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- 2021
- Working Paper
Public Disclosure of Private Meetings: Does Observing Peers' Information Acquisition Affect Analysts' Attention Allocation?
By: Yi Ru, Ronghuo Zheng and Yuan Zou
We investigate the impact of observing peers’ information acquisition on financial analysts’ attention allocation. Using the timely disclosure mandate by the Shenzhen Stock Exchange as a setting, we find that, when analysts can observe that a firm is visited by other... View Details
- Summer 2021
- Article
The World Management Survey at 18: lessons and the way forward
By: Daniela Scur, Raffaella Sadun, John Van Reenen, Renata Lemos and Nicholas Bloom
Understanding how differences in management ‘best practices’ affect organizational outcomes has been a focus of both theoretical and empirical work in the fields of management, sociology, economics, and public policy. The World Management Survey (WMS) project was born... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
Proxy Advisory Firms and Corporate Shareholder Engagement
By: Aiyesha Dey, Joshua White and Austin Starkweather
We examine the influence of proxy advisors on firms’ shareholder engagement behavior. Our analyses exploit a quasi-natural experiment using Say-On-Pay voting outcomes near a threshold that triggers a review of engagement activities by Institutional Shareholder Services... View Details
- June 2021
- Case
Building the Governance to Take Capital SAFI to the Next Level
By: V.G. Narayanan, Asis Martinez Jerez and Mariana Cal
Asset management firm Capital SAFI wanted to attract new strategic investors and expand to other countries. Having the right corporate governance in place was critical to achieve this goal. View Details
Keywords: Board Of Directors; Transparency; Sustainable Finance; South America; Latin America; Corporate Governance; Governance Controls; Governing and Advisory Boards; Business Organization; Corporate Strategy; Transformation; Investment Funds; Financial Services Industry; Bolivia; South America; Latin America
- June 2021 (Revised November 2024)
- Case
MicroStrategy: Accounting for Cryptocurrency
By: Jonas Heese and Annelena Lobb
On February 15, 2021, Alina Moss, an analyst who covered the technology company MicroStrategy, pondered a rise in MicroStrategy’s share price. Moss had dialed into the company earnings call. When it ended, Moss had more questions than answers. MicroStrategy had... View Details
- June 23, 2021
- Article
Research: When A/B Testing Doesn't Tell You the Whole Story
By: Eva Ascarza
When it comes to churn prevention, marketers traditionally start by identifying which customers are most likely to churn, and then running A/B tests to determine whether a proposed retention intervention will be effective at retaining those high-risk customers. While... View Details
Keywords: Customer Retention; Churn; Targeting; Market Research; Marketing; Investment Return; Customers; Retention; Research
- Article
Cash-for-Information Whistleblower Programs: Effects on Whistleblowing and Consequences for Whistleblowers
By: Aiyesha Dey, Jonas Heese and Gerardo Pérez Cavazos
Cash-for-information whistleblower programs have gained momentum as a regulatory tool to enforce corporate misconduct. Yet, little is known about how financial incentives affect whistleblowers’ decisions to report potential misconduct to authorities. Similarly, there... View Details
- June 2021
- Case
uBiome
By: Thomas R. Eisenmann and Olivia Graham
uBiome provided clinical tests that sequenced the DNA of human microbiome samples, providing data on health conditions directly to consumers or to prescribing physicians. Founded in 2012, the San Francisco-based startup raised $105 million from top-tier venture capital... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
Equilibrium Effects of Pay Transparency
By: Zoë B. Cullen and Bobak Pakzad-Hurson
The public discourse around pay transparency has focused on the direct effect: how workers seek
to rectify newly-disclosed pay inequities through renegotiations. The question of how wage-setting
and hiring practices of the firm respond in equilibrium has received... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
Granular Corporate Hedging Under Dominant Currency
By: Laura Alfaro, Mauricio Calani and Liliana Varela
Foreign currency use can be a source of risk associated with currency mismatches, which firms can hedge using FX derivatives. This paper uncovers five novel facts about firms’ use of foreign currency (FX) derivatives employing a unique dataset covering the universe of... View Details
- Article
Is ‘Not Guilty’ the Same as ‘Innocent’? Evidence from SEC Financial Fraud Investigations
By: Eugene F. Soltes and David H. Solomon
