Publications

September 2022
Background Note

On CUE: The Quest for Optimal Customer Unit Economics

By: Elie Ofek, Barak Libai and Eitan Muller

Startups are often evaluated by how well they perform on unit economics, defined as the ratio of a customer’s lifetime value (LTV) to acquisition costs (CAC). A common target for unit economics, advocated by many VCs and analysts, is 3:1 (i.e., LTV/CAC=3). While there... View Details

Keywords: Unit Economics; Business Startups; Performance Evaluation; Customer Value and Value Chain; Customer Relationship Management; Analysis

2023
Working Paper

Applications or Approvals: What Drives Racial Disparities in the Paycheck Protection Program?

By: Sergey Chernenko, Nathan Kaplan, Asani Sarkar and David S. Scharfstein

We use the 2020 Small Business Credit Survey to study the sources of racial disparities in use of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). Black-owned firms are 8.9 percentage points less likely than observably similar white-owned firms to receive PPP loans. About 55% of... View Details

Keywords: Borrowing and Debt; Small Business; Race; Financing and Loans

SSRN

February 2015
Case

Infinite Technology Solutions and the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor

By: John D. Macomber and Vidhya Muthuram

The Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC) is an ambitious economic development project linking six of the most competitive states in India with the sea. The corridor is modeled on the Jiangsu Corridor in China (Nanjing to Shanghai) and the Tokyo-Hokkaido Corridor in... View Details

Keywords: Development Economics; Projects; Economics; Personal Development and Career; Decision Making; India

2012
Working Paper

Reaching for Yield in the Bond Market

By: Bo Becker and Victoria Ivashina

Reaching-for-yield—the propensity to buy riskier assets in order to achieve higher yields—is believed to be an important factor contributing to the credit cycle. This paper analyses this phenomenon in the corporate bond market. Specifically, we show evidence for... View Details

Keywords: Fixed Income; Reaching For Yield; Financial Intermediation; Insurance Companies; Insurance; Bonds; Assets; Risk Management; Investment Return; Investment Portfolio; Insurance Industry

SSRN

24 Jan 2025
News

The Network Effect

space with which it had preexisting relationships. Thanks to Model and Mathur’s connection, Sagard was among them, and the firm ultimately made the best offer. Personal... View Details

March 2023
Case

Azenta Life Sciences: The Road to Transformation

By: Gary P. Pisano and Catherine Piner

When the Board brought Steve Schwartz in as President of Brooks Automation in 2010, they gave him a clear mission: strengthen the company’s core semiconductor equipment business and find a new industry to enter. Over the course of the next decade, Schwartz and the... View Details

Keywords: Transformation; Business and Shareholder Relations; Market Entry and Exit; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Segmentation; Technology Industry

2021
Working Paper

Public Disclosure of Private Meetings: Does Observing Peers' Information Acquisition Affect Analysts' Attention Allocation?

By: Yi Ru, Ronghuo Zheng and Yuan Zou

We investigate the impact of observing peers’ information acquisition on financial analysts’ attention allocation. Using the timely disclosure mandate by the Shenzhen Stock Exchange as a setting, we find that, when analysts can observe that a firm is visited by other... View Details

Keywords: Attention Allocation; Informational Efficiency; Corporate Site Visits; Externalities; Information; Acquisition; Corporate Disclosure; Outcome or Result

December 2009
Article

Strategy-proofness versus Efficiency in Matching with Indifferences: Redesigning the NYC High School Match

By: Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Parag A. Pathak and Alvin E. Roth

The design of the New York City (NYC) High School match involved tradeoffs among efficiency, stability, and strategy-proofness that raise new theoretical questions. We analyze a model with indifferences—ties—in school preferences. Simulations with field data and the... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Secondary Education; Marketplace Matching; Performance Efficiency; Mathematical Methods; Motivation and Incentives; Strategy; Balance and Stability

24 Apr 2019
Research & Ideas

The 'Amazon Effect' Is Changing Online Price Competition—and the Fed Needs to Pay Attention

It’s no secret that fierce competition from Amazon puts downward pressure on prices charged by Walmart and other big multichannel retailers for the same items. However, the bigger “Amazon effect” relates not... View Details

Keywords: by Roberta Holland; Retail

April 2014 (Revised October 2015)
Case

Texas Teachers and the New Texas Way

By: Matthew Rhodes-Kropf, Luis M. Viceira, John D. Dionne and Nathaniel Burbank

In 2011 Britt Harris, the Chief Investment Officer for the $107.4 billion Teachers Retirement System of Texas (TRS), was considering whether to pursue strategic partnerships with a group of large private equity firms. After spending four years aggressively moving the... View Details

Keywords: Texas; TRS; Texas Teachers; Private Equity; Texas

September 2019 (Revised December 2019)
Case

Google: To TVC or Not to TVC?

By: William R. Kerr and Carl Kreitzberg

In late 2018, evidence emerged that many of Google’s temporary help agency workers, vendors, and independent contractors (“TVCs”) were unhappy with the company. TVCs, who reportedly made up 49.95% of Google’s 170,000-person global workforce, had raised concerns of... View Details

October 1996
Article

Assessing the Work Environment for Creativity

By: T. M. Amabile, R. Conti, H. Coon, J. Lazenby and M. Herron

We describe the development and validation of a new instrument, KEYS: Assessing the Climate for Creativity, designed to assess perceived stimulants and obstacles to creativity in organizational work environments. The KEYS scales have acceptable factor structures,... View Details

Keywords: Creativity; Motivation and Incentives; Organizational Culture; Innovation and Invention; Groups and Teams; Performance; Research; Theory

Article

Is ‘Not Guilty’ the Same as ‘Innocent’? Evidence from SEC Financial Fraud Investigations

By: Eugene F. Soltes and David H. Solomon

When the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigates firms for financial fraud, investors learn about the investigation only if managers disclose it, or regulators sanction the firm. We investigate the effects of such disclosures using confidential records on... View Details

Keywords: Financial Fraud; Corporate Disclosure; Performance; Outcome or Result

Register to Read

2008
Working Paper

Catering through Nominal Share Prices

By: Malcolm Baker, Robin Greenwood and Jeffrey Wurgler

We propose and test a catering theory of nominal stock prices. The theory predicts that when investors place higher valuation on low-price firms, managers will maintain share prices at lower levels, and vice-versa. Using measures of time-varying catering... View Details

Keywords: Stocks; Stock Shares; Investment; Investment Return; Price; Theory; Valuation

2014
Article

Corporate Governance and the Financial Crisis in Italy

By: Dante Roscini

The financial crisis hit Italy harder than many other Eurozone countries. In part this was due to the fact that the crisis came upon a system that was weakened by years of sub-par economic growth. One of the several endogenous factors that explain the stagnation of the... View Details

Keywords: Financial Crisis; Corporate Governance; Italy; European Union