Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(717)
- Faculty Publications (158)
- 2020
- Working Paper
EMEs and COVID-19: Shutting Down in a World of Informal and Tiny Firms
By: Laura Alfaro, Oscar Becerra and Marcela Eslava
Emerging economies are characterized by an extremely high prevalence of informality, small-firm employment and jobs not fit for working from home. These features factor into how the COVID-19 crisis has affected the economy. We develop a framework that, based on... View Details
- April 29, 2020
- Article
The Case for AI Insurance
By: Ram Shankar Siva Kumar and Frank Nagle
When organizations place machine learning systems at the center of their businesses, they introduce the risk of failures that could lead to a data breach, brand damage, property damage, business interruption, and in some cases, bodily harm. Even when companies are... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Capital Regulation and Product Market Outcomes
By: Ishita Sen and David Humphry
We present evidence of product market adjustments and asset reorganizations from the largest ever shift in risk regulation in a developed insurance market. Using proprietary data on insurance risk exposures from the Bank of England, we develop a measure of regulatory... View Details
- November 2019 (Revised February 2020)
- Case
Hormel Foods
By: David E. Bell and Natalie Kindred
In 2019, CEO Jim Snee is weighing how to shape the image of Hormel Foods, one of the largest U.S. meat and food companies, at a time when the industry faces unprecedented scrutiny. Based in the small town of Austin, Minnesota, the nearly 130-year-old firm is best known... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
Shareholder Activism and Firms' Voluntary Disclosure of Climate Change Risks
By: Caroline Flammer, Michael W. Toffel and Kala Viswanathan
This paper examines whether—in the absence of mandated disclosure requirements—shareholder activism can elicit greater disclosure of firms’ exposure to climate change risks. We find that environmental shareholder activism increases the voluntary disclosure of climate... View Details
Keywords: Shareholder Activism; Climate Risk; Corporate Accountability; Climate Change; Corporate Disclosure; Corporate Governance; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Business and Shareholder Relations; Risk and Uncertainty; Natural Environment; Environmental Sustainability; Financial Services Industry; United States
- June 2019
- Case
ClearLife: From Prospect to Platform
By: Alexander Braun, Lauren Cohen, Mauro Elvedi and Jiahua Xu
ClearLife’s first product was a trading and analytics platform for participants in the U.S. life settlement market, the secondary market for life insurance. ClearLife played a key role in facilitating transactions and devising a common language for expressing value and... View Details
- October 2018
- Case
African Bank Investments Limited (A)
By: Lynn S. Paine and Will Hurwitz
Less than a year after joining the board of African Bank Investments Limited (ABIL), the newest director finds himself in difficult discussions with other directors about removing the struggling company’s CEO. The case is set in South Africa in mid-2014 as shares in... View Details
- October 2018
- Supplement
African Bank Investments Limited (B)
By: Lynn S. Paine and Will Hurwitz
Less than a year after joining the board of African Bank Investments Limited (ABIL), the newest director finds himself in difficult discussions with other directors about removing the struggling company’s CEO. The case is set in South Africa in mid-2014 as shares in... View Details
- October 2018
- Case
American Family Insurance and the Artificial Intelligence Opportunity
By: Rajiv Lal and Scott Johnson
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence; Machine Learning; Automation; Analytics; American Family; American Family Insurance; Insurance; Business Organization; Transformation; Talent and Talent Management; Employee Relationship Management; Innovation Strategy; Job Cuts and Outsourcing; Risk and Uncertainty; Mobile and Wireless Technology; Technology Adoption; Internet and the Web; Applications and Software; Corporate Strategy; AI and Machine Learning; Digital Transformation; Insurance Industry; Insurance Industry; Wisconsin
- February 2018 (Revised October 2018)
- Case
Wellington Global Impact
By: Shawn Cole and Lynn Schenk
Wellington Global Impact is one of the first public equities impact investing strategies in the market. The case explores how the strategy was developed at Wellington, including an analysis of the culture that supported its development. It also explores the difficulty... View Details
- February 2018
- Case
Robert K. Steel at Wachovia (A)
By: Gautam Mukunda, Nien-hê Hsieh and David Lane
In September 2008, Robert Steel presided over the sale of Wachovia, a top U.S. bank, less than three months after becoming its CEO. Wachovia’s exposure to risky home loans led depositors and creditors to flee the bank on Friday, September 26, after the FDIC seized and... View Details
