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Publications
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(1,444)
- Faculty Publications (361)
- Article
Why Schumpeter Was Right: Innovation, Market Power and Creative Destruction in 1920s America
By: Tom Nicholas
Are firms with strong market positions powerful engines of technological progress? Joseph Schumpeter thought so, but his hypothesis has proved difficult to verify empirically. This article highlights Schumpeterian market-power and creative-destruction effects in a... View Details
- October 2003 (Revised February 2004)
- Background Note
Introduction to the Large-Scale Investment (LSI) Course at Harvard Business School
By: Benjamin C. Esty
Introduces students to the Large-Scale Investment (LSI) course taught at Harvard Business School. LSI is a case-based course about project finance that is designed for second-year MBA students. The course is about project finance, which involves creation of a legally... View Details
- October 2003
- Article
The Determinants of Board Structure at the Initial Public Offering
By: Malcolm Baker and Paul Gompers
This paper describes board size and composition and investigates the role of venture capital in a sample of 1,116 firms' initial public offerings. First, firms backed by venture capital have fewer insider and instrumental directors and more independent... View Details
- June 2003 (Revised August 2003)
- Case
Pension Policy at The Boots Company PLC
By: Luis M. Viceira and Akiko M. Mitsui
In early 2000, the trustees of the pension scheme at Boots considered a proposal to move 100% of the pension assets into a bond portfolio, which would be passively managed. The Boots Co. PLC was a leading retailer of cosmetics and toiletries in the United Kingdom, and... View Details
- 2003
- Conference Paper
Follow the Money: What Really Drives Technology Innovation in Construction
By: John D. Macomber
Technology enthusiasts, academics, and software companies remain concerned about the slow pace of innovation in the construction industry. Tools are widely available that seem to provide eminently sensible and clearly apparent improvement to the process of design and... View Details
- February 2003 (Revised May 2003)
- Case
Accel Partners' European Launch
By: G. Felda Hardymon and Josh Lerner
In spring 2001, with the venture market crashing all around, the London office of Accel Partners, a major west coast venture capital firm, needs to make a decision about investing in an Irish software company. As the first investment of the new European operation, the... View Details
- February 2003 (Revised January 2006)
- Case
AIT Group Plc
By: G. Felda Hardymon, Josh Lerner and Ann Leamon
A U.S. venture capital firm has just learned that the deal structure for purchasing an illiquid U.K. software firm is unacceptable to institutional investors. The group must decide if it still wants to go through with the deal. This decision hinges on whether the... View Details
- 2003
- Article
Venture Capital and Private Equity: A Course Overview
By: Josh Lerner
This paper describes a course exploring the private equity industry, "Venture Capital and Private Equity". The goals of this article are two-fold: to make the structure and content of the class available to a broader audience beyond the audience of MBAs and executives... View Details
- December 2002 (Revised October 2013)
- Case
Williams, 2002
By: Joshua Coval, Robin Greenwood and Peter Tufano
Williams, a Tulsa, Oklahoma-based firm in various energy businesses, must decide whether to accept a financing package offered by Berkshire Hathaway and Lehman Brothers. The proposed one-year credit facility would provide the firm with financial resources in a... View Details
- November 2002 (Revised May 2006)
- Case
Forest Stewardship Council
By: James E. Austin and Ezequiel Reficco
In just a few years the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) made impressive progress toward its mission of promoting "environmentally appropriate, socially beneficial, and economically viable management of the world's forests." By 2001, 25.5 million hectares of forests in... View Details
- August 2002 (Revised January 2003)
- Case
Australia-Japan Cable: Structuring the Project Company
By: Benjamin C. Esty and Carrie Ferman
In late September 1999, representatives from Telstri, Japan Telecom, and Teleglobe met to discuss the structure of the Australia-Japan Cable (AJC) project, a $520 million submarine cable system that would run from Australia to Japan. The sponsors, excited by the... View Details
- July 2002 (Revised August 2002)
- Supplement
Australia-Japan Cable: Structuring the Project Company
By: Benjamin C. Esty
Spreadsheet to (9-203-024). Download only. View Details
- June 2002
- Background Note
Note on the Equivalency of Methods for Discounting Cash Flows
Uses a numerical example to demonstrate that when you discount the cash flows to capital from a project at the weighted average cost of capital, you get same net present value result as you obtain when discounting the cash flows to equity at the cost of equity. Also... View Details
- May 2002
- Case
Venture Capital Fund Restructuring Vignettes (Abridged)
By: Paul A. Gompers
This case examines the changes in fund structures proposed by four venture capital firms in 2002: Accel Partners, Battery Ventures, Charles River Ventures, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The venture capital market has experienced a major downturn, and these... View Details
- April 2002 (Revised February 2003)
- Module Note
Teaching Project Finance: An Overview of the Large-Scale Investment Course
By: Benjamin C. Esty
Large-Scale Investment is a case-based course about project finance for second-year MBA students. Project finance involves the creation of a legally independent project company financed with nonrecourse debt for the purpose of investing in a single-purpose industrial... View Details
- February 2002 (Revised March 2002)
- Case
Battery Ventures
By: Josh Lerner, G. Felda Hardymon, Ann Leamon, Nitin Gupta and Sameer Bharadwaj
Todd Dagres, general partner of Battery Ventures, reflects on his firm's organization and its effectiveness in one particular deal. One of the perennial challenges of venture capital is the scaling of the firm. Usually regarded as a craft industry, venture firms tend... View Details
- February 2002 (Revised May 2003)
- Case
Endeca Technologies (A)
By: G. Felda Hardymon, Josh Lerner and Ann Leamon
Steve Papa, CEO of Endeca Technologies, must decide among two term sheets raising the same amount of badly needed money for his young software company. One deal is led by insiders and, is offered at a lower price. It continues a board that has worked very well and... View Details
- February 2002
- Article
Market Timing and Capital Structure
By: Malcolm Baker and Jeffrey Wurgler
It is well known that firms tend to raise equity when their market values are high relative to book and past market values. We document that the resulting effects on capital structure are very persistent. As a consequence, current capital structure is strongly related... View Details
- December 2001
- Case
Natural Pork Production
By: Ray A. Goldberg and James M Beagle
An entrepreneurial hog farmer's creative use of contracts and capital structure drives very successful growth and returns in a depressed commodity industry. View Details
- November 2001 (Revised December 2002)
- Case
Tracking Stocks at Genzyme (A)
Genzyme, a tracking stock pioneer, has used its innovative capital structure as a way to frame and grow its R&D-intensive business. Facing the question of how best to integrate a new acquisition into its tracking stock structure, Genzyme's top management is forced to... View Details