Publications
Publications
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(5,098)
- Faculty Publications (1,036)
- June 2019
- Article
Debt Traps? Market Vendors and Moneylender Debt in India and the Philippines
By: Dean Karlan, Sendhil Mullainathan and Benjamin Roth
A debt trap occurs when someone takes on a high-interest rate loan and is barely able to pay back the interest, and thus perpetually finds themselves in debt (often by refinancing). Studying such practices is important for understanding financial decision-making of... View Details
Keywords: Borrowing and Debt; Household; Personal Finance; Decision Making; Behavior; India; Philippines
- September 2019
- Article
Household Matters: Revisiting the Returns to Capital Among Female Microentrepreneurs
By: Arielle Bernhardt, Erica Field, Rohini Pande and Natalia Rigol
Multiple field experiments report positive financial returns to capital shocks for male and not female microentrepreneurs. But these analyses overlook the fact that female entrepreneurs often reside with male entrepreneurs. Using data from experiments in India, Sri... View Details
- June 2019
- Article
Social Risk, Fiscal Risk, and the Portfolio of Government Programs
We develop a model of government portfolio choice in which a benevolent government chooses the scale of risky projects in the presence of market failures and tax distortions. These two frictions generate motives to manage social risk and fiscal risk. Social risk... View Details
- April 2019 (Revised July 2019)
- Case
Aperture Investors
By: Krishna G. Palepu, George Serafeim and David Lane
Aperture Investors is a startup investment firm that seeks to disrupt the asset management industry through competitive differentiation by charging investors primarily when its portfolio managers outperform the marketplace. Headed by Wall Street veteran Peter Kraus and... View Details
- April 2019 (Revised December 2021)
- Case
Sears: The Demise of an American Icon
By: Kristin Mugford and Sarah L. Abbott
In 2019, ESL Investments’ $5.2 billion offer to purchase Sears Holdings out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy, was accepted, despite opposition from the company's unsecured creditors and other parties. ESL, which was led by Eddie Lampert, had acquired a stake in Sears following... View Details
- March 2019 (Revised March 2023)
- Case
Accion's Fintech Strategy
By: V. Kasturi Rangan, Michael Chu and Tricia Gregg
Accion, an NGO, had been a pioneer in microfinance since its entry into that sector in the early 1970s. Its investments in Banco Compartamos paid off, when the microfinance bank went IPO in 2007, leaving an influx of $138 million for Accion. Under a new CEO, Michael... View Details
- March–April 2019
- Article
The Dual-Purpose Playbook
By: Julie Battilana, Anne-Claire Pache, Metin Sengul and Marissa Kimsey
Corporations are being pushed to dial down their single-minded pursuit of financial gain and pay closer attention to their impact on employees, customers, communities, and the environment. But changing an organization’s DNA may require upending the existing business... View Details
- February 2019 (Revised January 2021)
- Case
Quiksilver Inc. and Oaktree Capital Management
By: Kristin Mugford and Mike Harmon
Sports lifestyle company Quiksilver filed for bankruptcy in September 2015. Oaktree is considering an additional investment in the company to facilitate the restructuring.
Students must consider whether Oaktree should invest given the risks of the turnaround... View Details
Keywords: Bankruptcy; Bankruptcy Reorganization; Insolvency and Bankruptcy; Acquisition; Restructuring; Debt Securities; Transformation; Decision Making; Borrowing and Debt; Investment Return; Crisis Management; Negotiation; Apparel and Accessories Industry; Apparel and Accessories Industry; Apparel and Accessories Industry; France; United States
- Article
Corporate Culture and Analyst Catering
By: Joseph Pacelli
This study examines the relation between financial institutions’ corporate culture and the quality of analysts’ research services. Using data collected from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, I measure the weakness of financial institutions’ corporate culture... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
Does Public Ownership and Accountability Increase Diversity? Evidence from IPOs
By: Rembrand Koning and John-Paul Ferguson
Does public ownership improve employment diversity? Organizational researchers theorize that increased transparency to regulators and the public should lead firms to conform to legal and social norms—but that social closure and decoupling should preserve the status... View Details
Keywords: IPO; Initial Public Offering; Employees; Diversity; Gender; Race; Entrepreneurship; United States
- January 2019
- Supplement
JPMorgan Chase: Invested in Detroit (C)
By: Joseph L. Bower and Michael Norris
Video Supplement to HBS Case Nos. 918-406 and 918-410.
