Publications

August 2023 (Revised January 2024)
Supplement

Arla Foods: Data-Driven Decarbonization (A)

By: Michael Parzen, Michael W. Toffel, Amram Migdal and Susan Pinckney

Arla implemented a data-based price incentive system to measure, track, and influence climate friendly changes to reduce CO2 emissions across the world’s fourth largest dairy cooperative. View Details

Keywords: Dairy Industry; Business Earnings; Earnings Management; Environmental Accounting; Agribusiness; Animal-Based Agribusiness; Acquisition; Mergers and Acquisitions; Decision Making; Decisions; Voting; Environmental Management; Climate Change; Environmental Regulation; Environmental Sustainability; Green Technology; Pollution; Moral Sensibility; Values and Beliefs; Financial Strategy; Price; Profit; Revenue; Food; Geopolitical Units; Global Strategy; Ownership Type; Cooperative Ownership; Performance Efficiency; Performance Evaluation; Problems and Challenges; Natural Environment; Science-Based Business; Business Strategy; Commercialization; Cooperation; Corporate Strategy; Food and Beverage Industry; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Europe; United Kingdom; European Union; Germany; Denmark; Sweden; Luxembourg; Belgium

August 2023 (Revised March 2024)
Case

Arla Foods: Data-Driven Decarbonization (A)

By: Michael Parzen, Michael W. Toffel, Susan Pinckney and Amram Migdal

The case describes Arla’s history, in particular its climate change mitigation efforts, and how it implemented a price incentive system to motivate individual farms to implement scope 1 greenhouse gas emissions mitigation measures and receive a higher milk price. The... View Details

August 2023 (Revised January 2024)
Supplement

Arla Foods: Data-Driven Decarbonization (B)

By: Michael Parzen, Michael W. Toffel, Susan Pinckney and Amram Migdal

The case describes Arla’s history, in particular its climate change mitigation efforts, and how it implemented a price incentive system to motivate individual farms to implement scope 1 greenhouse gas emissions mitigation measures and receive a higher milk price. The... View Details

August 2023
Article

Can Security Design Foster Household Risk-Taking?

By: Laurent Calvet, Claire Célérier, Paolo Sodini and Boris Vallée

This paper shows that securities with a non-linear payoff design can foster household risk-taking. We demonstrate this effect empirically by exploiting the introduction of capital guarantee products in Sweden from 2002 to 2007. The fast and broad adoption of these... View Details

Keywords: Financial Innovation; Household Finance; Structured Products; Stock Market Participation; Finance; Innovation and Invention; Household; Personal Finance; Risk and Uncertainty; Behavior; Market Participation

2023
Book

Precarious Ties: Business and the State in Authoritarian Asia

By: Meg Rithmire

Developing Asia has been the site of some of the last century's fastest growing economies as well as some of the world's most durable authoritarian regimes. Many accounts of rapid growth alongside monopolies on political power have focused on crony relationships... View Details

Keywords: Business and Government Relations; Developing Countries and Economies; Economic Systems; Crime and Corruption; China; Indonesia; Malaysia

July 2023 (Revised October 2024)
Case

Revenue Recognition at Stride Funding: Making Sense of Revenues for a Fintech Startup

By: Paul M. Healy and Jung Koo Kang

The case explores the challenges of revenue recognition and financial reporting for Stride Funding (Stride), a fintech startup that has disrupted the student loan market. Stride leveraged proprietary machine learning and financial models to underwrite alternative... View Details

Keywords: Revenue Recognition; Financial Reporting; Entrepreneurial Finance; Business Startups; Growth and Development Strategy; Governance Compliance; Accrual Accounting; Financial Services Industry; United States

June 2023
Case

Dan McCrum - Unmasking Wirecard

By: Jonas Heese, Charles C.Y. Wang, Tonia Labruyere and Carlota Moniz

Dan McCrum, an investigative journalist for the Financial Times, had spent the past six years fighting to expose German payment processing firm Wirecard. The company had enjoyed years of exponential growth and was viewed by several investors as the poster child of... View Details

Keywords: Crime and Corruption; Accounting; Financial Services Industry; Financial Services Industry; Europe; United Kingdom; Germany

June 2023
Case

Accounting for Loan Losses at JPMorgan Chase: Predicting Credit Costs

By: Jonas Heese, Jung Koo Kang and James Weber

The case examines the accounting for loan losses at a large bank, how a bank sets its Allowance for Loan and Lease Losses (ALLL) on its financial statements. ALLL, and the rules that set them, determine when banks would and would not extend loans, which significantly... View Details

Keywords: Accounting Standards; Accrual Accounting; Financial Statements; Financial Reporting; Banks and Banking; Financing and Loans; Banking Industry; United States

May 2023
Article

Do Internal Control Weaknesses Affect Firms' Demand for Financial Skills? Evidence from U.S. Job Postings

By: Janet Gao, Kenneth J. Merkley, Joseph Pacelli and Joseph H. Schroeder

Ineffective internal controls over financial reporting often relates to a lack of qualified personnel with sufficient accounting and technical expertise. In this study, we examine whether firms respond to internal control failures by increasing their demand for... View Details

Keywords: Internal Controls; Labor Demand; Accounting; Financial Reporting; Experience and Expertise; Recruitment; Competency and Skills; Corporate Finance

SSRN

April 2023 (Revised July 2023)
Case

Fermenting Accounting Problems at Vermont Kombucha Corp.

