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- Article
Agency Costs, Mispricing, and Ownership Structure
By: Sergey Chernenko, C. Fritz Foley and Robin Greenwood
Standard theories of corporate ownership assume that because markets are efficient, insiders ultimately bear all agency costs that they create and therefore have a strong incentive to minimize conflicts of interest with outside investors. We argue that if equity is... View Details
- November 2012 (Revised December 2017)
- Case
TerraPower
John Gilleland, CEO of TerraPower, returned to his office after a lengthy meeting with potential investors. It was October 2012, and TerraPower was in the process of raising a $200M Series C round to finance the ongoing development of its next-generation nuclear... View Details
- November 2012 (Revised July 2013)
- Case
Gerry Pasciucco at AIG Financial Products
By: Gautam Mukunda and Thomas J. DeLong
Gerry Pasciucco was appointed to lead American International Group's Financial Products (AIGFP) group after the government bailout of AIG in 2008 and charged with the task of shutting down the division while minimizing the government's losses. AIGFP's failed trades had... View Details
- November 2012
- Case
Sugar Bowl
By: Richard G. Hamermesh and Alisa Zalosh
Shelby Givens, a recent business school graduate, returned home to Raleigh, North Carolina, to help rescue her family's ailing and outdated bowling alley, Westlake Lanes. Although she cut costs and addressed inefficiencies, moving the business from near-bankruptcy to... View Details
- November 2012
- Case
Ahold versus Tesco—Analyzing Performance
By: Suraj Srinivasan and Penelope Rossano
The case relates to understanding and comparing the performance of two leading retail companies—Ahold and Tesco. The case introduces the tools of Dupont and Modified Dupont Decomposition. While performance as measured by return on equity has been similar for the two... View Details
- October 2012 (Revised February 2019)
- Case
Whaling Ventures
By: Tom Nicholas and Jonas Peter Akins
Whaling was a prominent global industry in the nineteenth century and the United States was dominant. By 1850 there were about 900 whaling ships in the world and 700 of these were American. Rates of return on capital were high compared to benchmark investments, at... View Details
- October 2012 (Revised September 2013)
- Teaching Note
The Dabbawala System: On-Time Delivery, Every Time
By: Stefan H. Thomke
The Mumbai-based dabbawalas are a 5,000 or so person organization that achieves exceptional service performance with a semi-literate workforce. Every working day, they deliver and return about 130,000 lunchboxes to offices throughout Mumbai. This entails more than... View Details
- October 2012
- Article
The Effect of Reference Point Prices on Mergers and Acquisitions
By: Malcolm Baker, Xin Pan and Jeffrey Wurgler
Prior stock price peaks of targets affect several aspects of merger and acquisition activity. Offer prices are biased toward recent peak prices although they are economically unremarkable. An offer's probability of acceptance jumps discontinuously when it exceeds a... View Details
- 2012
- Working Paper
Risky Business: The Impact of Property Rights on Investment and Revenue in the Film Industry
By: Venkat Kuppuswamy and Carliss Y. Baldwin
Our paper tests a key prediction of property rights theory, specifically, that agents will respond to marginal incentives embedded in property rights when making non-contractible, revenue-enhancing investments (Grossman and Hart, 1986; Hart and Moore, 1990). Using rich... View Details
- Fall 2012
- Article
Innovation Strategy and Entry Deterrence
By: Ozge Turut and Elie Ofek
We model an incumbent's decision to pursue radical or incremental innovation when facing a rival entrant. The radical innovation may yield lucrative financial returns but entails significant technological and market-related uncertainties. It is also particularly... View Details
- 2012
- Article
Mutual Fund Trading Pressure: Firm-Level Stock Price Impact and Timing of SEOs
By: Mozaffar N. Khan, Leonid Kogan and George Serafeim
In tests of the equity market timing theory of external finance, the prior literature has used overvaluation identifiers such as high market-to-book and high prior returns that are likely correlated with other determinants of SEOs. We use price pressure resulting from... View Details
- 2012
- Article
Signing at the Beginning Makes Ethics Salient and Decreases Dishonest Self-reports in Comparison to Signing at the End
By: L. Shu, N. Mazar, F. Gino, D. Ariely and M. Bazerman
Many written forms required by businesses and governments rely on honest reporting. Proof of honest intent is typically provided through signature at the end of the document, e.g., tax returns or insurance policy forms. Still, people sometimes cheat to advance their... View Details
Keywords: Nudge; Morality; Honesty; Self-report; Policy-making; Ethics; Corporate Disclosure; Reports; Policy
- 2013
- Working Paper
FIN Around the World: The Contribution of Financing Activity to Profitability
By: Russell Lundholm, George Serafeim and Gwen Yu
We study how the availability of domestic credit influences the contribution that financing activities make to a firm's return on equity (ROE). Using a sample of 51,866 firms from 69 countries, we find that financing activities contribute more to a firm's ROE in... View Details
- 2012
- Working Paper
Clusters, Convergence, and Economic Performance
By: Mercedes Delgado, Michael E. Porter and Scott Stern
This paper evaluates the role of regional cluster composition in the economic performance of industries, clusters, and regions. On the one hand, diminishing returns to specialization in a location can result in a convergence effect: the growth rate of an industry... View Details
- June 2012
- Article
Comovement and Predictability Relationships Between Bonds and the Cross-Section of Stocks
By: Malcolm Baker and Jeffrey Wurgler
Government bonds comove more strongly with bond-like stocks: stocks of large, mature, low-volatility, profitable, dividend-paying firms that are neither high growth nor distressed. Variables derived from the yield curve that are already known to predict returns on... View Details
- June 2012
- Article
Managing Risks: A New Framework
By: Robert S. Kaplan and Anette Mikes
Risk management is too often treated as a compliance issue that can be solved by drawing up lots of rules and making sure that all employees follow them. Many such rules, of course, are sensible and do reduce some risks that could severely damage a company. But... View Details
- 2012
- Working Paper
Reaching for Yield in the Bond Market
By: Bo Becker and Victoria Ivashina
Reaching-for-yield—the propensity to buy riskier assets in order to achieve higher yields—is believed to be an important factor contributing to the credit cycle. This paper analyses this phenomenon in the corporate bond market. Specifically, we show evidence for... View Details
- May 2012
- Article
Complicated Firms
By: Lauren Cohen and Dong Lou
We exploit a novel setting in which the same piece of information affects two sets of firms: one set of firms requires straightforward processing to update prices, while the other set requires more complicated analyses to incorporate the same piece of information into... View Details
- May 2012
- Article
Global, Local, and Contagious Investor Sentiment
By: Malcolm Baker, Jeffrey Wurgler and Yu Yuan
We construct investor sentiment indices for six major stock markets and decompose them into one global and six local indices. In a validation test, we find that relative sentiment is correlated with the relative prices of dual-listed companies. Global sentiment is a... View Details
- April 17, 2012
- Blog Post
Learning and the Disappearing Association between Governance and Returns
By: Lucian A. Bebchuk, Alma Cohen and Charles CY Wang