When the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigates firms for financial fraud, investors learn about the investigation only if managers disclose it, or regulators sanction the firm. We investigate the effects of such disclosures using confidential records on... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
The Demand for Executive Skills
By: Stephen Hansen, Tejas Ramdas, Raffaella Sadun and Joseph B. Fuller
We use a unique corpus of job descriptions for C-suite positions to document skills requirements in top managerial occupations across a large sample of firms. A novel algorithm maps the text of each executive search into six separate skill clusters reflecting... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Virtual Water Coolers: A Field Experiment on the Role of Virtual Interactions on Organizational Newcomer Performance
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Jacqueline N. Lane and Iavor Bojinov
Designing management practices to better onboard organizational newcomers working remotely is a key priority for firms. We report results from a randomized field experiment conducted at a large global firm that estimates the performance effects of different types of... View Details
- May 2021 (Revised August 2021)
- Case
Airbnb During the Pandemic: Stakeholder Capitalism Faces a Critical Test
By: Benjamin C. Esty and Allison Ciechanover
As the COVID pandemic spread in early 2020, global travel ground to a halt. For Airbnb, the San Francisco-based platform for renting accommodations, the impact was both swift and severe as revenues plummeted more than 70% over the prior year. Responding to the sudden... View Details
Keywords: COVID-19 Pandemic; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Corporate Governance; Crisis Management; Leadership; Digital Platforms; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Mission and Purpose; Value Creation; Decision Making; Goals and Objectives; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Travel Industry; Tourism Industry; Service Industry; United States
- May 2021
- Teaching Note
From Globalization to Dual Digital Transformation: CEO Thierry Breton Leading Atos Into 'Digital Shockwaves'
By: Tsedal Neeley
Teaching Note for HBS Case Nos. 419-027 and 419-046. Thierry Breton, chairman and CEO of IT company Atos, faces a pivotal juncture. After spending eight intense years scaling the company globally to over 100,000 employees in 70 countries, he sees digital shockwaves... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Data Governance, Interoperability and Standardization: Organizational Adaptation to Privacy Regulation
By: Sam (Ruiqing) Cao and Marco Iansiti
The increasing availability of data can afford dynamic competitive advantages among data-intensive
corporations, but governance bottlenecks hinder data-driven value creation and increase regulatory risks.
We analyze the role of two technological features of data... View Details
- May 2021
- Teaching Plan
Gera Developments: Leadership at a Crossroads
By: Christina R. Wing and John Masko
Teaching Plan for HBS Case No. 621-018. For decades, Gera Developments (Gera) was a boutique family-owned real estate development firm in Pune, India. But since 2000, managing director Rohit Gera had turned the company into a dynamic innovator in housing solutions for... View Details
Keywords: Buildings and Facilities; Business Growth and Maturation; Construction; Geographic Location; Global Strategy; Globalized Firms and Management; Housing; Leadership Style; Management Succession; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Culture; Family Ownership; Family and Family Relationships; Urban Development; Customization and Personalization; Real Estate Industry; Maharashtra; India; San Francisco
- May 2021 (Revised September 2021)
- Case
CPE and SUS Environmental: You've Got to Know When to Hold 'Em (A)
By: Josh Lerner and Franko Jira
In July 2016, Di Yang and Grace Guo of the leading Chinese private equity group CPE faced a dilemma—a happy dilemma, but a challenge nonetheless. CPE’s investment in the waste-to-energy firm SUS Environment had proved to be exceedingly successful. This success had... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
Going by the Book: Valuation Ratios and Stock Returns
By: Ki-Soon Choi, Eric So and Charles C.Y. Wang
We study the use of firms’ book-to-market ratios (B/M) in value investing and its implications for comovements in firms’ stock returns and trading volumes. We show B/M has become increasingly detached from common alternative valuation ratios over time while also... View Details
- May 2021
- Article
Private and Social Returns to R&D: Drug Development and Demographics
By: Efraim Benmelech, Janice Eberly, Dimitris Papanikolaou and Joshua Krieger
Investment in intangible capital such as R&D has increased dramatically since the 1990s. However, productivity growth remains sluggish in recent years. One potential reason is that a significant share of the increase in intangible investment is geared toward consumer... View Details