Publications

January 2002 (Revised September 2002)
Case

Corporate Renewal in America

By: Bruce R. Scott and Thomas S. Mondschean

Discusses various macroeconomic, regulatory, technological, and financial forces that led to increased corporate restructuring in the United States beginning in the mid-1980s. The U.S. financial system is often viewed as the most developed in the world and a model for... View Details

Keywords: Performance Evaluation; Corporate Governance; Macroeconomics; Economic Systems; Restructuring; Markets; Private Sector; Corporate Finance; Germany; Japan; United States

Article

Selling After the Crisis

By: Frank V. Cespedes

Like perishable goods in grocery stores, sales models have a sell-by date. As product standards evolve and new entrants emerge, buyers have more choices and demand more in terms of quality and performance across vendors. Firms that fail to adjust to changing customer... View Details

Keywords: Sales Model; Sales; Management; Customer Relationship Management; Health Pandemics

Register to Read

We examine the influence of physical proximity on between-start-up knowledge spillovers at one of the largest technology coworking hubs in the United States. Relying on the exogenous assignment of office space to the hub’s 251 start-ups, we find that proximity... View Details

June 2021
Case

Modern Endowment Management: Paula Volent and the Bowdoin Endowment

By: Luis M. Viceira, Emily R. McComb and Dean Xu

This case examines modern endowment investment management through the lens of a leadership transition between Chief Investment Officers (CIOs). In March 2021, Paula Volent is about to step down as the CIO of the endowment of Bowdoin College after twenty-one years, and... View Details

Keywords: Investment Portfolio; Investment Banking; Growth Management; Investment Return; Capital Markets; Interest Rates; Competition; Cost Management; Risk Management; Financial Liquidity; Performance Evaluation

22 Oct 2018
Sharpening Your Skills

Motivate Me, Please

your manager's paycheck can motivate you to work harder. Research Papers Research Paper Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal Setting For decades, goal setting has been promoted as a halcyon pill for... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

January 2009
Case

Sue Whitman at MBB Financial

By: William A. Sahlman

This case describes some issues confronting the leader of a major investment bank. She is pleased with the financial performance of her firm but concerned about signs of a bubble in the market. View Details

Keywords: Financial Crisis; Investment Banking; Financial Condition; Performance Effectiveness; Performance Evaluation; Banking Industry; Financial Services Industry

10 Sep 2013
First Look

First Look: September 10

particular, supportive incumbent industrial structures for input and output markets are strongly linked to higher establishment entry rates. We also find substantial evidence for the Chinitz effect where small local incumbent suppliers... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

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

Keywords: Professional Service Firms; Client Mix; Strategic Positioning; Organizations; Performance Effectiveness; Decision Making; Framework

11 Oct 2007
Working Paper Summaries

How Firms Respond to Being Rated

Keywords: by Aaron K. Chatterji & Michael W. Toffel

2023
Working Paper

The Impact of Input Inaccuracy on Leveraging AI Tools: Evidence from Algorithmic Labor Scheduling

By: Caleb Kwon, Antonio Moreno and Ananth Raman

Are the inputs used by your AI tool correct and up to date? In this paper, we show that the answer to this question: (i) is frequently a “no” in real business contexts, and (ii) has significant implications on the performance of AI tools. In the context of algorithmic... View Details

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Employees; Performance Effectiveness

SSRN

May 2004
Article

The Case for International Coordination of Electricity Regulation: Evidence from the Measurement of Efficiency in South America

A decade of experience has shown that monitoring the performance of public and private monopolies is the hardest part of electricity sector reform in South America—because operators control most of the information needed for effective regulation. South American... View Details

Keywords: Information; Mathematical Methods; Monopoly; Globalization; Energy Sources; Energy Industry; South America

January 2015
Article

Collaboration in Multi-Partner R&D Projects: The Impact of Partnering Scale and Scope

By: Anant Mishra, Aravind Chandrasekaran and Alan MacCormack

How can firms design collaboration structures for effective performance in R&D projects that involve multiple partners? To address this question, we examine the theoretical underpinnings of collaboration structures in multi-partner R&D projects—i.e., the scale and the... View Details

Keywords: Multi-Partner R＆D Projects; Empirical Research; New Development; Collaboration Structures; Partnering Scale And Scope; Partners and Partnerships; Infrastructure; Performance Capacity; Research and Development; Collaborative Innovation and Invention

26 Feb 2019
First Look

New Research and Ideas, February 26, 2019

effectively. There is, relatedly, an increasing focus on charity performance metrics. Via a series of experiments, this paper provides a caution to such a focus. While information on charity performance... View Details

Keywords: Dina Gerdeman

Article

Mission-Driven Governance

By: Raymond Fisman, Rakesh Khurana and Edward Martenson

The purpose of this paper is to provide a useful, easily applied theory of governance performance. The existing model is fundamentally adversarial, rooted in the paradigm of principal-agent conflict. At its base is an image of governance as a never-ending struggle... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Governance; Governing and Advisory Boards; Knowledge Management; Standards; Mission and Purpose; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Performance Effectiveness; Performance Evaluation

Research Summary

Corporate Control and Valuation

By: Richard S. Ruback

Richard S. Ruback's research and course development focus on applied corporate finance-in particular, corporate control transactions and valuation. His research on corporate control has yielded case studies on major transactions, such as the View Details

2012
Working Paper

Can Implicit Regulation Change Financial Market Behavior? Evidence from Spitzer's Attack on Market Timers

By: Charles C.Y. Wang

This paper explores a natural experiment setup from the 2003-2004 mutual fund scandals to evaluate the effectiveness of implicit regulation on financial markets behavior. On average, buy-and-hold investors lost 218 basis points annually from 1998 to 2002 to market... View Details

Keywords: Financial Markets; Market Timing; United States

20 Mar 2019
Research & Ideas

Gender-Diverse Companies Thrive Only Where Diversity is Embraced

context. Q2: In brief, what did you learn? How much of diversity and performance is consistent across study areas, and how much is driven by context? Zhang: We learned that the social context matters, a lot! The View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

August 28, 2018
Article

How Intermittent Breaks in Interaction Improve Collective Intelligence

By: Ethan Bernstein, Jesse Shore and David Lazer

People influence each other when they interact to solve problems. Such social influence introduces both benefits (higher average solution quality due to exploitation of existing answers through social learning) and costs (lower maximum solution quality due to a... View Details