Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(956)
- Faculty Publications (108)
- October 2019
- Article
Limited Investment Capital and Credit Spreads
Using proprietary credit default swap (CDS) data, I investigate how capital shocks at protection sellers impact pricing in the CDS market. Seller capital shocks—measured as CDS portfolio margin payments—account for 12% of the time-series variation in weekly spread... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
Decarbonization Factors
By: Alex Cheema-Fox, Bridget LaPerla, George Serafeim, David Turkington and Hui (Stacie) Wang
In the face of accelerating climate change, investors are making capital allocations seeking to decarbonize portfolios by reducing the carbon emissions of their holdings. To understand the performance of portfolio decarbonization strategies and investor behavior... View Details
- 2019
- White Paper
Impact-Weighted Financial Accounts: The Missing Piece for an Impact Economy
By: George Serafeim, T. Robert Zochowski and Jennifer Downing
Reimagining capitalism is an imperative. We need to create a more inclusive and sustainable form of capitalism that works for every person and the planet. Massive environmental damage, growing income and wealth disparity, stress, and depression within developed... View Details
- 2018
- Working Paper
Detecting Anomalies: The Relevance and Power of Standard Asset Pricing Tests
By: Malcolm Baker, Patrick Luo and Ryan Taliaferro
The two standard approaches for identifying capital market anomalies are cross-sectional coefficient tests, in the spirit of Fama and MacBeth (1973), and time-series intercept tests, in the spirit of Jensen (1968). A new signal can pass the first test, which we label a... View Details
- Article
Are Buybacks Really Shortchanging Investment?
By: Jesse M. Fried and Charles C.Y. Wang
It’s no secret that the American economy is suffering from the twin ills of slow growth and rising income inequality. Many lay the blame at the doors of America’s largest public corporations. The charge? These firms prefer to distribute cash generated from their... View Details
- February 2018
- Case
Health Savings Accounts: Enabling Consumer Participation
By: Regina E. Herzlinger and James Wallace
Health savings accounts (HSAs), a creation of the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act, had become an integral part of the drive toward consumer-driven health care. Coupled with high-deductible health plans, HSAs allowed consumers to directly control a significant part of... View Details
- January 2018 (Revised March 2019)
- Case
Autonomous Vehicles: The Rubber Hits the Road...but When?
By: William Kerr, Allison Ciechanover, Jeff Huizinga and James Palano
The rise of autonomous vehicles has enormous implications for business and society. Despite the many headlines and significant investment in the technology by early 2019, it was still unclear when truly autonomous vehicles would be a commercial reality. Students will... View Details
- Fourth Quarter 2017
- Article
Optimal Tilts: Combining Persistent Characteristic Portfolios
By: Malcolm Baker, Ryan Taliaferro and Terry Burnham
We examine the optimal weighting of four tilts in U.S. equity markets from 1968 through 2014. We define a “tilt” as a characteristic-based portfolio strategy that requires relatively low annual turnover. This is a continuum, with small size (a very persistent... View Details
- Article
Does Front-Loading Taxation Increase Savings?: Evidence from Roth 401(k) Introductions
By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson and Brigitte C. Madrian
Can governments increase private savings by taxing savings up front instead of in retirement? Roth 401(k) contributions are not tax-deductible in the contribution year, but withdrawals in retirement are untaxed. The more common before-tax 401(k) contribution is... View Details
- January 2017 (Revised January 2019)
- Case
The Rise and Fall of Lehman Brothers
By: Stuart C. Gilson, Kristin Mugford and Sarah L. Abbott
With nearly $700 billion in assets, Lehman was the largest U.S. bankruptcy in history. In 2007, Lehman achieved record earnings of over $4 billion on revenues of $60 billion. By September 2008 the fourth largest investment bank in the world was bankrupt. How had a... View Details
Keywords: Bankruptcy; Financial Distress; Accounting Policies; Business Ethics; Financial Reporting; Volatility; Judgments; Financial Crisis; Insolvency and Bankruptcy; Financial Liquidity; Investment Banking; Financial Management; Financial Strategy; Corporate Accountability; Corporate Disclosure; Corporate Governance; Crisis Management; Risk Management; Failure; Business and Government Relations; Ethics; Banking Industry; New York (city, NY)
- 2017
- Chapter
Multinational Activity in Emerging Markets: How and When Does Foreign Direct Investment Promote Growth?
By: Laura Alfaro
Among the prominent economic trends in recent decades is the exponential increase in flows of goods and capital driven by technological progress and a falling number of restrictions. A key driver of this phenomenon has been the cross-border production, foreign... View Details
- November 2016
- Article
Corporate Sustainability: First Evidence on Materiality
By: Mozaffar Khan, George Serafeim and Aaron Yoon
Using newly available materiality classifications of sustainability topics, we develop a novel dataset by hand-mapping sustainability investments classified as material for each industry into firm-specific sustainability ratings. This allows us to present new evidence... View Details
- Article
ESG Integration in Investment Management: Myths and Realities
By: Sakis Kotsantonis, Christopher Pinney and George Serafeim
The authors’ aim in this article is to set the record straight on the financial performance of sustainable investing while also correcting a number of other widespread misconceptions about this rapidly growing set of principles and methods.
Myth Number 1:... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
Optimal Tilts: Combining Persistent Characteristic Portfolios
By: Malcolm Baker, Ryan Taliaferro and Terry Burnham
We examine the optimal weighting of four tilts in US equity markets from 1968 through 2014. We define a “tilt” as a characteristic-based portfolio strategy that requires relatively low annual turnover. This is a continuum, with small size, a very persistent... View Details
- January 28, 2016
- Article
Making Sense of the Many Kinds of Impact Investing
By: Brian Trelstad
The article discusses the factors to consider when seeking to practice impact investing, which include the kind of impact preferred by the investor, the intensity and immediacy of impact, and the impact risk profile. View Details
- 2015
- Working Paper
Replicating Private Equity with Value Investing, Homemade Leverage, and Hold-to-Maturity Accounting
By: Erik Stafford
Private equity funds tend to select relatively small firms with low EBITDA multiples. Publicly traded equities with these characteristics have high risk-adjusted returns after controlling for common factors typically associated with value stocks. Hold-to-maturity... View Details
- January 2016 (Revised April 2017)
- Case
The Galaxy Dividend Income Growth Fund's Option Investment Strategies
By: W. Carl Kester
This case is designed to provide an elementary introduction to options and option pricing for beginning finance students. Analysis of the case requires students to compare the prices of put and call options with various exercise prices and maturity dates on two... View Details
- Article
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 analyzes this phenomenon in the corporate bond market. Specifically, we show evidence for... View Details
- October–December 2015
- Article
Reducing Bounded Ethicality: How to Help Individuals Notice and Avoid Unethical Behavior
Research on ethics has focused on the factors that help individuals act ethically when they are tempted to cheat. However, we know little about how best to help individuals notice unethical behaviors in others and in themselves. This paper identifies a solution:... View Details
- Article
The Cost of Capital for Alternative Investments
By: Jakub W. Jurek and Erik Stafford
Traditional risk factor models indicate that hedge funds capture pre-fee alphas of 6% to 10% per annum over the period from 1996 to 2012. At the same time, the hedge fund return series is not reliably distinguishable from the returns of mechanical S&P 500 put-writing... View Details