Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(3,295)
- Faculty Publications (426)
- January 2012 (Revised January 2014)
- Case
Mexico City Water Shortage
By: John D. Macomber, Regina Garcia-Cuellar, Griffin H. James and Frederik Nellemann
In this case, a property company, a water privatizer, and municipal engineers explore the causes of and solutions to a severe water shortage in Mexico City, a great global capital. The protagonist is a real estate investor doing due diligence on the magnitude of the... View Details
- 2012
- Article
The Excess Burden of Government Indecision
By: Francisco J. Gomes, Laurence J. Kotlikoff and Luis M. Viceira
Governments are known for procrastinating when it comes to resolving painful policy problems. Whatever the political motives for waiting to decide, procrastination distorts economic decisions relative to what would arise with early policy resolution. In so doing, it... View Details
- December 2011 (Revised May 2015)
- Case
Aviva Investors
By: George Serafeim
The Aviva Investors case describes the challenge of integrating sustainability considerations into the strategy and business practices of companies and into the decision making process of the investment community. Steve Waygood, Chief Responsible Investment Officer at... View Details
Keywords: Investing; Investment Management; Shareholder Activism; Disclosure; Stock Exchanges; Sustainability; Sustainable Development; Sustainability Reporting; ESG; ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) Performance; Social Impact; Activism; Investment; Management; Business and Shareholder Relations; Environmental Sustainability; United Kingdom
- December 2011
- Article
Do Powerful Politicians Cause Corporate Downsizing?
By: Lauren Cohen, Joshua Coval and Christopher J. Malloy
This paper employs a new empirical approach for identifying the impact of government spending on the private sector. Our key innovation is to use changes in congressional committee chairmanship as a source of exogenous variation in state-level federal expenditures. In... View Details
- November 2011
- Case
Pacific Grove Spice Company
By: William E. Fruhan and Craig Stephenson
Pacific Grove Spice Company is a profitable, rapidly growing manufacturer, marketer, and distributor of quality spices and seasonings. The company's business model requires significant investment in accounts receivable, inventory, and fixed assets to support sales.... View Details
- October 2011 (Revised March 2013)
- Case
Yale University Investments Office: February 2011
By: Josh Lerner and Ann Leamon
David Swensen and the Investments Office staff must decide whether to continue to allocate the bulk of the university's endowment to illiquid investments—hedge funds, private equity, real estate—given the impact of the recent market turmoil. The case explores the risks... View Details
- September 2011
- Case
AXA Private Equity: The Diana Investment
By: Michael J. Roberts and William A. Sahlman
The case focuses on an investment made by AXA Private Equity, a French manufacturer of food ingredients. The investment is made at the height of the financial markets, and financed with significant debt. Soon thereafter, the financial crisis impacted the company's... View Details
- September 2011 (Revised February 2013)
- Case
Trucost: Valuing Corporate Environmental Impacts
By: Michael W. Toffel and Stephanie van Sice
Trucost provided corporate environmental performance data and analysis to institutional investors and corporate managers, but after operating for a decade had yet to achieve profitability. Trucost was struggling to effectively differentiate its high quality products... View Details
- Article
How Institutional Investors Frame Their Losses: Evidence on Dynamic Loss Aversion from Currency Portfolios
By: Kenneth A. Froot, John Arabadjis, Sonya Cates and Stephen Lawrence
Currency investors exhibit a tendency to cut risk by pairing both longs and shorts following losses and a weaker tendency to add risk following gains. By differentiating between position level, portfolio level, and aggregate cross-portfolio losses in currency... View Details
- July 2011
- Article
The Private Equity Advantage: Leveraged Buyout Firms and Relationship Banking
By: Victoria Ivashina and Anna Kovner
This paper examines the impact of leveraged buyout firms' bank relationships on the terms of their syndicated loans. Using a sample of 1,590 loans financing private equity sponsored leveraged buyouts between 1993 and 2005, we find that bank relationships are an... View Details
- June 2011
- Article
Watch What I Do, Not What I Say: The Unintended Consequences of the Homeland Investment Act
By: Dhammika Dharmapala, C. Fritz Foley and Kristin J. Forbes
This paper analyzes the impact of the Homeland Investment Act of 2004, which provided a one-time tax holiday for the repatriation of foreign earnings and thereby reduced the cost to U.S. multinationals of accessing a source of internal capital. Lawmakers and lobbyists... View Details
- April 2011 (Revised July 2011)
- Case
Renewing GE: The Africa Project (A)
By: David A. Thomas and Stephanie J. Creary
This case profiles the evolution of General Electric's African American Form (AAF), an employee affinity group, and its efforts to increase the company's involvement in Africa. The AAF formed in 1991 to help advance GE's recruitment, retention and development of black... View Details
- 2011
- Working Paper
Do Powerful Politicians Cause Corporate Downsizing?
By: Lauren H. Cohen, Joshua D. Coval and Christopher J. Malloy
This paper employs a new empirical approach for identifying the impact of government spending on the private sector. Our key innovation is to use changes in congressional committee chairmanship as a source of exogenous variation in state-level federal expenditures. In... View Details
- January – February 2011
- Article
'Bricks and Clicks': The Impact of Product Returns on the Strategies of Multichannel Retailers
By: Elie Ofek, Zsolt Katona and Miklos Sarvary
The Internet has increased the flexibility of retailers, allowing them to operate an online arm in addition to their physical stores. The online channel offers potential benefits in selling to customer segments that value the convenience of online shopping, but it also... View Details
- January 2011
- Article
Does Intellectual Property Rights Reform Spur Industrial Development?
By: Lee G. Branstetter, Ray Fisman, C. Fritz Foley and Kamal Saggi
An extensive theoretical literature generates ambiguous predictions concerning the effects of intellectual property rights (IPR) reform on industrial development. The impact depends on whether multinational enterprises (MNEs) expand production in reforming countries... View Details
- 2011
- Chapter
Financing Constraints and Entrepreneurship
By: William R. Kerr and Ramana Nanda
Financing constraints are one of the biggest concerns impacting potential entrepreneurs around the world. Given the important role that entrepreneurship is believed to play in the process of economic growth, alleviating financing constraints for would-be entrepreneurs... View Details
- November 2010
- Case
Morgan Asset Management
By: Boris Groysberg, Paul M. Healy and Sarah Abbott
It is 2010 and Guillermo Araoz, the equity research director at Morgan Asset Management (MAM), is considering his research budget for the year. Due to recent declines in the equity markets and MAM's sale of its mutual funds business, MAM has seen a decline in its... View Details
- 2010
- Working Paper
Growth through Heterogeneous Innovations
By: Ufuk Akcigit and William R. Kerr
We study how exploration versus exploitation innovations impact economic growth through a tractable endogenous growth framework that contains multiple innovation sizes, multi-product firms, and entry/exit. Firms invest in exploration R&D to acquire new product lines... View Details
- October 2010
- Article
The Emerging Capital Market for Nonprofits
By: Robert S. Kaplan and Allen S. Grossman
Many of our largest and most successful companies today did not exist 50 years ago. During this same time interval, companies that ranked among top in the 1960s have disappeared, been merged out of existence, or become much smaller presences in the U.S. industrial... View Details
- 2014
- Working Paper
Financing Risk and Innovation
By: Ramana Nanda and Matthew Rhodes-Kropf
We provide a model of investment into new ventures that demonstrates why some places, times, and industries should be associated with a greater degree of experimentation by investors. Investors respond to financing risk―a forecast of limited future funding―by modifying... View Details