Publications

10 Oct 2013
Working Paper Summaries

Managing Churn to Maximize Profits

Keywords: by Aurélie Lemmens & Sunil Gupta; Retail

July 2024
Case

RMZ 4.0: 'How Fast Do We Want to Run?'

By: Boris Groysberg and Sarah L. Abbott

In 2023, RMZ Corporation (“RMZ”) a large family-owned real estate firm based in Bengaluru, India, announced plans to transform from a commercial real estate developer to a diversified alternative asset owner. Over the next 5 years, RMZ looked to grow its real estate... View Details

Keywords: International Expansion; Growth Management; Family Business; Talent and Talent Management; Goals and Objectives; Transformation; Growth and Development Strategy; Diversification; Change Management; Global Strategy; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Real Estate Industry; India

September 2018
Case

Clayton, Dubilier & Rice at 40

By: Josh Lerner, Abhijit Tagade and Terrence Shu

In 2018, private equity firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice celebrated its 40th anniversary and its 20th year under the leadership of CEO Don Gogel. In those decades, CD&R showed solid portfolio performance and generated strong returns for its investors - accomplishments... View Details

Keywords: Finance; Succession; Buyout; Leveraged Buyout; Turnaround; Operations; Private Equity; Management Succession; Business Model; Leveraged Buyouts; Trends; Organizational Change and Adaptation

March 1985 (Revised November 1985)
Case

Wilmington Tap and Die

By: Robert S. Kaplan

The general manager of a division manufacturing taps and dies must decide whether to continue a major capital investment program. The program was designed to replace aging mechanical machines with modern, electronically controlled equipment. A post-audit, after an... View Details

Keywords: Capital Budgeting; Investment; Accounting Audits; Cost Management; Technological Innovation; Information Technology; Performance Productivity; Production; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Manufacturing Industry

20 Jul 2013
News

Executive Education program helps build nonprofit management skills

Research Summary

Time Varying Expected Returns, Stochastic Dividend Yields, and Default Probabilities: Linking the Credit Risk and Equity Literature (with George Chacko and Jens Hilscher)

In standard structural bond pricing models, the firm defaults once the market value of assets has fallen below a threshold. Expected returns, or at least dividend yields, are assumed to be constant, which implies that any asset value movement is permanent and has the... View Details

Research Summary

Output and asset price fluctuations

What are the sources of business cycles? How are these shocks propagated in the economy? Why are their effects so persistent? How can we explain asset price fluctuations? How are shocks transmitted internationally?To study these questions, I have developed a series... View Details

October 2022
Article

Sovereign Risk, Currency Risk, and Corporate Balance Sheets

By: Wenxin Du and Jesse Schreger

We provide a comprehensive account of the evolution of the currency composition of sovereign and corporate external borrowing by emerging markets from 2003 to 2017. We show that a higher reliance on foreign currency debt by the corporate sector is associated with... View Details

Keywords: Currency; International Finance

2023
Article

Towards Bridging the Gaps between the Right to Explanation and the Right to Be Forgotten

By: Himabindu Lakkaraju, Satyapriya Krishna and Jiaqi Ma

The Right to Explanation and the Right to be Forgotten are two important principles outlined to regulate algorithmic decision making and data usage in real-world applications. While the right to explanation allows individuals to request an actionable explanation for an... View Details

Keywords: Analytics and Data Science; AI and Machine Learning; Decision Making; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms

March 2009 (Revised May 2009)
Background Note

Executing Strategy

By: J. Bruce Harreld

This is a note to introduce the principles for effectively implementing a new strategy. It emphasizes the interdependence of strategy and execution in developing and sustaining superior competitive performance. Primarily based on the notion that strategy should be a... View Details

Keywords: Alignment; Competitive Strategy; Management Teams

Himabindu "Hima" Lakkaraju is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. She is also a faculty affiliate in the Department of Computer Science at Harvard University, the Harvard Data Science Initiative, Center for Research on... View Details

Article

Quantile Evaluation, Sensitivity to Bracketing, and Sharing Business Payoffs

By: Y. Grushka-Cockayne, K. C. Lichtendahl, V.R.R. Jose and R.L. Winkler

From forecasting competitions to conditional value-at-risk requirements, the use of multiple quantile assessments is growing in practice. To evaluate them, we use a rule from the general class of proper scoring rules for a forecaster’s multiple quantiles of a single... View Details

Keywords: Forecast; Aggregation; Operations; Forecasting and Prediction; Mathematical Methods

August 2018
Article

Extrapolation and Bubbles

By: Nicholas Barberis, Robin Greenwood, Lawrence Jin and Andrei Shleifer

We present an extrapolative model of bubbles. In the model, many investors form their demand for a risky asset by weighing two signals: an average of the asset’s past price changes and the asset’s degree of overvaluation. The two signals are in conflict, and investors... View Details

Keywords: Bubble; Extrapolation; Volume; Price Bubble; Mathematical Methods

April 2012 (Revised October 2013)
Case

eBay, Inc. and Amazon.com (A)

By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Anant Thaker

This case has been designed to explore strategic interactions among organizations with different business models. The case considers how a competitor successfully challenged the incumbent in a platform market defined by strong network effects and high switching costs.... View Details

December 2017 (Revised January 2018)
Teaching Note

Bega Cheese: Bidding to Bring Vegemite Back Home

By: Benjamin C. Esty, Lauren G. Pickle and Greg Saldutte

In January 2017, the leadership team of Bega Cheese—the Australian dairy company—was considering a bid for Mondelēz International’s Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) grocery business which included several leading consumer brands such as Vegemite, the iconic Australian... View Details

Article

Laws versus Contracts: Legal Origins, Shareholder Protections, and Ownership Concentration in Brazil, 1890–1950

By: Aldo Musacchio

This article examines some of the institutional conditions that facilitated the development of equity markets in Brazil. A critical factor was the addition of protections for investors to corporate bylaws, which enabled relatively large corporations in Brazil to... View Details

Keywords: Voting; Equity; Financial Markets; Investment; Governance Controls; Business History; Ownership Stake; Brazil

Research Summary

Interviewing and Dating in Two-Sided Matching Markets: Coordination and Communication (joint with M. Schwarz)

We introduce the interview assignment problem, which generalizes the one-to-one matching model of Gale Shapley (1962) by including a stage of costly information acquisition. Agents do not know their preferences over potential partners unless they choose to conduct... View Details

2023
Working Paper

Causal Interpretation of Structural IV Estimands

By: Isaiah Andrews, Nano Barahona, Matthew Gentzkow, Ashesh Rambachan and Jesse M. Shapiro

We study the causal interpretation of instrumental variables (IV) estimands of nonlinear, multivariate structural models with respect to rich forms of model misspecification. We focus on guaranteeing that the researcher's estimator is sharp zero consistent, meaning... View Details

Keywords: Mathematical Methods