Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(2,737)
- Faculty Publications (611)
- 2024
- Working Paper
The Value of Open Source Software
By: Manuel Hoffmann, Frank Nagle and Yanuo Zhou
The value of a non-pecuniary (free) product is inherently difficult to assess. A pervasive
example is open source software (OSS), a global public good that plays a vital role in the economy
and is foundational for most technology we use today. However, it is... View Details
- January 2024 (Revised May 2024)
- Case
Pioneer Natural Resources: Enhancing the Capital Return Strategy with Variable Dividends
In February 2021, Scott Sheffield, the CEO of Pioneer Natural Resources (an independent oil and gas company based in Texas), was considering the possibility of enhancing the firm’s capital return strategy by introducing a variable dividend tied to cash flows in... View Details
- January 2024
- Case
BWX Technologies
By: Suraj Srinivasan, Yuan Zou and Aldo Sesia
Rex Geveden and Robb LeMasters, CEO and CFO of BWX Technologies, Inc. (BWXT), were concerned that investors and analysts did not fully appreciate the company's transformation from a nuclear reactor provider to the US Navy and Canadian utilities to a multi-product line... View Details
- November–December 2023
- Article
Iterative Coordination and Innovation: Prioritizing Value over Novelty
By: Sourobh Ghosh and Andy Wu
An innovating organization faces the challenge of how to prioritize distinct goals of novelty and value, both of which underlie innovation. Popular practitioner frameworks like Agile management suggest that organizations can adopt an iterative approach of frequent... View Details
- October 2023
- Case
Kevin O'Leary: Building a Brand in Shark-infested Waters
By: Reza Satchu and Patrick Sanguineti
For more than fifteen years, successful Canadian entrepreneur and investor Kevin O’Leary had developed his brand into a global powerhouse. Since his first appearance on the Canadian television program Dragons’ Den in 2006 and his meteoric rise to stardom through the... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Bringing Science to Market: Knowledge Foundations, Inventor-Founders, and Performance
By: Justine Boudou and Maria Roche
In this paper, we examine how a startup’s knowledge foundations—embedded in its
core technology—influence its performance in the exit market. Using a dataset of 1,006
biomedicine startups founded between 2005 and 2015, we focus on two key factors: (1)
the degree of... View Details
- September 28, 2023
- Article
A Perspective on the Great Reallocation of Global Supply Chains
By: Laura Alfaro and Davin Chor
Previous optimism that cross-border supply chains would improve efficiency for firms and open up growth opportunities for countries has been tempered by concerns that global value chains now expose firms and countries to the risk of disruptions. This column analyses... View Details
- September 2023 (Revised January 2024)
- Case
Icahn Enterprises: Ponzi Scheme or Sound Investment
By: Aiyesha Dey, Jonas Heese and James Weber
Icahn Enterprises, a publicly traded limited partnership founded and operated by famed activist investor Carl Icahn, had earned above market returns for over a decade. Between 2018 and early 2023, it had a compound annual return of 31%. Icahn invested in undervalued... View Details
- September 2023 (Revised January 2024)
- Case
Helmy Abouleish: Making a Desert Bloom
By: Geoffrey G. Jones and Maxim Pike Harrell
This case examines the history of prominent Egyptian-based social enterprise SEKEM from its foundation in 1977 until the COP27 conference held in Sharm El-Sheikh in 2022. Led by father and son team Ibrahim and Helmy Abouleish, SEKEM turned desert into farmland using... View Details
- September 2023
- Article
Stock Price Reactions to ESG News: The Role of ESG Ratings and Disagreement
By: George Serafeim and Aaron Yoon
We investigate whether ESG ratings predict future ESG news and the associated market reactions. We find that the consensus rating predicts future news, but its predictive ability diminishes for firms with large disagreement between raters. Relation between news and... View Details
Keywords: ESG; ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) Performance; ESG Disclosure; ESG Ratings; ESG Reporting; ESG Disclosure Metrics; Sustainability; Investments; Disagreement; Rating Disagreement; Ratings; Environmental Sustainability; Social Issues; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Performance; News; Investment; Financial Markets; Stocks; Price
