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- January 2025
- Case
Untapped Global: Financing Africa's Missing Middle
By: Raymond Kluender and Emanuele Colonnelli
In November 2024, Jim Chu, founder and CEO of Untapped Global, faced mounting internal tensions over the company’s strategic direction. Untapped had developed a data-driven revenue-based financing (RBF) model to address the “missing middle” problem—the $5.2 trillion... View Details
Keywords: Social Entrepreneurship; Venture Capital; Working Capital; Private Equity; Financial Strategy; Microfinance; International Finance; Currency Exchange Rate; Profit Sharing; Revenue; Developing Countries and Economies; Economic Growth; Emerging Markets; Mission and Purpose; Small Business; Entrepreneurial Finance; Banking Industry; Financial Services Industry; Information Technology Industry; Technology Industry; Africa; Nigeria; South Africa; Kenya; Uganda; California; San Francisco
- January 2025
- Supplement
Hippo: Weathering the Storm of the Home Insurance Crisis (B)
By: Lauren Cohen, Grace Headinger and Sophia Pan
Rick McCathron, CEO of Hippo, was optimistic about the InsurTech's path to profitability after navigating the financial uncertainties of 2022. By bundling their home insurance services with third-parties and established insurance incumbents, Hippo was adopting a... View Details
Keywords: Fintech; Underwriters; Big Data; Homeowners' Insurance; Catastrophe Risk; Global Warming; Environment; Business Economics; Vertical Specialization; Bundling; Economies Of Scale; Business Model; Forecasting and Prediction; Climate Change; Environmental Sustainability; Green Technology; Technological Innovation; Natural Environment; Natural Disasters; Weather; Business Strategy; Competitive Advantage; Business Earnings; Insurance; Social Issues; Profit; Growth and Development Strategy; Insurance Industry; California; United States
- January 2025
- Case
PayJoy: Financing for the Next Billion
By: Boris Groysberg and Sarah L. Abbott
PayJoy, an impact-driven financial technology company founded in 2015, provides smartphone financing and other financial products to customers who lack access to traditional credit products. As of early 2025, PayJoy had issued $2.5 billion in loans to 13 million... View Details
Keywords: Social Impact; Fintech; Underbanked; Algorithm; Data Analysis; Technology; Business Startups; Business Model; Growth and Development; Information Technology; Social Enterprise; Developing Countries and Economies; Credit; Mission and Purpose; Entrepreneurship; Financing and Loans; Financial Services Industry; Technology Industry; South America; South Africa; Asia; Latin America; Africa; Southeast Asia
- December 2024 (Revised February 2025)
- Teaching Note
Mirakl: Growing the Marketplace Economy
By: Antonio Moreno and Margaret Underwood
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 623-054. View Details
- 2024
- Book
The Fading Light of Democratic Capitalism: How Pervasive Cronyism and Restricted Suffrage Are Destroying Democratic Capitalism as a National Ideal ... And What to Do About It
What are we to do about declining public trust and confidence in democratic capitalism, which many citizens consider a cornerstone of our national ideology and identity? In this book, I address how we can rekindle the fading light of democratic capitalism as an... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Why Has Construction Productivity Stagnated? The Role of Land-Use Regulation
By: Leonardo D’Amico, Edward Glaeser, Joseph Gyourko, William Kerr and Giacomo A. M. Ponzetto
We document a Kuznets curve for construction productivity in 20th-century America.
Homes built per construction worker remained stagnant between 1900 and 1940, boomed after
World War II, and then plummeted after 1970. The productivity boom from 1940 to 1970
shows... View Details
- November 2024
- Article
Perceptions About Monetary Policy
By: Michael D. Bauer, Carolin Pflueger and Adi Sunderam
We estimate perceptions about the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy rule from panel data on professional forecasts of interest rates and macroeconomic conditions. The perceived dependence of the federal funds rate on economic conditions varies substantially over time,... View Details
- November 5, 2024
- Article
The International Empirics of Management
By: Daniela Scur, Scott Ohlmacher, John Van Reenen, Morten Bennedsen, Nick Bloom, Ali Choudhary, Lucia Foster, Jesse Groenewegen, Arti Grover, Sjoerd Hardeman, Leonardo Iacovone, Ryo Kambayashi, Marie-Christine Laible, Renata Lemos, Hongbin Li, Andrea Linarello, Mika Maliranta, Denis Medvedev, Charlotte Meng, John Miles Touya, Natalia Mandirola, Roope Ohlsbom, Atsushi Ohyama, Megha Patnaik, Mariana Pereira-López, Raffaella Sadun, Tatsuro Senga, Franklin Qian and Florian Zimmermann
A country’s national income broadly depends on the quantity and quality of workers and capital. But how well these factors are managed within and between firms may be a key determinant of a country’s productivity and its GDP. Although social scientists have long... View Details
- October 2024
- Teaching Note
El Salvador: Launching Bitcoin as Legal Tender
By: Laura Alfaro
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 322-055. In June 2021, Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s president, surprised the world with the announcement that the country would adopt bitcoin as legal tender, becoming the first nation to do so. Bitcoin was mostly used for trading and had... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Generative AI and the Nature of Work
By: Manuel Hoffmann, Sam Boysel, Frank Nagle, Sida Peng and Kevin Xu
Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) technology demonstrate a considerable potential
to complement human capital intensive activities. While an emerging literature documents wide-ranging
productivity effects of AI, relatively little attention has been paid... View Details
- 2024
- Chapter
What Future for the Renminbi in the Global Monetary System?
