Publications
Publications
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(15,477)
- Faculty Publications (4,484)
- June 2025
- Case
From Single Stock to Diversified Portfolio: Mastercard Foundation's $42 Billion Asset Management Launch
By: Luis M. Viceira and Justin Cohen
This case examines the decision of the Mastercard Foundation in 2023 to divest its holdings of Mastercard stock, its only asset since inception in 2006 and worth $42 billion in early 2024, and to invest the proceeds in a newly designed diversified portfolio. To this... View Details
- June 2025
- Case
Konko AI: Automating Work with AI Agents
By: Shikhar Ghosh, Shweta Bagai and Liang Wu
In January 2025, Jean Marc Goguikian and Michael Haddad, co-founders of Konko AI, faced a critical strategic decision. After the company’s developer platform for private large language models (LLMs) struggled to gain traction, they had pivoted to building AI sales... View Details
- June 2025
- Case
New WOW at Equitable (A): A New Way of Working
By: Das Narayandas and Kerry Herman
Equitable CEO Mark Pearson executes a company-wide change management- transforming a sleepy but reasonably performing firm in a traditional industry not known for innovation, into an innovation-focused agile organization. View Details
- June 2025
- Case
Zerodha
By: Das Narayandas and Kairavi Dey
Zerodha Broking Pvt. Ltd. (Zerodha) was among India's largest online broking platforms. Nithin and Nikhil Kamath started Zerodha to empower retail investors and remove the hurdles to investing in stocks. The company pioneered tech-first discount broking, charging... View Details
Keywords: Financial Services Industry
- 2025
- Working Paper
Heterogeneous Beliefs and Stock Market Fluctuations
By: Odhrain McCarthy and Sebastian Hillenbrand
This paper examines the role of heterogeneous investor beliefs in explaining stock market puzzles. Using survey data, we show that individual investors and investment professionals, such as equity analysts and strategists, form distinct beliefs. These groups rely on... View Details
- June 2025
- Case
VC Exits in Africa: Knife Capital and Quicket
By: Paul A. Gompers, Emanuele Colonnelli, Maagatha Kalavadakken and Namrata Arora
Keet van Zyl and Eben van Heerden, co-founders of Knife Capital, face a critical decision point with their investment in Quicket, a prominent South African ticketing company. As the global ticketing industry recovers, they are exploring strategic exit options to... View Details
Keywords: Financial Services Industry
- 2025
- Working Paper
Cash Flow Volatility, Return Predictability and Stock Price Decompositions: Why You Should Scale Prices by Trend Cash Flows
By: Sebastian Hillenbrand and Odhrain McCarthy
We address two inconvenient facts in asset pricing: (i) valuation ratios are often more related to future cash flows than to returns, and (ii) they mostly fail to predict returns. We show that these issues arise because stock prices are scaled by cash flows that... View Details
- June 2025
- Technical Note
Fair Value Accounting for Debt Securities and Loan Assets
- June 2025
- Teaching Note
To Found or to Cofound? That Is the Question
By: Christina Wallace and Stacy Straaberg
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 824-034. Entrepreneurs often struggle with the question of whether to found solo or alongside one or more cofounders. This case is comprised of three vignettes detailing common founding scenarios: the first-time technical founder; the... View Details
- June 2025
- Case
Accounting for OpenAI at Microsoft
By: Jonas Heese, Joseph Pacelli, Nicole Zelazko and Michael Norris
In early 2025, Microsoft was evaluating the impact of its $14 billion investment in OpenAI. As OpenAI’s computing needs expanded, Microsoft positioned Azure as the exclusive provider for training and inference of their large language models. Despite the scale of the... View Details
- June 2025
- Case
Larry Culp at General Electric: Rebuilding an American Icon
By: Nitin Nohria, Kayti Stanley, Ashka Stephen and Drew Goydan
As he takes over as CEO of the iconic industrial giant General Electric, Larry Culp faces a range of urgent issues as the company is delisted from the DJIA and is seen by many as heading towards bankruptcy. Culp steers GE through a series of carefully thought-out moves... View Details
Keywords: Leadership; Restructuring; Financial Management; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Culture; Performance Improvement; Business and Shareholder Relations; Perception; Corporate Strategy; Value; Financial Services Industry; Financial Services Industry; Financial Services Industry; Financial Services Industry; North America; Europe