- 2023
- Working Paper
Mapping Organizational-Level Networks Using Individual-Level Connections: Evidence from Online Professional Networks
By: Shelley Xin Li, Frank Nagle and Aner Zhou
Organization-level networks facilitate the flow of information and business activities in the
economy. Prior research relies solely on high-level connections to measure these networks. Therefore, to
understand the role of employee connections at all job levels in... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Evaluation and Learning in R&D Investment
By: Alexander P. Frankel, Joshua L. Krieger, Danielle Li and Dimitris Papanikolaou
We examine the role of spillover learning in shaping the value of exploratory versus incremental
R&D. Using data from drug development, we show that novel drug candidates generate more
knowledge spillovers than incremental ones. Despite being less likely to reach... View Details
- June 2023
- Article
Can Purpose Foster Stakeholder Trust in Corporations
By: Ranjay Gulati and Franz Wohlgezogen
As part of institutional changes toward more responsible capitalism, firms increasingly articulate a purpose beyond simply profit as a central tenet of their governance. Management scholarship has noted the potential advantages of such purpose-focus for stakeholder... View Details
- June 2023
- Article
Do Job Seekers Value Diversity Information? Evidence from a Field Experiment and Human Capital Disclosures
By: Jung Ho Choi, Joseph Pacelli, Kristina M. Rennekamp and Sorabh Tomar
We examine how information about the diversity of a potential employer's workforce affects individuals’ job-seeking behavior. We embed a field experiment in job recommendation emails from a leading career advice agency in the U.S. The experimental treatment involves... View Details
- May–June 2023
- Article
Should Your Start-up Be For-profit or Nonprofit?: A Guide for Social Entrepreneurs
By: Cait Brumme and Brian Trelstad
Years ago the line between nonprofit and for-profit enterprises was clear, but that has changed. Nonprofits now offer products that compete with those of the best for-profits, and for-profits can deliver as much social value as charities. Despite the blurred... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Corporate Website-based Measures of Firms' Value Drivers
By: Wei Cai, Dennis Campbell and Patrick Ferguson
We develop and validate new text-based measures of firms’ financial and non-financial value drivers. Using the Wayback Machine to access public US firms’ archived websites from 1995-2020, we scrape text from corporate homepages. We use Kaplan and Norton’s (1992)... View Details
- April 2023
- Article
The Real Exchange Rate, Innovation and Productivity
By: Laura Alfaro, Alejandro Cuñat, Harald Fadinger and Yanping Liu
We evaluate manufacturing firms' responses to changes in the real exchange rate (RER) using detailed firm-level data for a large set of countries for the period 2001-2010. We uncover the following stylized facts about regional variation of manufacturing firms'... View Details
- April 2023
- Article
The Stock Market Valuation of Human Capital Creation
By: Ethan Rouen and Matthias Regier
We develop a measure of firm-year-specific human capital investment from publicly disclosed personnel expenses (PE) and examine the stock market valuation of this investment. Measuring the future value of PE (PEFV) based on the relation between... View Details
- March 2023
- Case
Ownership Works: Scaling a Profitable Social Mission
By: Ethan Rouen, Dennis Campbell and Andrew Robinson
Pete Stavros was on a high after his latest experiment with employee ownership. As the head of industrial investments for KKR, Stavros orchestrated the sale of CHI Overhead Doors, which turned into KKR’s best investment in more than two decades and created $360 million... View Details
- March 2023
- Article
Attracting the Sharks: Corporate Innovation and Securities Class Action Lawsuits
By: Elisabeth Kempf and Oliver Spalt
This paper provides novel evidence suggesting that securities class action lawsuits, a central pillar of the U.S. litigation and corporate governance system, can constitute an obstacle to valuable corporate innovation. We first establish that valuable innovation output... View Details