Publications
Publications
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(11,473)
- Faculty Publications (3,436)
- May 2025
- Article
Imagining the Future: Memory, Simulation and Beliefs
By: Pedro Bordalo, Giovanni Burro, Katherine B. Coffman, Nicola Gennaioli and Andrei Shleifer
How do people form beliefs about novel risks, with which they have little or no experience? Motivated by survey data on beliefs about Covid we collected in 2020, we build a model based on the psychology of selective memory. When a person thinks about an event,... View Details
- May–June 2025
- Article
Sustainability as a Business-Model Transformation
By: Ivanka Visnjic, Felipe Monteiro and Michael L. Tushman
Many global companies have made public commitments to sustainability targets. Fulfilling these commitments will require firms to transform their business models and organizational architectures. A few pioneers are leading the way, demonstrating that companies can make... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Management and Firm Dynamism
By: Nicholas Bloom, Jonathan S. Hartley, Raffaella Sadun, Rachel Schuh and John Van Reenen
We show better-managed firms are more dynamic in plant acquisitions, disposals, openings and closings in U.S. Census and international data. Better-managed firms also birth better-managed plants, and improve the performance of the plants they acquire. To explain these... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Generative AI Use by Capital Market Information Intermediaries: Evidence from Seeking Alpha
By: Mark Bradshaw, Chenyang Ma, Benjamin Yost and Yuan Zou
We study the use of generative AI for firm-specific financial analysis on the Seeking Alpha platform. We find that, after the initial launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, the share of AI-generated articles rose sharply to 13.4% of all articles, then declined in late... View Details
- April 2025 (Revised May 2025)
- Background Note
Customer Acquisition and the Cash Flow Trap
By: E. Ofek, Barak Libai and Eitan Muller
Startups as well as existing firms recognize the need to invest in order to acquire customers for their new ventures. And as each customer is expected at some point to have generated sufficient gross margins to cover their CAC, management expects that, soon enough, the... View Details
- April 2025
- Case
Japan Industrial Partners Powers the Leveraged Buyout of Toshiba
By: Brian K. Baik, Joseph Pacelli and James Barnett
The case explores Japan Industrial Partners (JIP) $14 billion takeover of Toshiba Corporation (Toshiba). JIP was a private equity firm that took over the troubled electronics corporation in late 2023. The deal, which had been labeled one of the largest leveraged... View Details
Keywords: International Accounting; Borrowing and Debt; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Ownership; Risk and Uncertainty; Strategy; Valuation; Leveraged Buyouts; Restructuring; Capital Structure; Cost of Capital; Private Equity; Bids and Bidding; Accounting Industry; Electronics Industry; Energy Industry; Manufacturing Industry; Semiconductor Industry; Asia; Japan
- April 2025
- Case
Techint: Strategic Choices for Community Impact
By: Lauren Cohen, Virak Prum, Kenneth Charman, Pedro Levindo and Mariana Cal
In early 2024 Erika Bienek, Chief Community Relations Officer at Techint, had to decide whether to invest in a new company-owned and operated technical school in Veracruz, Mexico, or invest instead in strengthening the city’s public education system. Techint, a global... View Details
Keywords: Technical Institutes; Community Relations; Social Impact; Argentina; Mexico; Brazil; Conglomerate; Stakeholder Management; Government And Business; Community Impact; Philanthropy; Business Conglomerates; Business Subsidiaries; Business Headquarters; Family Business; Decision Making; Private Sector; Public Sector; Education; Curriculum and Courses; Middle School Education; Secondary Education; Teaching; Training; Learning; Energy; Engineering; Construction; Values and Beliefs; Geography; Global Range; Local Range; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Globalized Firms and Management; Government Legislation; Recruitment; Innovation and Invention; Disruptive Innovation; Knowledge; Resource Allocation; Industry Clusters; Infrastructure; Family Ownership; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Business and Community Relations; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Business and Government Relations; Creativity; Reputation; Social and Collaborative Networks; Civil Society or Community; Social Issues; Poverty; Strategy; Construction Industry; Education Industry; Energy Industry; Industrial Products Industry; Manufacturing Industry; Steel Industry; Europe; Italy; Latin America; North and Central America; Mexico; North America; United States; South America; Argentina; Buenos Aires; Brazil
- 2025
- Working Paper
Balancing Engagement and Polarization: Multi-Objective Alignment of News Content Using LLMs
By: Mengjie Cheng, Elie Ofek and Hema Yoganarasimhan
We study how media firms can use LLMs to generate news content that aligns with multiple objectives—making content more engaging while maintaining a preferred level of polarization/slant consistent with the firm’s editorial policy. Using news articles from The New York... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
