the family business, it’s important to think through some general policies in advance. Document a... View Details