Publications

January 2001
Case

Valuing Project Achieve

By: Mihir A. Desai and Kathleen Luchs

Project Achieve is a start-up providing information management solutions for schools. Its founders see a need for software both to manage the volumes of information necessary to administer a school and to connect parents, teachers, and students in a more effective way.... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Valuation; Venture Capital; Cost of Capital; Cash Flow; Forecasting and Prediction

05 Sep 2006
Working Paper Summaries

Optimal Reserve Management and Sovereign Debt

Keywords: by Laura Alfaro & Fabio Kanczuk

April 2023 (Revised September 2023)
Case

Levels: The Remote, Asynchronous, Deep Work Management System

By: Joseph B. Fuller and George Gonzalez

Levels is a highly innovative startup in the health care space. They intend to revolutionize health by linking behavior—eating, exercise, sleeping, etc.—to changes in metabolism. They believe metabolic health can be managed through careful monitoring of changes in... View Details

Keywords: Applications and Software; Business Startups; Organizational Culture; Management Style; Technology Industry; United States

September 2021
Article

Diagnostic Bubbles

By: Pedro Bordalo, Nicola Gennaioli, Spencer Yongwook Kwon and Andrei Shleifer

We introduce diagnostic expectations into a standard setting of price formation in which investors learn about the fundamental value of an asset and trade it. We study the interaction of diagnostic expectations with two well-known mechanisms: learning from prices and... View Details

Keywords: Bubble; Speculation; Diagnostic Expectations; Price Bubble; Mathematical Methods

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April 12, 2022
Article

Evaluation of Individual and Ensemble Probabilistic Forecasts of COVID-19 Mortality in the United States

By: Estee Y. Cramer, Evan L. Ray, Velma K. Lopez, Johannes Bracher, Andrea Brennen, Alvaro J. Castro Rivadeneira, Michael Lingzhi Li and et al.

Short-term probabilistic forecasts of the trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States have served as a visible and important communication channel between the scientific modeling community and both the general public and decision-makers. Forecasting models... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19; Forecasting and Prediction; Health Pandemics; Mathematical Methods; Partners and Partnerships

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June 2024
Article

Valuing the Societal Impact of Medicines and Other Health Technologies: A User Guide to Current Best Practices

By: Jason Shafrin, Jaehong Kim, Joshua T. Cohen, Louis P. Garrison, Dana A. Goldman, Jalpa A. Doshi, Joshua Krieger, Darius N. Lakdawalla, Peter J. Neumann, Charles E. Phelps, Melanie D. Whittington and Richard Willke

This study argues that value assessment conducted from a societal perspective should rely on the Generalized Cost-Effectiveness Analysis (GCEA) framework proposed herein. Recently developed value assessment inventories—such as the Second Panel on Cost-Effectiveness’s... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Valuation; Cost vs Benefits; Society

June 2011 (Revised June 2012)
Case

Sephora Direct: Investing in Social Media, Video, and Mobile

By: Elie Ofek and Alison Berkley Wagonfeld

Julie Bornstein, senior vice president of Sephora Direct, is seeking to double her budget for social media and other digital marketing initiatives for 2011. A number of digital efforts implemented in the past two years seem to be bearing fruit and there is a desire to... View Details

Keywords: History; Leadership; Marketing Strategy; Marketing; Emerging Markets; Investment Return; Investment Funds; Budgets and Budgeting

October 2022
Case

Star Magnolia Capital: Becoming Experts at Finding Experts

By: Lauren Cohen, Hao Gao, River Ewing and Grace Headinger

Shinya Deguchi, Founder and Managing Partner of Star Magnolia Capital, a Shanghai-based multi-family office (MFO), considered how to convince a new prospective family that the MFO’s endowment model approach would best suit their needs. In recent decades, there has been... View Details

Keywords: China; Asia; Family Office; Shanghai; Financial Industry; Asset Management; Financial Instruments; Financial Management; Financial Strategy; Investment; Investment Return; Investment Portfolio; Human Capital; Family Business; Financial Services Industry; China; Shanghai

