Publications

June 2014
Supplement

Financial Policy at Apple, 2013 (B)

By: Mihir Desai and Elizabeth A. Meyer

This case is meant to accompany Financial Policy at Apple, 2013 (A) and details the results of Apple's Q2 2013 earnings call. View Details

Keywords: Apple; Steve Jobs; Forecast; Forecasting; Forecasting And Prediction; Shareholder Activism; Share Repurchase; Dividends; Financial Ratios; Preferred Shares; Cash Distribution; Corporate Finance; Borrowing and Debt; Financial Management; Financial Strategy; Technology Industry; Consumer Products Industry; United States; Republic of Ireland

December 2015
Article

Emotion and the Art of Negotiation: How to Use Your Feelings to Your Advantage

By: Alison Wood Brooks

Negotiations can be fraught with emotion, but it's only recently that researchers have examined how particular feelings influence what happens during deal making. Here the author shares some key findings and advice. Anxiety leads to poor outcomes. You will be less... View Details

Keywords: Negotiation Style; Emotions

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26 Nov 2007
Research & Ideas

Best Practices of Global Innovators

can provide a valuable source of product differentiation. And finally, advances in development tools (e.g., computer-aided design) coupled with a move to more open architectures and technical standards have driven down the cost View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

Web

Commodities, Currencies, and Balancing of the Trade Deficit - A Chronicle of the China Trade

China and also became a major source of currency. 16 Millions of dollars’ worth of opium were imported into the country, distributed into the... View Details

The Relevance of Broker Networks for Information Diffusion in the Stock Market

This paper shows that the network of relationships between brokers and institutional investors shapes the information diffusion in the stock market. We exploit trade-level data to show that trades channeled through central brokers earn significantly positive... View Details

June 2015 (Revised January 2017)
Case

Accor: Strengthening the Brand with Digital Marketing

By: Jill Avery, Chekitan S. Dev and Peter O'Connor

Accor, the world's leading hotel operator with a portfolio of fourteen hospitality brands (including Sofitel and Novotel) in 92 countries, prided itself on living up to its motto, "To open new frontiers in hospitality." Accor was indeed contemplating how to do just... View Details

Keywords: Digital; Hospitality; Branding; Brand Management; Marketing; Brands and Branding; Marketing Channels; Marketing Communications; Marketing Strategy; E-commerce; Accommodations Industry; Travel Industry; Tourism Industry; Europe; France

Educators

Research Summary

Selection, Reallocation, and Spillover: Identifying the Sources of Gains from Multinational Production (with Maggie Chen)

By: Laura Alfaro

Quantifying the gains from multinational production has been a vital topic of economic research. Positive productivity gains are often attributed to knowledge spillover from multinational to domestic firms. An alternative, less stressed explanation is firm selection... View Details

Keywords: Gains From Multinational Production; Firm Selection; Knowledge Spillover

Research Summary

Capitalism as a System of Governance

My research interest is in further exploration of the analytic utility of an original conception of capitalism as an indirect, three level system of governance for the economic relationships within political entities, and mostly within nation states. This three level... View Details

September 2011
Article

Political Instability: Effects on Financial Development, Roots in the Severity of Economic Inequality

By: Mark J. Roe and Jordan I. Siegel

We here bring forward strong evidence that political instability impedes financial development, with its variation a primary determinant of differences in financial development around the world. As such, it needs to be added to the short list of major determinants of... View Details

Keywords: Financial Development; Political Instability; Government and Politics; Finance; Growth and Development; Economics; Equality and Inequality