Keywords: Leadership; Financial Crisis; Robert Steel; Wachovia; Sheila Bair; Richard Kovacevich; Wells Fargo; Vikram Pandit; Citigroup; FDIC; Tim Geithner; Mortgage Lending; Contagion; Mergers And Acquisitions; Financial Services; Banking; Decision Making; Ethics; Fairness; Finance; Leadership Style; Crisis Management; Management Style; Risk Management; Negotiation; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Banking Industry; United States
- February 2018
- Supplement
Robert K. Steel at Wachovia (B)
By: Gautam Mukunda, Nien-hê Hsieh and David Lane
In September 2008, Robert Steel presided over the sale of Wachovia, a top U.S. bank, less than three months after becoming its CEO. Wachovia’s exposure to risky home loans led depositors and creditors to flee the bank on Friday, September 26, after the FDIC seized and... View Details
Keywords: Leadership; Financial Crisis; Robert Steel; Wachovia; Sheila Bair; Richard Kovacevich; Wells Fargo; Vikram Pandit; Citigroup; FDIC; Tim Geithner; Mortgage Lending; Contagion; Mergers And Acquisitions; Financial Services; Banking; Decision Making; Ethics; Fairness; Finance; Leadership Style; Crisis Management; Management Style; Risk Management; Negotiation; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Banking Industry; United States
- 2017
- Article
Agricultural Insurance and Economic Development
By: Shawn A. Cole and Wentao Xiong
This article provides a review of recent research on agricultural insurance (AI) in developing countries. Agricultural producers face a variety of significant risks; historically, only government-subsidized products have achieved widespread adoption. A recent... View Details
- 2017
- Book
Managing Risk in Reinsurance: From City Fires to Global Warming
By: Niels Viggo Hauter and Geoffrey Jones
This is the first book to provide a comprehensive history of the reinsurance industry from the nineteenth century to the present day. Reinsurance developed at the fringe of financial services and, for most of its existence, was largely unnoticed outside the expert... View Details
- November 2016 (Revised December 2016)
- Module Note
Strategy Execution Module 13: Identifying Strategic Risk
By: Robert Simons
This module reading begins by describing the three sources of strategic risk—operations risk, asset impairment risk, and competitive risk—and demonstrates how these risks can undermine an entire business. To assist in the identification of these risks, the risk... View Details
- October 2016 (Revised March 2019)
- Case
Carrum Health: Scaling Bundled Payments
By: Robert S. Huckman and Sarah Mehta
Founded in 2014, Carrum Health helped self-insured employers located in three markets (San Diego, California; Seattle, Washington; and San Francisco, California) save money on their employees’ planned surgeries. It did so by contracting directly with top-quality... View Details
Keywords: Health Financing; Health Insurance; Value-based Healthcare Reimbursements; Bundled Payments; Innovation; Scale; Health; Health Care and Treatment; Cost Management; Growth and Development Strategy; Decision Choices and Conditions; Health Industry; California; San Francisco; San Diego; Seattle
- 2018
- Working Paper
Bank Risk-Taking and the Real Economy: Evidence from the Housing Boom and Its Aftermath
By: Antonio Falato, Giovanni Favara and David Scharfstein
The short-termism of lenders amplifies boom-bust credit cycles, leading in turn to real costs for the aggregate economy. During the U.S. housing credit boom, publicly-traded banks increased mortgage lending activity and relaxed standards much more than privately-held... View Details
- Article
Can Analysts Assess Fundamental Risk and Valuation Uncertainty? An Empirical Analysis of Scenario-Based Value Estimates
By: Peter R. Joos, Joseph D. Piotroski and Suraj Srinivasan
We use a dataset of sell-side analysts' scenario-based valuation estimates to examine whether analysts reliably assess the risk surrounding a firm's fundamental value. We find that the spread in analysts' state-side contingent valuations captures the riskiness of... View Details
- 2016
- Blog
Building A Culture of Health - John A. Quelch: Creating A Culture of Health
By: John A. Quelch
All American companies are in the health business whether they like it or not. The private sector directly pays for one-fifth of the whopping 17.5% of GDP spent on healthcare in the United States. Rather than viewing health merely as an insurance expense to be... View Details
Keywords: Building A Culture Of Health; Intersection Of Healthcare And Business; Impact Of Healthcare On Business; Population Health Footprint; Healthcare As An Investment; Change; Education; Health; Human Resources; Labor; Leadership; Management; Marketing; Operations; Performance; Personal Development and Career; Problems and Challenges; Risk and Uncertainty; Strategy; Value; Insurance Industry; Insurance Industry; Canada; North America; United States
- Article
Beyond Statistics: The Economic Content of Risk Scores
By: Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, Raymond Kluender and Paul Schrimpf
"Big data" and statistical techniques to score potential transactions have transformed insurance and credit markets. In this paper, we observe that these widely-used statistical scores summarize a much richer heterogeneity, and may be endogenous to the context in which... View Details