Publications

April–May 2024
Article

Gone with the Big Data: Institutional Lender Demand for Private Information

By: Jung Koo Kang

I explore whether big-data sources can crowd out the value of private information acquired through lending relationships. Institutional lenders have been shown to exploit their access to borrowers’ private information by trading on it in financial markets. As a shock... View Details

Keywords: Analytics and Data Science; Borrowing and Debt; Financial Markets; Value; Knowledge Dissemination; Financing and Loans

March 2024
Case

Nomad: A License to Bank

By: Paul A. Gompers and Pedro Levindo

In late 2023, Lucas Vargas, CEO and co-founder of Nomad, a fintech that offered financial services in the United States for Brazilian residents, had to decide what to do to ensure the company’s continued expansion. Nomad launched its first product, a U.S. digital bank... View Details

March 2024
Case

East Rock Capital: 'Talent Is the Best Asset Class'

By: Boris Groysberg, Sarah L. Abbott and Izzy Yeoh

Adam Shapiro and Graham Duncan launched East Rock Capital, LLC in 2006 with a seed investment from Stuart Miller, executive chairman of Lennar Corporation. East Rock managed long-term assets for high-net-worth families, primarily working with external managers who had... View Details

Keywords: Alternative Assets; Hiring; HNW Products And Services; Recruiting; Hedge Funds; Wealth Management; Asset Management; Private Equity; Financial Institutions; Marketing Strategy; Growth and Development Strategy; Competitive Advantage; Financial Services Industry; United States

February 2024
Case

Vespucci Partners: The New World of Venture Capital in Hungary

By: Paul A. Gompers, Tonia Labruyere and Emilie Billaud

Julia Sohajda was the young, female founding partner of the Hungarian VC firm Vespucci Partners, which focused on investing at seed stage into Hungarian deep tech startups and prepare them for a launch in the U.S market. Vespucci's first fund had largely been comprised... View Details

Keywords: Venture Capital; Business Startups; Investment Funds; Financing and Loans; Entrepreneurship; Financial Services Industry; Hungary; United States

February 2024
Case

Chime Solutions

By: Shai Bernstein, William R. Kerr, Christopher Stanton, Raymond Kluender and Mel Martin

Just two years after launching its 10k by 2020 initiative to hire 10,000 employees by 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced Chief Executive Officer Mark Wilson to send nearly all of his staff at Chime Solutions (Chime) to work from home. Chime was a customer contact firm... View Details

Keywords: Working Capital; Service Operations; Recruitment; Performance; Change Management; Retention; Financial Institutions; Employee Relationship Management; Talent and Talent Management; Growth Management; Mission and Purpose; Communications Industry; Service Industry; United States

February 2024
Article

Fifty Shades of QE: Robust Evidence

By: Brian Fabo, Marina Jančoková, Elisabeth Kempf and Ľuboš Pástor

Fabo et al. (2021) show that papers written by central bank researchers find quantitative easing (QE) to be more effective than papers written by academics. Weale and Wieladek (2022) show that a subset of these results lose statistical significance when OLS regressions... View Details

Keywords: Quantitative Easing; Research; Mathematical Methods; Perception; Banks and Banking; Body of Literature

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January 2024 (Revised May 2024)
Case

Generation Investment Management: Sustainable Investing in a Warming World

By: Vikram S. Gandhi, Michael Norris and David Allen

In September 2021, the sustainable investment firm Generation Investment Management (Generation) considered whether to add Schneider Electric to the focus list of companies in which it was prepared to invest. Dedicated to promoting a sustainable world through its... View Details

Keywords: Sustainable Investing; Climate Change; Environmental Sustainability; Governance; Private Equity; Public Equity; Financial Markets; Investment Return; Investment Activism; Investment Funds; Investment Portfolio; Institutional Investing; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Financial Services Industry; United Kingdom; England; London

December 2023
Article

Discerning Saints: Moralization of Intrinsic Motivation and Selective Prosociality at Work

By: Mijeong Kwon, Julia Lee Cunningham and Jon M. Jachimowicz

Intrinsic motivation has received widespread attention as a predictor of positive work outcomes, including employees’ prosocial behavior. In the current research, we offer a more nuanced view by proposing that intrinsic motivation does not uniformly increase prosocial... View Details

Keywords: Motivation and Incentives; Behavior; Moral Sensibility; Employees

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November 2023 (Revised April 2024)
Case

BiomX: Bringing Phage Back to the Stage

By: Paul A. Gompers, Elie Ofek, Orna Dan and Emilie Billaud

In the spring of 2023, and following the favorable results of a trial involving its phage cocktail for treating lung infections among cystic fibrosis (CF) patients, the leadership of BiomX had several critical issues to wrestle with. First, given its precarious... View Details

