Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(2,082)
- Faculty Publications (432)
- April 2012
- Article
Broadening Focus: Spillovers, Complementarities and Specialization in the Hospital Industry
By: Jonathan R. Clark and Robert S. Huckman
The long-standing argument that focused operations outperform others stands in contrast to claims about the benefits of broader operational scope. The performance benefits of focus are typically attributed to reduced complexity, lower uncertainty, and the development... View Details
- Spring 2012
- Article
The Need for Sector-Specific Materiality and Sustainability Reporting Standards
By: Robert G. Eccles, Michael P. Krzus, Jean Rogers and George Serafeim
Even though the supply of sustainability information has increased considerably in the last decade, companies are still failing to disclose material information in a comparable format. We believe this has two downsides. On the one hand, companies are not adequately... View Details
- March 2012
- Article
The Incentive Bubble
By: Mihir Desai
The past three decades have seen American capitalism quietly transformed by a single, powerful idea—that financial markets are a suitable tool for measuring performance and structuring compensation. Stock instruments for managers, high-powered incentive contracts for... View Details
- February 2012
- Case
Henkel: Building a Winning Culture
By: Robert Simons and Natalie Kindred
This case illustrates a CEO-led organizational transformation driven by stretch goals, performance measurement, and accountability. When Kasper Rorsted became CEO of Henkel, a Germany-based producer of personal care, laundry, and adhesives products, in 2008, he was... View Details
- December 2011
- Article
CEO and Board Chair Roles: To Split or Not to Split?
By: Aiyesha Dey, Ellen Engel and Xiaohui Liu
We examine the performance and compensation implications of firms' decisions to combine the roles of CEO and board chairman (duality). We document that firms that split the CEO and chairman positions due to investor pressure have significantly lower announcement... View Details
- December 2011
- Case
PepsiCo India: Performance with Purpose
In 2010, PepsiCo India's management is working to translate PepsiCo's new mission, "Performance with Purpose," into practice in the India market. The mission calls for continued financial performance and market leadership, as well as greater emphasis on healthy... View Details
- November 29, 2011
- Article
The Role of The Board in Creating a Sustainable Strategy
By: Robert G. Eccles, Ioannis Ioannou and George Serafeim
While conceptually elegant, the belief that a corporation's role is to maximize value for shareholders is under increasing challenge as society's expectations for companies change. An equally elegant new concept that takes account of these dual pressures has yet to... View Details
Keywords: Value Creation; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Corporate Strategy; Business and Shareholder Relations; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Performance Expectations; Governing and Advisory Boards; Management Practices and Processes; Decisions; Risk and Uncertainty; Cost vs Benefits; Information
- November 2011
- Article
Corporate Governance When Founders Are Directors
By: Feng Li and Suraj Srinivasan
We examine CEO compensation, CEO retention policies, and M&A decisions in firms where founders serve as a director with a non-founder CEO (founder-director firms). We find that founder-director firms offer a different mix of incentives to their CEOs than other firms.... View Details
- October 2011 (Revised January 2012)
- Case
PepsiCo, Performance with Purpose, Achieving the Right Global Balance
- September 2011 (Revised February 2013)
- Case
Trucost: Valuing Corporate Environmental Impacts
By: Michael W. Toffel and Stephanie van Sice
Trucost provided corporate environmental performance data and analysis to institutional investors and corporate managers, but after operating for a decade had yet to achieve profitability. Trucost was struggling to effectively differentiate its high quality products... View Details
- September 2011
- Article
A Global Leader's Guide to Managing Business Conduct
An extensive global survey by three Harvard Business School professors finds that employees agree on core standards of corporate behavior. But meeting those standards will require new approaches to managing business conduct. The compliance and ethics programs of most... View Details
- September – October 2011
- Article
The Rise and Consequences of Corporate Sustainability Reporting
By: Ioannis Ioannou and George Serafeim
For many decades the cornerstone of corporate reporting has been financial information that is presented in a company's annual, semi-annual, and quarterly reports. These comprehensive financial reports—required by law for public companies in most countries... View Details
- 2011
- Working Paper
The Organization of Firms Across Countries
By: Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
We argue that social capital as proxied by trust increases aggregate productivity by affecting the organization of firms. To do this we collect new data on the decentralization of investment, hiring, production, and sales decisions from Corporate Headquarters to local... View Details
- July 2011 (Revised September 2011)
- Case
CEO Compensation at GE: A Decade with Jeff Immelt
By: V.G. Narayanan and Lisa Brem
When ISS, a large shareholder advisory group, recommended a "no" vote on Jeff Immelt's award of 2 million stock options in April 2011, GE's compensation committee had to decide whether to rescind or amend the award or ignore the ISS recommendation. Was Immelt's 2010... View Details
- July–August 2011
- Article
Putting Business Models Under the Microscope
By: K. Merchant, Tatiana Sandino and D. Huelsbeck
The article provides advice for financial managers on evaluating business models for corporate performance measurement. Emphasis is given to a study sponsored by the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) that examined the business model of a medical... View Details
- May 2011 (Revised March 2012)
- Case
InterfaceRAISE: Sustainability Consulting
By: Michael W. Toffel, Robert G. Eccles and Casey Taylor
InterfaceRAISE is a sustainability management consulting firm created to leverage the capabilities of its parent company Interface Inc., a carpet manufacturer recognized as a global leader in corporate environmental sustainability. This case illustrates the challenges... View Details
Keywords: Problems and Challenges; Integrated Corporate Reporting; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Entrepreneurship; Performance; Environmental Accounting; Profit; Marketing Strategy; Human Resources; Business Model; Leveraged Buyouts; Salesforce Management; Consulting Industry; Manufacturing Industry
- 9 May 2011 - 11 May 2011
- Conference Presentation
How Firms Respond to Mandatory Information Disclosure
By: Anil Doshi, Michael Toffel and Glen W. S. Dowell
When new institutional pressures arise, which organizations are particularly likely to resist or
acquiesce? When subjected to new information disclosure mandates, an increasingly popular form
of market-based government regulation, which types of organizations are... View Details
- May 2011
- Article
The Growing Power of Non-financial Reports
By: Ioannis Ioannou and George Serafeim
We are exploring the value of forcing corporations to issue sustainability reports, which provide information about corporate performance in terms of social, environmental and governance issues. In a breakthrough study they asked, what is the effect of mandatory... View Details
- March 2011
- Article
What Do Dividends Tell Us About Earnings Quality
By: Douglas Skinner and Eugene F. Soltes
Over the past 30 years, there have been significant changes in the distribution of earnings (cross-sectional variation has increased, with increasing left skewness) as well as in corporate payout policy, with many fewer firms paying dividends and the emergence of stock... View Details
Keywords: Distribution; Business Earnings; Change; Policy; Stocks; Investment Return; Performance Consistency; Quality
- 2011
- Working Paper
What Do CEOs Do?
By: Oriana Bandiera, Luigi Guiso, Andrea Prat and Raffaella Sadun
We develop a methodology to collect and analyze data on CEOs' time use. The idea-sketched out in a simple theoretical set-up-is that CEO time is a scarce resource and its allocation can help us identify the firm's priorities as well as the presence of governance... View Details