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- Article
Manage the Suppliers That Could Harm Your Brand: Know When to Avoid, Engage, or Drop Them
By: Jodi L Short and Michael W. Toffel
The pandemic has placed a new spotlight on working conditions in factories that supply global companies. To avert problems, firms often impose codes of conduct on their suppliers and perform audits to assess compliance. Do these measures help identify unethical... View Details
Keywords: Auditing; Agency Cost; Quality And Safety; Quality Management System; Quality Management; Unions; Environmental Management; Globalization; Goods and Commodities; Governance; Labor; Labor Unions; Wages; Working Conditions; Operations; Supply Chain; Safety; Quality; China; Bangladesh; Asia; Pakistan
- March 2021
- Article
On the Direct and Indirect Real Effects of Credit Supply Shocks
By: Laura Alfaro, Manuel García-Santana and Enrique Moral-Benito
We explore the real effects of bank-lending shocks and how they permeate the economy through buyer-supplier linkages. We combine administrative data on all Spanish firms with a matched bank-firm-loan dataset of all corporate loans from 2003 to 2013 to estimate... View Details
- 2021
- Chapter
Renewing the Relevance of IB: Can Some History Help?
By: Geoffrey Jones
International business (IB) as a discipline has given limited attention to contemporary grand challenges of inequality, global warming, aging populations, endemic health crises, and de-globalization, in all of which multinationals are either central to the problem or... View Details
- March 2021
- Article
Targeted Price Controls on Supermarket Products
By: Alberto Cavallo and Diego Aparicio
We study the impact of targeted price controls for supermarket products in Argentina from 2007 to 2015. Using web scraping, we collected daily prices for controlled and non-controlled goods and measured the differential effects on inflation, product availability, and... View Details
Keywords: Prices; Controls; Price Dispersion; Economics; Price; Cost Management; Goods and Commodities; Retail Industry; Argentina
- March 2021
- Article
The Customer May Not Always Be Right: Customer Compatibility and Service Performance
This paper investigates the impact of customer compatibility – the degree of fit between the needs of customers and the capabilities of the operations serving them – on customer experiences and firm performance. We use a variance decomposition analysis to quantify the... View Details
- Article
What Professional Service Firms Must Do to Thrive
By: Ashish Nanda and Das Narayandas
When the going gets tough, professional service firms (PSFs) often get desperate and chase all kinds of business just to keep the lights on. Consultancies, financial services firms, VC/PE firms, and the like offer services and sign up clients they should never have... View Details
- February 2021 (Revised October 2021)
- Case
Collab Capital
Founded in 2020 by Jewel Burks Solomon and her partners, Barry Givens and Justin Dawkins, Collab Capital was a new investment firm built on two pillars: first, it would identify and support ventures founded by Black entrepreneurs, a group underrepresented in... View Details
- February 2021
- Case
Apple: Privacy vs. Safety (A)
By: Henry McGee, Nien-hê Hsieh, Sarah McAra and Christian Godwin
In 2015, Apple CEO Tim Cook debuted the iPhone 6S with enhanced security measures that enflamed a debate on privacy and public safety around the world. The iPhone 6S, amid a heightened concern for privacy following the 2013 revelation of clandestine U.S. surveillance... View Details
Keywords: Iphone; Encryption; Data Privacy; Customers; Customer Focus and Relationships; Decision Making; Ethics; Values and Beliefs; Globalized Firms and Management; Government and Politics; National Security; Law; Law Enforcement; Leadership; Markets; Safety; Social Issues; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Civil Society or Community; Mobile and Wireless Technology; Technology Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Telecommunications Industry; Electronics Industry; United States; China; Hong Kong
- February 2021 (Revised June 2021)
- Case
Barbarians at the Gate or Turnaround Gurus? Private Equity and the Rise of the LBO
By: Tom Nicholas and John Masko
During the 1980s, leveraged buyouts (LBOs) and the private equity (PE) firms responsible for carrying them out revolutionized both investment and management in the U.S. Between 1980 and 1989, buyout activity in the U.S. surged from $1 billion per year to $60 billion.... View Details
Keywords: Leveraged Buyouts; Mergers and Acquisitions; Business Conglomerates; Restructuring; Borrowing and Debt; Private Equity; Bonds; Investment Return; Institutional Investing; Profit Sharing; Business History; Management Style; Private Ownership; Performance Effectiveness; Value Creation; Financial Services Industry; United States
- February 2021
- Case
Board Director Dilemmas—New Year, New Timing
By: Suraj Srinivasan, David G. Fubini and Amram Migdal
This case focuses on a junior partner at a private equity (PE) firm who sits on the board of one of the firm’s portfolio companies. In the case, the board member asks the CEO to accelerate a cost-cutting initiative and looks to a seasoned industry veteran who is also a... View Details
- February 2021 (Revised June 2021)
- Case
Brainlab: Imaging a MedTech Future
By: Regina E. Herzlinger, Gregory P. Licholai and Federica Gabrieli
Can Brainlab, a privately held firm, compete with giants like Medtronic and Amazon in delivering the Digital Operating Room of the future? The CEO is pondering solutions for secure exchange of medical information, pricing a new robotic imaging device, and reorganizing... View Details