Keywords: Working Capital; Financing and Loans; Health Testing and Trials; Product Development; Research and Development; Science-Based Business; Commercialization; Biotechnology Industry; Pharmaceutical Industry

2023
Working Paper

Flow-Driven ESG Returns

By: Philippe van der Beck

I show that the recent returns to ESG investing are strongly driven by price impact from flows towards ESG funds. Using data on institutional trades, I estimate the market’s ability to accommodate the demand of ESG funds, which is given by the elasticity of... View Details

Keywords: Investment Funds; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Financial Markets; Investment Return

2023
Working Paper

The Equity Market Implications of the Retail Investment Boom

By: Philippe van der Beck and Coralie Jaunin

This paper quantifies the impact of Robinhood traders on the US equity market. Within a structural model, we estimate retail and institutional demand curves and derive aggregate pricing implications via market clearing. The inelastic nature of institutional demand... View Details

Keywords: Institutional Investing; Financial Markets; Price; Financial Instruments

October 2023
Case

JPMorgan Chase in Paris

By: Joseph L. Bower, Dante Roscini, Elena Corsi and Michael Norris

In 2019, Daniel Pinto, President and COO of JPMorgan Chase, has to make a recommendation to the bank’s Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, about where to physically locate the bank’s European trading operations after Brexit takes effect in 2020. The decision-making process... View Details

Keywords: Change Management; Banks and Banking; Financial Markets; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Globalized Firms and Management; Globalized Markets and Industries; Decisions; Banking Industry; Europe; European Union; France; United Kingdom; Paris

October 2023 (Revised November 2023)
Case

Rheaply: Circularity For Every Business

By: Rembrand Koning and Alicia Dadlani

In March 2023, Garry Cooper, cofounder and CEO of Chicago-based Rheaply, needed to demonstrate that Rheaply’s expanded vision could translate into building cash flows and metrics needed to raise a Series B and turn the business into a model for financial and... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Social Entrepreneurship; Technological Innovation; Environmental Sustainability; Entrepreneurial Finance; Technology Industry; Green Technology Industry; United States; Illinois; Chicago

September 2023
Case

Diamond Standard

By: Lauren H. Cohen, Zhaoheng Gong and Grace Headinger

Cormac Kinney, Founder and CEO of Diamond Standard, was on a mission to transform the U.S. diamond market through unlocking the precious gems as market-traded assets. As a serial FinTech entrepreneur, he hoped to add an additional service to his vault: Carats. The... View Details

2023
Working Paper

The Stock Market and Bank Risk-Taking

By: David S. Scharfstein and Antonio Falato

Using confidential supervisory risk ratings, we document that banks increase risk after they go public compared to a control group of banks that filed to go public but withdrew their filings for plausibly exogenous reasons. The increase in risk increases short-term... View Details

Keywords: Risk and Uncertainty; Banks and Banking; Going Public; Performance; Stocks

August 2023 (Revised January 2024)
Supplement

Arla Foods: Data-Driven Decarbonization (B)

By: Michael Parzen, Michael W. Toffel, Susan Pinckney and Amram Migdal

The case describes Arla’s history, in particular its climate change mitigation efforts, and how it implemented a price incentive system to motivate individual farms to implement scope 1 greenhouse gas emissions mitigation measures and receive a higher milk price. The... View Details

July 2023 (Revised October 2024)
Case

Revenue Recognition at Stride Funding: Making Sense of Revenues for a Fintech Startup

By: Paul M. Healy and Jung Koo Kang

The case explores the challenges of revenue recognition and financial reporting for Stride Funding (Stride), a fintech startup that has disrupted the student loan market. Stride leveraged proprietary machine learning and financial models to underwrite alternative... View Details

Keywords: Revenue Recognition; Financial Reporting; Entrepreneurial Finance; Business Startups; Growth and Development Strategy; Governance Compliance; Accrual Accounting; Financial Services Industry; United States

2023
Working Paper

Firm Visibility and Acquisition Likelihood: Evidence from Seeking Alpha Coverage

By: Pu Gu, Benjamin Yost and Yuan Zou

This study investigates whether social media coverage influences a firm’s likelihood of being acquired. Specifically, we hypothesize that coverage of a firm on the Seeking Alpha platform raises its visibility to potential acquirers and M&A advisers (i.e., investment... View Details

Keywords: Social Media; Mergers and Acquisitions; Marketplace Matching; Investment Banking

2023
Working Paper

The Market for Sharing Interest Rate Risk: Quantities and Asset Prices

By: Umang Khetan, Jane Li, Ioana Neamtu and Ishita Sen

We study the extent of interest rate risk sharing across the financial system using granular positions and transactions data in interest rate swaps. We show that pension and insurance (PF&I) sector emerges as a natural counterparty to banks and corporations: overall,... View Details

Keywords: Interest Rates; Investment Funds; Banks and Banking; Insurance; Investment Banking; Risk and Uncertainty