2017
Working Paper

Investment Timing with Costly Search for Financing

By: Samuel Antill

I develop a dynamic model of investment timing in which firms must first choose when to search for external financing. Search is costly and the arrival of investors is uncertain, leading to delay in financing and investment. Depending on parameters, my model can... View Details

Keywords: Real Options; Search And Bargaining; Time-varying Financial Conditions; Investment; Venture Capital; Mathematical Methods

SSRN

2009
Working Paper

Corrigendum to 'Resource-Monotonicity for House Allocation Problems'

By: Bettina-Elisabeth Klaus and Lars Ehlers

Ehlers and Klaus (2003) study so-called house allocation problems and claim to characterize all rules satisfying efficiency, independence of irrelevant objects, and resource-monotonicity on two preference domains (Ehlers and Klaus, 2003, Theorem 1).... View Details

Keywords: Equality and Inequality; Resource Allocation

Research Summary

Sovereign Debt as a Contingent Claim: A Quantitative Approach (joint with Fabio Kanczuk)

By: Laura Alfaro

We construct a dynamic equilibrium model with contingent service and adverse selection to quantitatively study sovereign debt. In the model, benefits of defaulting are tempered by higher future interest rates. For a wide parameter, the only equilibrium is one in which... View Details

November 2023
Article

Open Source Software and Global Entrepreneurship

By: Nataliya Langburd Wright, Frank Nagle and Shane Greenstein

This is the first study to consider the relationship between open source software (OSS) and entrepreneurship around the globe. This study measures whether country-level participation on the GitHub OSS platform affects the founding of innovative ventures, and where it... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Applications and Software; Business Ventures; Development Economics; Innovation and Invention; Global Range

SSRN

November 2023 (Revised April 2024)
Case

Khanmigo: Revolutionizing Learning with GenAI

By: William A. Sahlman, Allison M. Ciechanover and Emily Grandjean

Already a leader in the edtech space since its 2008 launch, Khan Academy was now one of the first edtech organizations to embrace generative artificial intelligence ("genAI"). In March 2023, Khan Academy began beta testing Khanmigo, a genAI “guide” and tutor built with... View Details

Keywords: Technology Adoption; Leading Change; Entrepreneurship; Risk and Uncertainty; Education; AI and Machine Learning; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Education Industry; Technology Industry; United States; San Francisco

14 Jun 2007
Working Paper Summaries

Evolution Analysis of Large-Scale Software Systems Using Design Structure Matrices and Design Rule Theory

Keywords: by Matthew J. LaMantia, Yuanfang Cai, Alan D. MacCormack & John Rusnak; Video Game; Web Services

Research Summary

The Role of Financial and Information Intermediaries in the Capital Markets

Hutton's research investigates the role of financial analysts and short sellers in the pricing of equity securities. Recently, Hutton examines (with Patricia Dechow and Richard Sloan) the role of sell-side analysts' earnings forecasts in the pricing of common equity... View Details

19 Oct 2021
Research & Ideas

Fed Up Workers and Supply Woes: What's Next for Dollar Stores?

question. You are definitely seeing competition for labor from Amazon, from Walmart. Dollar Tree and Family Dollar are not quite the pure model Dollar General has become, but they’re all at that low end of... View Details

Keywords: by Christine Pazzanese, Harvard Gazette; Retail

13 Oct 2006
Working Paper Summaries

Pricing Liquidity: The Quantity Structure of Immediacy Prices

Keywords: by George C. Chacko, Jakub W. Jurek & Erik Stafford

December 2019
Article

Costly Concessions: An Empirical Framework for Matching with Imperfectly Transferable Utility

By: Alfred Galichon, Scott Duke Kominers and Simon Weber

We introduce an empirical framework for models of matching with imperfectly transferable utility and unobserved heterogeneity in tastes. Our framework allows us to characterize matching equilibrium in a flexible way that includes as special cases the classic fully- and... View Details

Keywords: Sorting; Matching; Marriage Market; Intrahousehold Allocation; Imperfectly Transferable Utility; Marketplace Matching; Mathematical Methods