Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(4,770)
- Faculty Publications (1,393)
- 2024
- Working Paper
Ponzi Funds
By: Philippe van der Beck, Jean-Philippe Bouchaud and Dario Villamaina
Many active funds hold concentrated portfolios. Flow-driven trading causes price pressure, which
pushes up the funds’ existing positions resulting in realized returns. We decompose fund returns
into a price pressure (self-inflated) and a fundamental component and... View Details
- September 26, 2024
- Article
A Better Way to Measure Social Impact
By: Robert S. Kaplan and Constance Spitzer
All impact investors report the financial returns from their funds and investments, and many provide metrics on intended social outcomes, such as numbers of individuals served, or quality jobs created. But investors do not supply metrics about their impacts on... View Details
- September 2024
- Exercise
Assessing the Value of Unifying and De-Duplicating Customer Data
By: Elie Ofek and Hema Yoganarasimhan
This exercise provides an opportunity for students to gain hands on experience with assessing the value of unifying various customer databases that a firm may have (e.g., across the different brands it markets) and of properly identifying customers to avoid duplication... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Does Private Equity Have Any Business Being in the Health Care Business?
By: Nori Gerardo Lietz and Zirui Song
Private Equity (“PE”) has come under increased scrutiny by the press, academics, and policymakers, as well as the public, for its investments in health care delivery. This scrutiny has been exacerbated by recent high profile hospital bankruptcies following PE... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Behavioral Attenuation
By: Thomas Graeber, Benjamin Enke, Ryan Oprea and Jeffrey Yang
We report a large-scale examination of behavioral attenuation: due to information-processing constraints, the elasticity of people’s decisions with respect to economic fundamentals is generally too small. We implement more than 30 experiments, 20 of which were... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Finance Without Exotic Risk
By: Pedro Bordalo, Nicola Gennaioli, Rafael La Porta and Andrei Shleifer
We address the joint hypothesis problem in cross-sectional asset pricing by using measured analyst expectations of earnings growth. We construct a firm-level measure of Expectations Based Returns (EBRs) that uses analyst forecast errors and revisions and shuts down any... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
The New Digital Divide
By: Mayana Pereira, Shane Greenstein, Raffaella Sadun, Prasanna Tambe, Lucia Ronchi Darre, Tammy Glazer, Allen Kim, Rahul Dodhia and Juan Lavista Ferres
We build and analyze new metrics of digital usage that leverage telemetry data collected by Microsoft during operating system updates across forty million Windows devices in U.S. households. These measures of US household digital usage are much more comprehensive than... View Details
- September–October 2024
- Article
Where Data-Driven Decision-Making Can Go Wrong
By: Michael Luca and Amy C. Edmondson
When considering internal data or the results of a study, often business leaders either take the evidence presented as gospel or dismiss it altogether. Both approaches are misguided. What leaders need to do instead is conduct rigorous discussions that assess any... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
The Financial Anatomy of Climate Solutions: A Large Language Model Approach to Company Classification and Analysis
By: Shirley Lu and George Serafeim
Leveraging advancements in large language models (LLM), we study the financial characteristics of firms offering climate solutions-products and services aimed at fostering a transition to a low-carbon economy. We use a new measure that applies LLM to 10-K Item 1... View Details
- August 2024
- Technical Note
Measuring Concentrated Ownership
By: Christina R. Wing, Everett Alexander and Justin Huang
Firms with strong governance practices exhibit lower control premiums due to reduced risks and more efficient operations. Conversely, poorly governed firms may exhibit higher control premiums as new owners anticipate the need for substantial governance improvements.... View Details
- August 19, 2024
- Article
The Business Roundtable’s Stakeholder Pledge, Five Years Later
By: Lynn S. Paine
Five years ago, the Business Roundtable issued a statement pledging to “lead their companies for the benefit of all stakeholders.” In the past five years, stakeholderism has gained wider acceptance and helped many corporate leaders see the value of taking the interests... View Details
- September 2024
- Article
Comprehensive Measurement of Biopharmaceutical R&D Investment
By: Amitabh Chandra, John Drum, Michael Daly, Henry Mirsberger, Samuel Spare, Ulrich Neumann, Silas Martin and Noam Kirson
- August 2024
- Article
Partisans neither Expect nor Receive Reputational Rewards for Sharing Falsehoods over Truth Online.
By: Isaias Ghezae, Jillian J. Jordan, Izzy Gainsburg, Mohsen Mosleh, Gordon Pennycook, Robb Willer and David Rand
A frequently invoked explanation for the sharing of false over true political information is that partisans are motivated by their reputations. In particular, it is often argued that by indiscriminately sharing news that is favorable to one’s political party,... View Details
- July 2024
- Article
The Home State Effect: How Subnational Governments Shape Climate Coalitions
By: Jonas Meckling and Samuel Trachtman
Organized business interests often seek to block public interest regulations. But whether firms oppose regulation depends on institutional context. We argue that, in federal systems, sub-national policies and politics can have a home state effect on firms' national... View Details
- July 2024
- Article
Mass General Brigham’s Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement System: A Decade of Learnings
By: Jason B. Liu, Robert S. Kaplan, David W. Bates, Mario O. Edelen, Rachel C. Sisodia and Andrea L. Pusic
This article describes the strategies that leaders at the Mass General Brigham (MGB) health system have used in launching a standardized patient-reported outcome measure (PROM) collection program in 2012, a major step in the value-based transformation of health care.... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Winner Take All: Exploiting Asymmetry in Factorial Designs
By: Matthew DosSantos DiSorbo, Iavor I. Bojinov and Fiammetta Menchetti
Researchers and practitioners have embraced factorial experiments to simultaneously test multiple treatments, each with different levels. With the rise of technologies like Generative AI, factorial experimentation has become even more accessible: it is easier than ever... View Details
- June 2024
- Article
Going Digital: Implications for Firm Value and Performance
By: Wilbur Chen and Suraj Srinivasan
We examine firm value and performance implications of the growing trend of non-technology companies engaging in digital transformation. We measure digital activities in firms based on the disclosure of digital words in the business description section of 10-Ks. Digital... View Details
- June 2024
- Article
Inflation with COVID Consumption Baskets
By: Alberto Cavallo
The Covid-19 pandemic led to changes in expenditure patterns that introduced significant bias in the measurement of Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation. Using publicly-available data on card transactions, I updated the official CPI weights and re-calculated inflation... View Details
- June 2024
- Article
Real Growth in Space Manufacturing Output Substantially Exceeds Growth in the Overall Space Economy
By: Tina Highfill and Matthew Weinzierl
Accurately measuring real economic output in the space economy is made difficult by the rapid increase in capabilities and decrease in prices of launch and satellite technologies achieved over the past two decades. Nominal measures of output in space will tend to... View Details
- May 2024
- Background Note
Net Revenue Retention: Unpacking the Dynamics of Customer Monetization
By: Elie Ofek, Barak Libai and Eitan Muller
Firms and investors alike are beginning to recognize the importance of tracking how revenues from existing customers are evolving over time and to appreciate the value in understanding what might explain changes in these revenues. Consequently, in addition to looking... View Details