Small Business Loans - Publications - Faculty & Research

February 2005 (Revised June 2006)
Case

UAL, 2004: Pulling Out of Bankruptcy

By: Daniel Baird Bergstresser, Kenneth A. Froot and Darren Robert Smart

UAL is a large air transportation company with roots that go back to the 1920s. As a legacy carrier, going back to before the 1978 deregulation of air transportation markets, United Airlines is burdened with cost structures that make it difficult to compete with newer... View Details

Keywords: Bankruptcy; Compensation; Costs; Loans; Reorganization; Cost; Restructuring; Financing and Loans; Insolvency and Bankruptcy; Compensation and Benefits; Air Transportation Industry; United States

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July 2001 (Revised March 2003)
Background Note

Running and Growing the Small Company: Project-Paper Writing Recommendations

Students are required to do a team project. During the project, they are to do a benchmarking study of a business process to determine best practice or to study a single business process for the purposes of discovering improvement opportunities. The student teams are... View Details

Keywords: Analysis; Business Processes; Management Skills

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30 Nov 2016
Op-Ed

Where Could More Regulation Help Small Businesses? Online Lending.

addressable market of $280 billion. That’s music to the ears of small businesses. Indeed, our research shows a sizeable credit gap exists for small businesses, particularly for View Details

Keywords: by Karen Mills and Brayden McCarthy; Financial Services

2017
Working Paper

The Decline of Big-Bank Lending to Small Business: Dynamic Impacts on Local Credit and Labor Markets

By: Brian S. Chen, Samuel G. Hanson and Jeremy C. Stein

Small business lending by the four largest banks fell sharply relative to others in 2008 and remained depressed through 2014. We explore the dynamic adjustment process following this credit supply shock. In counties where the largest banks had a high market share, the... View Details

Keywords: Small Business; Financing and Loans; Banks and Banking; System Shocks; Credit; Labor; United States

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27 Mar 2015
News

Small Company Aims to Provide Primary Care for the Masses

September 2012
Case

Castronics, LLC

By: Richard S. Ruback and Royce Yudkoff

Patrick Dickinson (HBS '09) and Michael Weiner (MIT's Sloan '07) acquired Castronics, a firm that specialized in threading pipe used in the oil and natural gas industry, at the end of 2009. The partners overcame significant hurdles during the first two years of... View Details

Keywords: Small Business; Search Funds; Corporate Finance; Entrepreneurship; Financial Management; Energy Industry; Western United States

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29 Apr 2020
Book

The Key to Powerful Social Change: Small Villages

Who will solve the great problems facing humanity, a list of critical issues that only begins with the current pandemic? In the interview below, Rosabeth Moss Kanter discusses her recent book, Think Outside the Building, and her view that solutions are most likely to... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

August 2018 (Revised September 2018)
Case

LendingClub (A): Data Analytic Thinking (Abridged)

By: Srikant M. Datar and Caitlin N. Bowler

LendingClub was founded in 2006 as an alternative, peer-to-peer lending model to connect individual borrowers to individual investor-lenders through an online platform. Since 2014 the company has worked with institutional investors at scale. While the company assigns... View Details

Keywords: Data Science; Data Analytics; Investing; Loans; Investment; Financing and Loans; Analytics and Data Science; Analysis; Forecasting and Prediction; Business Model

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26 Jun 2020
News

Will I Be Able to Reapply for an SBA Loan If There’s Another Crisis?

23 Feb 2021
News

Why remote workers are moving to small towns and cities

September 2018 (Revised January 2019)
Teaching Note

Gemini Investors

By: Richard S. Ruback, Royce Yudkoff and Ahron Rosenfeld

Teaching Note for HBS No. 211-066. Gemini Investors was a private equity firm that targeted equity investments of between $4 million to $6 million per firm. In the period from 2000 to 2015, Gemini had successfully deployed four funds, all licensed as Small Business... View Details

Keywords: Small ＆ Medium-sized Enterprises; Small Business; Private Equity; Investment Funds; Decision Making; Financial Services Industry; United States

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09 Jan 2016
News

Amy Cuddy: big fan of tales of small towns

02 Apr 2015
Research & Ideas

Digital Initiative Summit: Big Messages, Small Screens, Many Choices

Again, hardly anyone raised a hand. "And that's the problem," Balis said. Other Articles In This Series Big Messages, Small Screens, Many Choices Companies Must Forget—and Borrow The Business of... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Advertising

26 Aug 2020
News

'I'm afraid we're going to lose 20-30% of our small businesses': Fmr. SBA Administrator Karen Mills

22 Oct 2019
News

Episode 11: Karen Mills, Harvard Business School

14 Aug 2024
Podcast

Bonus episode: Introducing HBS's latest podcast, Think Big, Buy Small

Joe Fuller talks to his Harvard Business School faculty colleague Rick Ruback about Rick and HBS professor Royce Yudkoff’s podcast Think Big, Buy Small. The show is based on Rick and Royce’s popular HBS course “Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition”. The show combines... View Details

01 Dec 2014
Research & Ideas

The Big Influence of Small Countries in the United Nations Secretariat

associate professor in the Business, Government and the International Economy unit at Harvard Business School, asks in a new working paper, Who Runs the International System? Power and Staffing at the United Nations Secretariat. He... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

12 PM – 1 PM EST, 13 Dec 2016
Webinars: Trending@HBS

Buying a Small Business: How to Take Advantage of Big Opportunities

There are over 1 million smaller firms in North America and each year thousands and thousands come up for sale, principally as founders retire. Acquiring the right kind of smaller firm offers very compelling economic rewards, and you can become CEO of one of these... View Details

Forthcoming
Article

Weak Credit Covenants

By: Victoria Ivashina and Boris Vallée

Using novel data on 1,240 credit agreements, we investigate sources of contractual complexity in the leveraged loan market. While negative covenants are widespread, carve-out and deductible clauses that qualify them are as frequent. We propose simple and comprehensive... View Details

Keywords: Leveraged Loans; Loan Contracts; Debt Covenants; Carve-out; Creditor Governance; LBO; Credit; Agreements and Arrangements; Leveraged Buyouts