Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(3,682)
- Faculty Publications (649)
- 2012
- Article
Hiring Cheerleaders: Board Appointments of 'Independent' Directors
By: Lauren Cohen, Andrea Frazzini and Christopher Malloy
We provide evidence that firms appoint independent directors who are overly sympathetic to management, while still technically independent according to regulatory definitions. We explore a subset of independent directors for whom we have detailed, micro-level data on... View Details
- 2013
- Working Paper
Did Bank Distress Stifle Innovation During the Great Depression?
By: Ramana Nanda and Tom Nicholas
We find a negative relationship between bank distress and the level, quality and trajectory of firm-level innovation during the Great Depression, particularly for R&D firms operating in capital intensive industries. However, we also show that because a sufficient... View Details
- April–May 2012
- Article
Resources or Power? Implications of Social Networks on Compensation and Firm Performance
By: Joanne Horton, Yuval Millo and George Serafeim
Using a sample of 4,278 listed UK firms, we construct a social network of directorship-interlocks that comprises 31,495 directors. We use social capital theory and techniques developed in social network analysis to measure a director's connectedness and investigate... View Details
- April 2012
- Case
Renesas Electronics and the Automotive Microcontroller Supply Chain (A)
By: Willy Shih and Margaret Pierson
The magnitude 9.0 earthquake that struck Japan in March 2011 caused extensive damage to Renesas Electronics wafer fabrication facility, a critical link in the global automotive supply chain. Many OEMs sole-sourced customized microprocessors from the fab, so its... View Details
- April 2012
- Article
Bouncing Out of the Banking System: An Empirical Analysis of Involuntary Bank Account Closures
By: Dennis Campbell, F. Asis Martinez-Jerez and Peter Tufano
Using a new database, we document the factors that relate to the extent of involuntary consumer bank account closure resulting from excessive overdraft activity. Consumers who have accounts involuntarily closed for overdraft activity may have limited or no access to... View Details
- April 2012
- Article
Broadening Focus: Spillovers, Complementarities and Specialization in the Hospital Industry
By: Jonathan R. Clark and Robert S. Huckman
The long-standing argument that focused operations outperform others stands in contrast to claims about the benefits of broader operational scope. The performance benefits of focus are typically attributed to reduced complexity, lower uncertainty, and the development... View Details
- April 2012
- Article
Change Agents, Networks, and Institutions: A Contingency Theory of Organizational Change
By: Julie Battilana and Tiziana Casciaro
We develop a contingency theory for how structural closure in a network, defined as the extent to which an actor's network contacts are connected to one another, affects the initiation and adoption of change in organizations. Using longitudinal survey data supplemented... View Details
- 2012
- Working Paper
No News Is Good News: CSR Strategy and Newspaper Coverage of Negative Firm Events
By: Jiao Luo, Stephan Meier and Felix Oberholzer-Gee
One of the benefits of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs, it has been argued, is that they build up a reservoir of public good will, shielding companies in times of trouble. In this paper, we test the view that CSR provides protection from public ire by... View Details
- February 2012
- Article
Americans Do IT Better: US Multinationals and the Productivity Miracle
By: Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
US productivity growth accelerated after 1995 (unlike Europe's), particularly in sectors that intensively use information technologies (IT). Using two new micro panel datasets we show that US multinationals operating in Europe also experienced a "productivity miracle."... View Details
- February 2012
- Article
Management Practices across Firms and Countries
By: Nicholas Bloom, Christos Genakos, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
For the last decade we have been using double-blind survey techniques and randomized sampling to construct management data on over 10,000 organizations across 20 countries. On average, we find that in manufacturing American, Japanese, and German firms are the best... View Details
Keywords: Management Practices and Processes; Competency and Skills; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Organizations; Developing Countries and Economies; Economic Sectors; Performance; Business and Shareholder Relations; Private Equity; Multinational Firms and Management; United States; Germany; Japan; China; India
- 2012
- Chapter
Evidence from the Firm: A New Approach to Understanding Corruption
By: Shawn A. Cole and Anh Tran
Due to its clandestine nature, most of what we understand about corruption comes from survey evidence and self-reported perceptions of corruption: this limits both the range of questions that can be asked and the precision of answers that can be provided. This chapter... View Details
- 2012
- Chapter
Institutional Pressures and Organizational Characteristics: Implications for Environmental Strategy
By: Magali A. Delmas and Michael W. Toffel
A broad literature has emerged over the past decades demonstrating that firms' environmental strategies and practices are influenced by stakeholders and institutional pressures. Such findings are consistent with institutional sociology, which emphasizes the importance... View Details
- December 2011
- Article
Data Impediments to Empirical Work on Health Insurance Markets
By: Leemore S. Dafny, David Dranove, Frank Limbrock and Fiona Scott Morton
We compare four datasets that researchers might use to study competition in the health insurance industry. We show that the two datasets most commonly used to estimate market concentration differ considerably from each other (both in levels and in changes over time),... View Details
- 2011
- Working Paper
Discretion Within the Constraints of Opportunity: Gender Homophily and Structure in a Formal Organization
By: Adam M. Kleinbaum, Toby E. Stuart and Michael L. Tushman
Homophily in social relations is widely documented. We know that homophily results from both individual preferences and uneven opportunities for interaction, but how these two mechanisms interact in formal organizations is not well understood. We argue that... View Details
- 2011
- Working Paper
Management Practices Across Firms and Countries
By: Nicholas Bloom, Christos Genakos, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
For the last decade we have been using double-blind survey techniques and randomized sampling to construct management data on over 10,000 organizations across 20 countries. On average, we find that in manufacturing, American, Japanese, and German firms are the best... View Details
- November 2011
- Case
Celeritas, Inc.: Leadership Challenges in a Fast-Growth Industry
By: Michael Beer and Ingrid Vargas
In 2011, Celeritas is a leading data communications company in the crowded, highly competitive, and ever-evolving enterprise-network optimization market. Having experienced rapid growth since its founding in 2003, Celeritas has recently seen sales decline and has begun... View Details
- November 2011
- Article
Corporate Governance When Founders Are Directors
By: Feng Li and Suraj Srinivasan
We examine CEO compensation, CEO retention policies, and M&A decisions in firms where founders serve as a director with a non-founder CEO (founder-director firms). We find that founder-director firms offer a different mix of incentives to their CEOs than other firms.... View Details
- 2013
- Working Paper
The Dynamics of Firm Lobbying
By: William R. Kerr, William F. Lincoln and Prachi Mishra
We study the determinants of the dynamics of firm lobbying behavior using a panel data set covering 1998–2006. Our data exhibit three striking facts: (i) few firms lobby, (ii) lobbying status is strongly associated with firm size, and (iii) lobbying status is highly... View Details
- September 2011
- Article
Information Risk and Fair Value: An Examination of Equity Betas
By: Edward J. Riedl and George Serafeim
Using a sample of U.S. financial institutions, we exploit recent mandatory disclosures of financial instruments designated as fair value level 1, 2, and 3 to test whether greater information risk in financial instrument fair values leads to higher cost of capital. We... View Details
- Article
Market Interest in Nonfinancial Information
By: R. G. Eccles, Michael P. Krzus and George Serafeim
Market interest in nonfinancial (e.g., Environmental, Social, and Governance [ESG]) information, including data produced by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), is growing. Using data from Bloomberg we analyze this interest from a variety of different perspectives, and... View Details