- June 2025
- Case
TfL Pension Fund and the 2022 Gilt Market Crisis
By: Emil N. Siriwardane, Vincent Dessain, Emer Moloney and Carlota Moniz
On September 27, 2022, Padmesh Shukla, CIO of the Transport for London (TfL) Pension Fund, was keeping a careful eye on the turmoil in the U.K. sovereign bond (or gilt) market. When the new government announced the largest tax cuts the U.K. had seen in half a century,... View Details
Keywords: Financial Crisis; Macroeconomics; Assets; Asset Management; Borrowing and Debt; Corporate Finance; Capital Markets; Equity; Financial Liquidity; Financial Instruments; Financial Strategy; Interest Rates; Governing and Advisory Boards; Crisis Management; Resource Allocation; Investment; Financial Services Industry; United Kingdom; England; London; Europe
- June 2025
- Case
The Venetian Resort: Frontline Engagement as Value Driver
By: Hubert Joly, Leonard A. Schlesinger, Laura Zhang and Matthew Keeley
In the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, private equity firm Apollo Global Management completed the acquisition of The Venetian Resort, one of the most successful and opulent institutions on the Las Vegas Strip. Apollo executives appointed Patrick Nichols, a career... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
How Firms Respond to Worker Activism: Evidence from Global Supply Chains
By: Yanhua Bird, Jodi L. Short and Michael W. Toffel
Social movement pressures can lead organizations to concede and improve social performance to avoid disruption costs, but we theorize that such responses evoke concession costs that prompt organizations to shift resources and attention from other social domains whose... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Street Earnings: Implications for Asset Pricing
By: Sebastian Hillenbrand and Odhrain McCarthy
To address the excess volatility puzzle – the excessive movements in stock prices – researchers often study movements in valuation ratios. However, we demonstrate that movements in valuation ratios based on fundamental measures with high transitory volatility, such as... View Details
- June 2025
- Article
Integral Outside: The Financial Curb Market, the Electric Telegraph, and the Politics of Pricing in Second Empire France
Financial markets in nineteenth-century France were far more complex than an analysis of the official Bourse or its state-authorized brokers would suggest. Most financial transactions occurred on an illegal yet tacitly tolerated curb market called the coulisse, which... View Details
- June 2025
- Article
Passive Ownership and Price Informativeness
By: Marco Sammon
I show that passive ownership negatively affects the degree to which stock prices anticipate earnings announcements. Estimates across several research designs imply that the rise in passive ownership over the last 30 years has caused the amount of information... View Details
Keywords: Passive Ownership; ETFs; Market Efficiency; Price; Investment Funds; Stocks; Communication
- June 2025
- Article
Social Security and Trends in Wealth Inequality
By: Sylvain Catherine, Max Miller and Natasha Sarin
Recent influential work finds large increases in inequality in the U.S. based on measures of wealth concentration that notably exclude the value of social insurance programs. This paper shows that top wealth shares have not changed much over the last three decades when... View Details
- June 2025
- Case
Vail Resorts: Responding to Activist Pressure (A)
By: Benjamin C. Esty and Edward A. Meyer
On January 27, 2025, the head of a relatively small hedge fund named Late Apex Partners sent a highly critical letter to the board of directors of Vail Resorts, the world’s largest ski resort operator. In his letter, and the 88-slide presentation that accompanied his... View Details
Keywords: Corporate Finance; Capital Budgeting; Corporate Governance; Competitive Advantage; Competitive Strategy; Leading Change; Valuation; Investment Activism; Climate Change; Management Succession; Financial Management; Risk Management; Business and Shareholder Relations; Sports Industry; Entertainment and Recreation Industry; Travel Industry; United States; Australia; Canada
- June 2025
- Article
What Board-level Control Mechanisms Changed in Banks Following the 2008 Financial Crisis? A Descriptive Study
By: Shelly Li, Shivram Rajgopal, Suraj Srinivasan and Yu Ting Forester Wong
Following the 2008 financial crisis, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) identified major shortcomings in bank board governance, contributing to systemic risk management failures. This study adapts a management control framework and empirically examines... View Details