Publications

2021
Working Paper

No-fault Default, Chapter 11 Bankruptcy, and Financial Institutions

By: Robert C. Merton and Richard T. Thakor

This paper analyzes the costs and benefits of a no-fault-default debt structure as an alternative to the typical bankruptcy process. We show that the deadweight costs of bankruptcy can be avoided or substantially reduced through no-fault-default debt, which permits a... View Details

Keywords: No-fault Default; Chapter 11; Insolvency and Bankruptcy; Borrowing and Debt; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Financial Institutions; Contracts

2015
Book

Political Standards: Corporate Interest, Ideology, and Leadership in the Shaping of Accounting Rules for the Market Economy

By: Karthik Ramanna

There are certain institutions underlying our modern market-capitalist system that are largely outside the interest and understanding of the general public—e.g., rulemaking for bank capital adequacy, actuarial standards, accounting standards, and auditing practice. In... View Details

Keywords: Business And Society; Financial Institutions; Financial Reporting; GAAP; IFRS; Lobbying; Capitalism; Sustainability; Accounting; Finance; Business and Government Relations; Leadership; Financial Services Industry; Financial Services Industry; United States; China; India

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Article

Impact-Weighted Financial Accounts: A Paradigm Shift

By: Ethan Rouen and George Serafeim

The last decade has seen an exponential increase in corporate sustainability activities and efforts by investors to use these activities in their portfolio formation, valuation, and stewardship activities. This paper explains the need for a uniform strategy to measure... View Details

Keywords: Impact-Weighted Accounts; ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) Performance; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Measurement and Metrics; Standards

July 2022
Case

Yinglan Tan: Scaling a Venture Capital Firm in Southeast Asia

By: Josh Lerner and Richard Zhu

Yinglan Tan considered the future of his young Singapore-based venture capital firm. On the one hand, the intuition that was behind the initial creation of Insignia in 2017 had been proven correct. The venture capital market in Southeast Asia had grown rapidly, driven... View Details

Keywords: E-commerce; Scalability; Globalized Markets and Industries; Venture Capital; International Finance; Growth and Development; Expansion

Educators

11 Dec 2018
Research & Ideas

Free Trade Needs Nurturing—and Other Lessons from History

and started World War I, and it all collapsed. As percentages of GDP, we didn’t return to those earlier levels of global capital flows until the 1990s. Global free trade is not the natural order of things. Globalization is a project, and... View Details

Keywords: by Staff; Auto; Aerospace; Chemical; Consumer Products; Electronics; Energy; Industrial Products; Manufacturing; Shipping; Transportation

2024
Working Paper

Primary Capital Market Transactions and Index Funds

By: Marco Sammon and Chris Murray

We document the effects of mechanical buying by CRSP-index-tracking funds on post-IPO returns and IPO deal structure. Leveraging a difference-in-differences-style design built on a 2017 CRSP rule change, we find that expected index fund demand leads fast track IPOs to... View Details

Keywords: Investment Funds; Initial Public Offering; Investment Return; Price; Market Transactions; Financial Markets

SSRN

22 Aug 2005
Research & Ideas

Balancing the Future Against Today’s Needs

navigate conflicts both external and internal. Today, more than ever, markets exert continual pressure on organizations to cut costs and return capital to the bottom line, but building value demands that much of that same View Details

Keywords: by Paul Michelman

2024
Working Paper

Internal and External Capital Markets of Large Banks

By: Lina Lu, Marco Macchiavelli and Jonathan Wallen

Despite regulatory restrictions, large U.S. bank holding companies have sizable and dynamic internal capital markets. They raise long-term debt at the holding company and deposits at the commercial bank to internally make unsecured loans to affiliated broker-dealers.... View Details

Keywords: Banks and Banking; International Finance; Financial Markets

2024
Working Paper

Capital Market Integration and Growth across the United States

By: Leonardo D'Amico and Maxim Alekseev

What drives the integration of national financial markets and what are its consequences for regional growth? We digitize and collect US state-level banking data from 1953 to 1983 and document a tight link between high nominal short rates and financial integration,... View Details

Keywords: Interest Rates; Financial Markets; Economic Growth; Banks and Banking; Analytics and Data Science

24 Sep 2014
Op-Ed

The Climate Needs Aggressive CEO Leadership

Corporations are facing great uncertainty. For the world to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, the United States eventually will have to put a price on carbon dioxide emissions, as has been done by Europe, parts of Canada, and California. To plan for the... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Toffel & Auden Schendler; Energy; Utilities

01 Sep 2016
Cold Call Podcast

Behind Apple's Tax Situation, an Unprecedented Financial Policy

Keywords: Re: Mihir A. Desai; Technology; Consumer Products

Forthcoming
Article

The Allocation of Socially Responsible Capital

By: Daniel Green and Benjamin N. Roth

Portfolio allocation decisions increasingly incorporate social values. We develop a tractable framework to study how competition between investors to own socially valuable assets affects social welfare. Relative to the most common social-investing strategies, we... View Details

Keywords: Socially Responsible Investing; Investment Portfolio; Welfare; Social Issues; Investment Return

11 Feb 2008
Research & Ideas

Does Democracy Need a Marketing Manager?

Very little scholarship has been done around the subject of marketing and democracy. In fact, many believe that politics needs less marketing. Harvard Business School professor John A. Quelch and research associate Katherine E. Jocz see... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

August 2001
Teaching Note

Venture Capital Case Vignettes TN

By: G. Felda Hardymon, Josh Lerner and Ann Leamon

Teaching Note for (9-801-408). View Details

Keywords: Financial Services Industry

Article

Do Strict Capital Requirements Raise the Cost of Capital? Bank Regulation, Capital Structure and the Low Risk Anomaly

By: Malcolm Baker and Jeffrey Wurgler

Traditional capital structure theory predicts that reducing banks' leverage reduces the risk and cost of equity but does not change the weighted average cost of capital, and thus the rates for borrowers. We confirm that the equity of better-capitalized banks has lower... View Details

Keywords: Capital Structure; Banks and Banking; Banking Industry

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24 Sep 2014
Op-Ed

We Need a Miracle. New Nuclear Might Provide it.

On September 4, the US Energy Information Agency (EIA) published its 2014 International Energy Outlook. Earlier this year, the International Energy Agency (IEA) released its latest World Energy Investment Outlook. Both watchdogs tell us the same story. Energy... View Details

Keywords: by Joseph Lassiter; Energy; Utilities

2021
Working Paper

Elusive Safety: The New Geography of Capital Flows and Risk

By: Laura Alfaro, Ester Faia, Ruth Judson and Tim Schmidt-Eisenlohr

A confidential dataset with industry-level disaggregation of U.S. cross-border claims and liabilities, shows U.S. securities to be increasingly intermediated by tax-haven-financial-centers (THFC) and less regulated funds. These securities are risky, in... View Details

Keywords: Tax Havens; Financial Centers; Geography Of Flows; Profit Shifting; Tax Avoidance; Risk; Safe Assets; Hetergeneous Firms; Endogenous Entry; Endogenous Monitoring; Regulatory Arbitrage; Assets; Safety; Risk and Uncertainty; Capital; Global Range

2022
Working Paper

The Stock Market Value of Human Capital Creation

By: Matthias Regier and Ethan Rouen

We develop a measure of firm-year-specific human capital investment from publicly disclosed personnel expenses (PE) and examine the stock market valuation of this investment. Measuring the future value of PE (PEFV) based on the relation between lagged... View Details

Keywords: Intangibles; Market Valuation; Human Capital; Stocks; Financial Markets; Valuation

SSRN