Beginning in 2014, JPMorgan Chase launched “Invested in Detroit,” a $100 million philanthropic investment in the city over five years. The bank worked with local economic development organizations,... View Details
Beginning in 2014, JPMorgan Chase launched “Invested in Detroit,” a $100 million philanthropic investment in the city over five years. The bank worked with local economic development organizations,... View Details
Keywords: Philanthropic Investment; Banking; Economic Development; Local Economic Development; Workforce Development; Financial Institutions; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Urban Development; Business and Community Relations; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Expansion; Banking Industry; United States; Michigan; Detroit
- January 4, 2019
- Article
How Companies Can Balance Social Impact and Financial Goals
By: Marya L. Besharov, Wendy K. Smith and Michael Tushman
It’s notoriously difficult for a business to manage two separate-but-equal goals—making money and creating social value at the same time, for example, or managing an existing business at the same time that you invent a new one. Most attempts at managing these... View Details
- January 2019 (Revised October 2019)
- Case
Rural Taobao: Alibaba's Expansion into Rural E-Commerce
By: Tarun Khanna, Ryan Allen, Adam Frost and Wesley Koo
Alibaba's Rural Taobao initiative had been launched in 2014 as a public service initiative to increase e-commerce adoption in China’s remote rural areas. In the first two iterations of the initiative, dubbed “1.0” and “2.0,” Alibaba had partnered with local businesses... View Details
Keywords: Strategy; Business Growth; Ecommerce; Corporate Social Responsibility; Business And Government; Emerging Market; Digital Platforms; Internet and the Web; Emerging Markets; Rural Scope; Growth and Development Strategy; Competitive Strategy; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Business and Government Relations; Decision Making; E-commerce; China
- January 2019
- Article
Bubbles for Fama
By: Robin Greenwood, Andrei Shleifer and Yang You
We evaluate Eugene Fama's claim that stock prices do not exhibit price bubbles. Based on U.S. industry returns 1926–2014 and international sector returns 1985–2014, we present four findings: (1) Fama is correct in that a sharp price increase of an industry portfolio... View Details
Keywords: Bubble; Market Efficiency; Predictability; Price Bubble; Stocks; Price; Forecasting and Prediction
- January–February 2019
- Article
Corporate Purpose and Financial Performance
By: Claudine Gartenberg, Andrea Prat and George Serafeim
We construct a measure of corporate purpose within a sample of U.S. companies based on approximately 500,000 survey responses of worker perceptions about their employers. We find that this measure of purpose is not related to financial performance. However, high... View Details
- 2019
- Article
Structural Balance Emerges and Explains Performance in Risky Decision-Making
By: Omid Askarisichani, Jacqueline N. Lane, Francesco Bullo, Noah E. Friedkin, Ambuj K. Singh and Brian Uzzi
Polarization affects many forms of social organization. A key issue focuses on which affective relationships are prone to change and how their change relates to performance. In this study,
we analyze a financial institutional over a two-year period that employed 66... View Details
- January 2019
- Article
The ABCs of Financial Education: Experimental Evidence on Attitudes, Behavior, and Cognitive Biases
By: Fenella Carpena, Shawn A. Cole, Jeremy Shapiro and Bilal Zia
This paper uses a large-scale field experiment in India to study attitudinal, behavioral, and cognitive constraints that can stymie the link between financial education and financial outcomes. The study complements financial education with (1) financial incentives on a... View Details
- 2018
- Article
Cracking the Organizational Challenge of Pursuing Joint Social and Financial Goals: Social Enterprise as a Laboratory to Understand Hybrid Organizing
By: Julie Battilana
While in recent decades the social and business sectors have evolved on fairly separate tracks, today companies are increasingly expected to generate social value in addition to profit. As a result, they also increasingly face the distinct challenge of pursuing social... View Details
- Article
Populism and the Return of the 'Paranoid Style': Some Evidence and a Simple Model of Demand for Incompetence as Insurance against Elite Betrayal
By: Rafael Di Tella and Julio J. Rotemberg
We present a simple model of populism as the rejection of “disloyal” leaders. We show that adding the assumption that people are worse off when they experience low income as a result of leader betrayal (than when it is the result of bad luck) to a simple voter choice... View Details
- November 2018 (Revised June 2019)
- Case
The Rise of Populism and Italy's Electoral 'Tsunami'
By: Rawi Abdelal, Dante Roscini and Elena Corsi
Italy’s March 2018 elections led to a populist government that included the right-wing League and the anti-establishment 5 Star Movement. To respect their electoral promises, the two parties came up with a budget plan that provided for a public deficit at 2.4%, a... View Details