The Political Economy of Firm Networks: CEO Ideology and Global Trade
By: Elisabeth Kempf, Mancy Luo and Margarita Tsoutsoura
We examine how the political ideology of corporate leaders shapes cross-border firm
networks. Exploiting changes in ideological alignment between U.S. firm CEOs and
foreign governments around close foreign elections, we show that U.S. firms are more
likely to... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Prices and Concentration: A U-shape? Theory and Evidence from Renewables
By: Michele Fioretti, Junnan He and Jorge Tamayo
We show that when firms compete via supply functions, transferring high-cost
capacity to the largest, most efficient firm—thereby diversifying its production technologies
while increasing concentration—can lower prices by prompting the leader
to expand output and... View Details
- April 2025
- Case
Pouring Oil on Troubled Waters: Vickers Oils and Resolving Family Conflict over Generations
By: Lauren Cohen, Octavian Graf Pilati and Sophia Pan
Will Vickers, a seventh-generation (G7) member of the Vickers Family, grappled with a pressing challenge: how to re-integrate family members into the firm to recover lost talent. His father, Peter Vickers, was the lone leader of the Vickers Oils—despite having stepped... View Details
Keywords: Shareholder; Involvement; Family Office; Family Firms; Family Business; Business Growth and Maturation; Experience and Expertise; Retention; Leadership Development; Business or Company Management; Management Succession; Organizational Structure; Family Ownership; Family and Family Relationships; Diversification; Conflict and Resolution; Consumer Products Industry; United Kingdom
- 2025
- Working Paper
Training Within Firms
By: Brayan Diaz, Andrea Neyra-Nazarrett, Julian Ramirez, Raffaella Sadun and Jorge Tamayo
Training investments are essential for improving worker and firm productivity, yet their
implementation is often hindered by low participation rates and insufficient worker engagement.
This study uses data from three firms–a car manufacturer, a quick-service... View Details
- April 2025
- Article
An Anatomy of Crypto-Enabled Cybercrimes
By: Will Cong, Campbell Harvey, Daniel Rabetti and Zong-Yu Wu
The advent of cryptocurrencies and digital assets holds the promise of improving financial systems by offering cheap, quick, and secure transfer of value. However, it also opens up new payment channels for cybercrimes. Assembling a diverse set of public on- and... View Details
- April 2025
- Article
Corporate Ownership and ESG Performance
By: Belen Villalonga, Peter Tufano and Boya Wang
Using a sample of 3083 firms from 62 countries over 18 years, we analyze how the structure and identity of firms' material owners influence their Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) performance. We find that firms with founding families or other individual... View Details
- April 2025
- Article
Crisis Interventions in Corporate Insolvency
By: Samuel Antill and Christopher Clayton
We model the optimal resolution of insolvent firms in general equilibrium. Collateral-constrained banks lend to (i) solvent firms to finance investments and (ii) distressed firms to avoid liquidation. Liquidations create negative fire-sale externalities. Liquidations... View Details
- April 2025
- Article
The Allocation of Socially Responsible Capital
By: Daniel Green and Benjamin N. Roth
Portfolio allocation decisions increasingly incorporate social values. We develop a tractable framework to study how competition between investors to own socially valuable assets affects social welfare. Relative to the most common social-investing strategies, we... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
The Invention of Corporate Governance
By: Yueran Ma and Andrei Shleifer
The analysis of corporate governance begins with a central feature of modern capitalism—the separation of ownership and control in large corporations—first empirically documented by Berle and Means (1932). Such separation entails several agency problems reflecting... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
With a Little Help from My Family: Informal Startup Financing
By: Brian K. Baik, Johan Ludvig S. Karlsen and Katja Kisseleva
Using Norwegian administrative data, we identify family equity investments in startups
and examine their effects on investor returns and firm behavior. Informal investors
earn lower returns than external individuals, and the firms they back are less
likely to secure... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Private Equity and Workers: Modeling and Measuring Monopsony, Implicit Contracts, and Efficient Reallocation
By: Kyle Herkenhoff, Josh Lerner, Gordon M. Phillips, Francisca Rebelo and Benjamin Sampson
We measure the real effects of private equity buyouts on worker outcomes by building a new
database that links transactions to matched employer-employee data in the United States. To
guide our empirical analysis, we derive testable implications from three theories in... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Transferability MATTRs: Towards Understanding Antecedents of Strategic Licensing
By: Dafna F. Bearson and Maria P. Roche
This paper examines the antecedents of firms’ decisions to license intellectual property
(IP). We propose a conceptual framework emphasizing two critical factors: (1) transferability,
which we define as the ease of moving knowledge embodied in inventions across
firm... View Details