Keywords: Surgery; Robotics; Health Care; Private Healthcare; Pricing; Technology Platform; Acquisition; Business Growth and Maturation; Growth and Development Strategy; Business Strategy; Corporate Strategy; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Health Care and Treatment; Health; Innovation and Invention; Innovation and Management; Innovation Strategy; Technological Innovation; Applications and Software; Information Infrastructure; Information Technology; Digital Platforms; Health Industry; Europe; Germany; Munich
- February 2021 (Revised April 2024)
- Case
Shopify: The Conquest for Chinese E-Commerce
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Avani Patel, Samantha Lin and Ariel Yang
In mid-2020, Tobias Lütke, CEO of Shopify, faced a critical decision on how to time potential expansion into the China market. Over the prior 15 years, his Canadian software-as-a-service company had grown from a small e-commerce solutions provider to a full service... View Details
Keywords: Timing; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Service Operations; Business Model; Organizational Design; Change Management; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Global Strategy; Health Pandemics; Growth Management; Marketing Strategy; Digital Platforms; Alliances; Partners and Partnerships; Opportunities; Internet and the Web; E-commerce; United States; Canada; China
- February 2021
- Supplement
HNA Group: Global Excellence with Chinese Characteristics (C)
By: William C. Kirby, Billy Chan and John P. McHugh
July 2017 was supposed to be a triumphant month for HNA Group. The latest Fortune Global 500 list showed the company had again skyrocketed in its ranking to no. 170, an improvement of over 200 positions from the year prior. Yet earlier that same July, the mysterious... View Details
Keywords: Conglomerate; Airline Industry; Coronavirus; Financial Risk; Debt; Bankruptcy; Global Strategy; Restructuring; Health Pandemics; Financial Markets; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Financial Condition; Globalized Firms and Management; Business and Government Relations; Air Transportation Industry; Financial Services Industry; China
- February 2021 (Revised June 2021)
- Case
Bairong and the Promise of Big Data
By: Lauren Cohen, Xiaoyan Zhang and Spencer C.N. Hagist
Bairong CEO Felix Zhang, in launching his credit scoring start-up that incorporates 74,000 variables per individual, found strong initial success. However, the shifting regulatory environment, growing breadth of competitors, difficulties in retaining top talent, and... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Competitive Two-Part Tariffs
By: Jorge Tamayo and Guofu Tan
We study competitive two-part tariffs in a model of asymmetric duopoly firms offering vertically and horizontally differentiated products. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for marginal cost pricing to arise in equilibrium, respectively, and determine the... View Details
- January–February 2021
- Article
Cross‐firm Return Predictability and Accounting Quality
By: Wen Chen, Mozaffar Khan, Leonid Kogan and George Serafeim
We test the hypothesis that if poor accounting quality (AQ) is associated with poor investor understanding of firms’ revenue and cost structures, then poor AQ stocks likely respond more slowly than good AQ stocks to new non‐idiosyncratic information that affects both... View Details
- February 2021
- Article
Do Household Wealth Shocks Affect Productivity? Evidence from Innovative Workers During the Great Recession
By: S. Bernstein, T. McQuade and R. Townsend
We investigate how the deterioration of household balance sheets affects worker productivity, and, in turn, economic downturns. Specifically, we compare the output of innovative workers who experienced differential declines in housing wealth during the financial crisis... View Details
- February 2021 (Revised February 2021)
- Background Note
eGrocery and the Role of Data for CPG Firms
By: Ayelet Israeli, Fedor (Ted) Lisitsyn and Mark A. Irwin
This notes provides information about the eGrocery industry and how traditional CPG companies handle this channel and potential data. It is recommended to use together with a series of exercises entitled: "E-Commerce Analytics for CPG Firms (A), (B), and (C)." View Details
Keywords: Data; Data Analysis; Data Analytics; Data Sharing; CPG; Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG); Delivery Planning; Customer Lifetime Value; Online Channel; Retail; Retail Analytics; Retailing Industry; Ecommerce; Grocery; Optimization; Analytics and Data Science; Analysis; Customer Value and Value Chain; Marketing Channels; E-commerce; Retail Industry; Consumer Products Industry; United States
- 2021
- Chapter
Sostenibilidad y negocios verdes en América Latina
By: Geoffrey Jones
This chapter in the first-ever business history textbook on Latin America examines the impact of modern business enterprise on the natural environment of the region between the 19th century and the present day. It argues that although global capitalism created much... View Details
- February 2021
- Article
The Department of Justice as a Gatekeeper in Whistleblower-Initiated Corporate Fraud Enforcement: Drivers and Consequences
By: Jonas Heese, Ranjani Krishnan and Hari Ramasubramanian
We examine drivers and consequences of U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) oversight of whistleblower cases of corporate fraud against the government. We find that the DOJ is more likely to intervene in and conduct longer investigations of cases that have a higher chance... View Details