Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(6,232)
- Faculty Publications (1,531)
- January 2021
- Article
Turbulence, Firm Decentralization and Growth in Bad Times
By: Philippe Aghion, Nicholas Bloom, Brian Lucking, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
What is the optimal form of firm organization during “bad times”? We present a model of delegation within the firm to show that the effect is ambiguous. The greater turbulence following macro shocks may benefit decentralized firms because the value of local information... View Details
- December 2020 (Revised April 2021)
- Case
Arcos Dorados: A QSR Recovery Plan
By: Forest Reinhardt, José B. Alvarez, Jenyfeer Martinez Buitrago and Mariana Cal
Arcos Dorados—McDonald’s largest independent franchisee, covering Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC)—faced a pandemic that was disrupting the entire consumer foodservice business in 2020. With the exclusive right to own, operate, and sub-franchise McDonald’s... View Details
Keywords: Agribusiness; Animal-Based Agribusiness; Plant-Based Agribusiness; Customer Value and Value Chain; Income; Macroeconomics; Environmental Management; Environmental Sustainability; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Food; Health Pandemics; Crisis Management; Logistics; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Strategic Planning; Food and Beverage Industry; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Retail Industry; Latin America; Aruba; Guadeloupe; Martinique; Mexico; Panama; Costa Rica; Argentina; Brazil; Chile; Colombia; Ecuador; French Guiana; Peru; Uruguay; Venezuela; Puerto Rico; Trinidad and Tobago
- December 2020
- Article
Monetary Policy and Global Banking
By: Falk Bräuning and Victoria Ivashina
When central banks adjust interest rates, the opportunity cost of lending in local currency changes, but—in absence of frictions—there is no spillover effect to lending in other currencies. However, when equity capital is limited, global banks must benchmark domestic... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Party-State Capitalism in China
By: Margaret Pearson, Meg Rithmire and Kellee Tsai
The “state capitalism” model, in which the state retains a dominant role as owner or investor-shareholder amidst the presence of markets and private firms, has received increasing attention, with China cited as the main exemplar. Yet as models evolve, so has China’s... View Details
- November 2020 (Revised January 2021)
- Supplement
Bridge International Academies in 2020: Battling Headwinds to Solve Africa's Education Problems
By: Caroline M. Elkins, Tarun Khanna and Joyce J. Kim
By 2020, Bridge International Academies and its "school in a box" model had achieved great scale. By leveraging digital technology and public-private partnerships, they had reached one million children across Africa and India through hundreds of schools. However, the... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Determinants of Early-Stage Startup Performance: Survey Results
To explore determinants of new venture performance, the CEOs of 470 early-stage startups were surveyed regarding a broad range of factors related to their venture’s customer value proposition, product management, marketing, technology and operations, financial... View Details
- October 2020 (Revised December 2020)
- Case
AfricInvest: A Pan-African Investment Platform
By: Victoria Ivashina and Youssef Abdel Aal
The case is set in December 2018, when Ziad Oueslati, co-managing director and co-founder of AfricInvest, a leading pan-African private equity firm headquartered in Tunisia, was reflecting on the future direction of his firm. AfricInvest started as a traditional small... View Details
- 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
- 2022
- Working Paper
Flight to Safety: How Economic Downturns Affect Talent Flows to Startups
By: Shai Bernstein, Richard Townsend and Ting Xu
Using proprietary data from AngelList Talent, we study how individuals’ job search and application behavior changed during the COVID-19 downturn. We find that job seekers shifted their searches toward more established firms and away from early-stage startups, even... View Details
- September 2020
- Case
Disrupting Justice at RightNow: Persevere, Pivot or Perish
By: Shikhar Ghosh and Amir Reza Rezvani
The case examines the focus of an early stage company, and how an unexpected external incidence can threaten or void the business model. It encompasses issues such as defining and pivoting a business model, organizational requirements for a pivot, investor relations,... View Details