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Roe, Mark J., and Jordan I. Siegel. "Political Instability: Effects on Financial Development, Roots in the Severity of Economic Inequality." Journal of Comparative Economics 39, no. 3 (September 2011): 279–309. (We here bring forward strong evidence that political instability impedes financial development, with its variation a primary determinant of differences in financial development around the world. As such, it needs to be added to the short list of major determinants of financial development. First, structural conditions first postulated by Engerman and Sokoloff (2002) as generating long-term inequality are shown here empirically to be exogenous determinants of political instability. Second, that exogenously-determined political instability in turn holds back financial development, even when we control for factors prominent in the last decade's cross-country studies of financial development. The findings indicate that inequality-perpetuating conditions that result in political instability are fundamental roadblocks for international organizations like the World Bank that seek to promote financial development. The evidence here includes country fixed effect regressions and an instrumental model inspired by Engerman and Sokoloff's (2002) work, which to our knowledge has not yet been used in finance and which is consistent with current tests as valid instruments. Four conventional measures of national political instability — Alesina and Perotti's (1996) well-known index of instability, a subsequent index derived from Banks' (2005) work, and two indices of managerial perceptions of nation-by-nation political instability — persistently predict a wide range of national financial development outcomes for recent decades. Political instability's significance is time consistent in cross-sectional regressions back to the 1960's, the period when the key data becomes available, robust in both country fixed-effects and instrumental variable regressions, and consistent across multiple measures of instability and of financial development. Overall, the results indicate the existence of an important channel running from structural inequality to political instability, principally in nondemocratic settings, and then to financial backwardness. The robust significance of that channel extends existing work demonstrating the importance of political economy explanations for financial development and financial backwardness. It should help to better understand which policies will work for financial development, because political instability has causes, cures, and effects quite distinct from those of many of the key institutions most studied in the past decade as explaining financial backwardness.)

01 Feb 2013
Working Paper Summaries

Dollar Funding and the Lending Behavior of Global Banks

Keywords: by Victoria Ivashina, David S. Scharfstein & Jeremy C. Stein; Financial Services

2011
Article

How Do Networks Matter? The Performance Effects of Interorganizational Networks

By: Ranjay Gulati, D. Lavie and Ravi Madhavin

A growing body of research suggests that an organization's ties to other organizations furnish resources that bestow various benefits. Scholars have proposed different perspectives on how such networks of ties shape organizational behavior and performance outcomes, but... View Details

Keywords: Management Systems; Organizational Design; Performance; Performance Effectiveness; Networks; Partners and Partnerships; Research; Perspective; Value

September 2013 (Revised August 2015)
Background Note

Leadership and Teaming

By: Ethan Bernstein

Small differences in the leadership of teams can have large consequences for the success of their efforts. Many initiatives fail not because of a fatal error in judgment or insufficient ideas, knowledge, motivation, or capabilities to deliver a solution. They fail... View Details

Educators

October 2011
Supplement

An Interview with Jack Hughes, Founder and Chairman of TopCoder

By: David A. Garvin

TopCoder's crowdsourcing-based business model, in which software is developed through online tournaments, is presented. The case highlights how TopCoder has created a unique two-sided innovation platform consisting of a global community of over 225,0000 developers who... View Details

Keywords: Growth and Development; Technological Innovation; Problems and Challenges; Motivation and Incentives; Competition; Online Technology; Information Technology Industry

22 Feb 2012
Working Paper Summaries

The Dynamic Effects of Bundling as a Product Strategy

Keywords: by Timothy Derdenger & Vineet Kumar; Video Game

2015
Article

Scalable Detection of Anomalous Patterns With Connectivity Constraints

By: Skyler Speakman, Edward McFowland III and Daniel B. Neill

We present GraphScan, a novel method for detecting arbitrarily shaped connected clusters in graph or network data. Given a graph structure, data observed at each node, and a score function defining the anomalousness of a set of nodes, GraphScan can efficiently and... View Details

Keywords: Biosurveillance; Event Detection; Graph Mining; Scan Statistics; Spatial Scan Statistic

2008
Working Paper

Attracting Flows by Attracting Big Clients: Conflicts of Interest and Mutual Fund Portfolio Choice

By: Lauren Cohen and Breno Schmidt

We explore a new channel for attracting inflows using a unique dataset of corporate 401(k) retirement plans and their mutual fund family trustees. Families secure substantial inflows by being named trustee of a 401(k) plan. This affords the plan sponsor potential... View Details

Keywords: Investment Funds; Investment Portfolio; Conflict of Interests; Financial Services Industry