By: Tatiana Sandino and Marshal Herrmann

Founded in 2005, Vermont Kombucha Corp. (V-Ko) was an early mover in the fledgling U.S. market for kombucha, a drink brewed for its health benefits. Early on, the company captured more than 90% of market share. Under the leadership of its founder and CEO, Joe Williams,... View Details

Keywords: Going Public; Business Model; Financial Reporting; Ethics; Corporate Governance; Stock Shares; Food and Beverage Industry

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

Keywords: Value; Corporate Strategy; Accounting; Analytics and Data Science

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February 2023
Article

The Effect of Systems of Management Controls on Honesty in Managerial Reporting

By: Aishwarrya Deore, Susanna Gallani and Ranjani Krishnan

While budgetary controls with capital rationing are optimal in theory and widespread in practice, empirical research documents their association with higher employee dishonesty compared to budgetary controls without rationing. In this study, we examine whether... View Details

Keywords: Directing Controls; Misreporting; Mission Statements; Participative Budgeting; Stewardship Theory; Systems Of Management Controls; Capital; Budgets and Budgeting; Mission and Purpose

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December 2022
Article

Cost Standard Set Program: Moving Forward to Standardization of Cost Assessment Based on Clinical Condition

By: Anna Paula Beck da Silva Etges, Richard D. Urman, Anne Geubelle, Robert Kaplan and Carisi Anne Polanczyk

This communication announces the International Cost Standard Set Program. Its goal is to establish global standardized frameworks for measuring the costs of treating specific clinical conditions. A scientific committee, including 16 international healthcare cost... View Details

Keywords: Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing; Value-based Health Care; Cost; Health Care and Treatment; Activity Based Costing and Management; Health Industry

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December 2022
Article

Does Industry Employment of Active Regulators Weaken Oversight?

By: Jonas Heese

I study whether industry employment of active regulators weakens oversight. To examine this question, I exploit that the Financial Reporting Enforcement Panel (FREP), the German capital-market regulator responsible for enforcing public firms’ compliance with accounting... View Details

Keywords: Conflict-of-interest Policies; Directorships; Enforcement Actions; Industry Employment; Self-regulatory Organizations; Governance Compliance; Governing and Advisory Boards; Policy; Conflict of Interests

October 2022 (Revised June 2024)
Case

Driving Decarbonization at BMW

By: Shirley Lu, George Serafeim and Michael W. Toffel

The case describes BMW’s electrification and decarbonization strategy, and how the company measured carbon emissions throughout the life cycle of its vehicles and used tools like carbon abatement cost curves to evaluate decarbonization opportunities. In mid-2022,... View Details

September 2022 (Revised January 2023)
Case

Bear to Bull: An Analyst’s Journey with Netflix

By: Aiyesha Dey, Joseph Pacelli, Jennifer G. Lawson and Tom Quinn

Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter said “hell freezing over” was more likely than him upgrading the “sell” rating he had maintained on movie and television streaming giant Netflix since 2011, despite meteoric subscriber and share price growth. In 2022, however,... View Details

Keywords: Accounting; Asset Pricing; Cash Flow; Investment; Stocks; Equity; Analysis; Attitudes; Financial Services Industry; Financial Services Industry; United States

August 2022 (Revised November 2024)
Case

Sweet Teez Bakery: Projecting the Dough’s Rise

By: Emily R. McComb, Mel Martin and Amy Klopfenstein

In 2021, the HBS Impact Investment Fund student team met with entrepreneur Teresa Maynard, who had applied for a $25,000 impact investment loan. The students thought the former Harvard Data Scientist’s bakery business, Sweet Teez Bakery, showed promise. Maynard had... View Details

Keywords: Impact Investment; Entrepreneurship; Social Entrepreneurship; Finance; Investment; Goods and Commodities; Financial Reporting; Small Business; Food and Beverage Industry; United States; Massachusetts

August 2022
Supplement

Sweet Teez Bakery: Projecting the Dough’s Rise Financial Supplement

By: Emily R. McComb, Mel Martin and Amy Klopfenstein

Abstract: In 2021, the HBS Impact Investment Fund student team met with entrepreneur Teresa Maynard, who had applied for a $25,000 impact investment loan. The students thought the former Harvard Data Scientist’s bakery business, Sweet Teez Bakery, showed promise.... View Details

Keywords: Impact Investment; Entrepreneurship; Social Entrepreneurship; Finance; Investment; Goods and Commodities; Financial Reporting; Small Business; Food and Beverage Industry; Massachusetts; United States

August, 2022
Article

Billing and Insurance-Related Administrative Costs: A Cross-National Analysis

By: Barak D. Richman, Robert S. Kaplan, Japees Kohli, Dennis Purcell, Mahek Shah, Igna Bonfrer, Brian Golden, Rosemary Hannam, Will Mitchell, Daniel Cehic, Garry Crispin and Kevin A. Schulman

Billing and insurance-related costs are a significant source of wasteful health care spending in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations, but these administrative burdens vary across national systems. We executed a microlevel accounting of these... View Details

Keywords: Health Care Costs; Administrative Costs; Cost; Health Care and Treatment; Health Industry