By: Edoardo Campanella and Meg Rithmire
What is a realistic and positive outcome for US-China relations in the realm of global finance over the next ten years? While some policymakers, especially in the US, have feared that China holds ambitions for the renminbi (RMB) to replace the dollar as a global... View Details
- October 2024 (Revised January 2025)
- Case
Citizens of the World: The International Legacy of Gloria von Thurn und Taxis
By: Lauren Cohen, Maximilian Form and Sophia Pan
When her husband passed away and inheritance taxes struck, Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis took decisive action to preserve her family’s fortune and legacy. The Thurn und Taxis family, one of Europe’s oldest aristocratic dynasties, had built their wealth through... View Details
- October 2024
- Teaching Note
Taiwan After Globalization: Twilight of the Developmental State?
By: Debora L. Spar and Julia M. Comeau
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 324-032. In the last 70 years, the small island of Taiwan has achieved what many believe to be a “miracle”: its economy has grown at a record-setting pace, driven and guided by one of the world's most successful set of industrial... View Details
- 2024
- Other Unpublished Work
A Proposal for the IMF: A New Instrument of International Liquidity Provision for Emerging Markets and Developing Economies
By: Laura Alfaro, Guillermo Calvo, José de Gregorio, Augusto de la Torre, Pablo Guidotti, Enrique Mendoza, Ernesto Talvi, Liliana Rojas-Suarez and Andrés Velasco
This paper addresses a critical flaw in the international financial system: the failure to address the inherent asymmetry between countries that issue reserve currencies and those that do not, leaving the latter vulnerable during systemic liquidity crises. We propose... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Foreign Influence in U.S. Politics
By: Marco Grotteria, Max Miller and S. Lakshmi Naaraayanan
This paper investigates the informational role of lobbyists in the context of foreign lobbying in the United States. Using Department of Justice data on contacts between foreign governments and US legislators, we show that exogenous shocks to these connections... View Details
- September–October 2024
- Article
The Crowdless Future? Generative AI and Creative Problem-Solving
The rapid advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) open up attractive opportunities for creative problem-solving through human-guided AI partnerships. To explore this potential, we initiated a crowdsourcing challenge focused on sustainable, circular economy... View Details
- September 2024 (Revised March 2025)
- Supplement
Wemade: (Re)Establishing Trust in Blockchain Games (B)
By: Jung Koo Kang, Charles C.Y. Wang, David Allen and Kwangmoon So
This supplement reviews Wemade's efforts to rebuild confidence in its business after its WEMIX coin was delisted from the major South Korean cryptocurrency exchanges on December 8, 2022. It outlines Wemade's strategy of transparency, which included partnerships with... View Details
- September 2024
- Case
Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners: Leading the Energy Transition
By: John Macomber and Maxwell Nii Laryea
A leading global infrastructure fund debates whether and when to become engaged in the electrolysis and distribution of hydrogen, as part of the hydrogen economy and the global transtion to a net zero energy world. The proposed billion dollar project consists of ... View Details
Keywords: Energy; Infrastructure; Energy Generation; Renewable Energy; Project Finance; Energy Industry; Spain
- September 2024 (Revised February 2025)
- Case
Aramco: Navigating the Energy Transition
By: Tarun Khanna and Gizem Cihan Dincsoy
In March 2024, Amin Nasser, president, and CEO of the Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Aramco), had just delivered a speech about the future of energy at a global energy conference. The world was behind schedule in meeting long-term climate change goals. The global shift... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Changing Perceptions and Post-Pandemic Monetary Policy
By: Michael D. Bauer, Carolin Pflueger and Adi Sunderam
We document that the Fed’s perceived monetary policy response to inflation shifted materially over the post-pandemic period. In forward-looking policy rules estimated from surveys of macroeconomic forecasters, the inflation coefficient rose significantly after liftoff... View Details