- September 2020 (Revised January 2021)
- Case
Catalys Pacific
In 2019, BT Slingsby founds Catalys Pacific, the first biotech “venture creation” fund in Tokyo. After convincing some of the biggest Japanese pharmaceutical firms to invest, BT hopes the fund can make a big splash and transform biotechnology innovation in Japan. After... View Details
Keywords: Pharmaceutical Companies; Biotech; Health Care; Entrepreneur; Innovation; International Business; Entrepreneurial Finance; Entrepreneurship; Finance; Innovation Strategy; Venture Capital; Strategy; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Pharmaceutical Industry; Biotechnology Industry; Tokyo
- September 2020 (Revised November 2020)
- Case
d.light
By: Michael Chu, Krishna G. Palepu and Dilyana Karadzhova Botha
Kenyan off-grid-solar pioneer d.light can power entire homes in rural Africa but must now decide how to fund the growth of its asset-heavy business model. Ned Tozun and Sam Goldman founded d.light in 2006 to transform lives through solar solutions enabling access to... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Long-Run Returns to Private Equity in Emerging Markets
By: Shawn Cole, Martin Melecky, Florian Mölders and Tristan Reed
We provide the first evidence on the long-run returns to private equity in emerging and frontier markets using the cash flows from every equity investment made by the International Finance Corporation across 130 countries over 58 years. Risk-adjusted returns are... View Details
- 2020
- Chapter
Reserve Accumulation, Sovereign Debt, and Exchange Rate Policy
By: Laura Alfaro and Fabio Kanczuk
In the past decade, foreign participation in local-currency bond markets in emerging countries increased dramatically. Additionally, emerging countries are increasingly deviating from inflation targeting regimes, managing their exchange rate and engaging in... View Details
- September 2020
- Article
The Rise of the Investor State: State Capital in the Chinese Economy
By: Meg Rithmire and Hao Chen
The nature and extent of the role of the Chinese state in the economy is fundamental to many empirical and theoretical debates about that country’s political economy. We document and explain the rise of a novel form of intervention on the part of the Chinese state: the... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Venture Capitalists and COVID-19
By: Paul A. Gompers, Will Gornall, Steven N. Kaplan and Ilya A. Strebulaev
We survey over 1,000 institutional and corporate venture capitalists (VCs) at more than 900 different firms to learn how their decisions and investments have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. We compare their survey answers to those provided by a large sample of... View Details
- August 2020 (Revised December 2020)
- Case
Latam Airlines and COVID-19: Seeking Bankruptcy Protection in the United States
By: Laura Alfaro, Mauricio Larrain, Carlos Vilches and Sarah Jeong
On May 26, 2020, Latam Airlines became the largest airline in the world to be driven to bankruptcy by COVID-19. With a complex debt structure and international investor composition, the company decided to file for bankruptcy protection in the United States, which... View Details
- August 2020 (Revised November 2024)
- Case
NextView Ventures
By: Jo Tango and Nori Gerardo Lietz
David Beisel, Rob Go, and Lee Hower are non-partners at different-and-established venture capital (VC) firms. They decide to leave their positions to start a new seed-stage VC firm. The case covers the genesis of the firm, the formulation of its strategy and... View Details
- August 2020 (Revised May 2021)
- Case
PayPal: The Next Chapter
By: Michael Porter, Mark Kramer and Annelena Lobb
Can a social purpose and stakeholder capitalism confer a powerful competitive advantage in the age of COVID-19? For PayPal, the answer is yes. After spinning off from eBay in a 2015 IPO, the company declared its purpose as "democratizing financial services" by ensuring... View Details
- August 2020
- Article
Financial Market Risk Perceptions and the Macroeconomy
By: Carolin E. Pflueger, Emil Siriwardane and Adi Sunderam
We propose a novel measure of risk perceptions: the price of volatile stocks (PVS), defined as the book-to-market ratio of low-volatility stocks minus the book-to-market ratio of high-volatility stocks. PVS is high when perceived risk directly measured from surveys and... View Details