Publications
Publications
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- Faculty Publications (222)
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- December 2021 (Revised May 2025)
- Case
Bed Bath & Beyond: The New Strategy to Drive Shareholder Value
By: Benjamin C. Esty and Daniel W. Fisher
At one time, Bed Bath & Beyond was one of the most successful specialty retailers in the United States—its growth and profit margins far exceeded both peer retailers in the home goods market as well as many other discount retailers. But in 2014, its stock price peaked,... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
Limits to Bank Deposit Market Power
By: Juliane Begenau and Erik Stafford
Claims about the market power of bank deposits in the banking literature are numerous and far reaching. Recently, a causal narrative has emerged in the banking literature: market power in bank deposits, measured as imperfect pass-through of short-term market rates on... View Details
- November 2021
- Article
Ratings, Reviews, and the Marketing of New Products
By: Itay P. Fainmesser, Dominique Olié Lauga and Elie Ofek
We study how user-generated content (UGC) about new products impacts a firm's advertising and pricing decisions and the effect on profits and market dynamics. We construct a two-period model where consumers value quality and are heterogeneous in their taste for the new... View Details
- September 2021 (Revised February 2022)
- Case
Sawiris Foundation: Elevating Education in Egypt
By: Brian Trelstad and Alpana Thapar
Founded in 2001 by the Sawiris family, one of the wealthiest families in Egypt, the Sawiris Foundation for Social Development (SFSD) invested in human capital and provision of basic social services for the most marginalized Egyptians. In 2015, Noura Selim’s (MBA 2013)... View Details
- 2021
- Article
An Empirical Examination of Sell-Side Brokerage Analysts' Published Research, Concierge Services, and High-Touch Services
By: David A. Maber, Boris Groysberg and Paul M. Healy
This paper uses a proprietary panel dataset to categorize and quantify the activities that sell-side brokerage analysts use to build and sustain their network of buy-side client relations. We then examine the marginal impact of these activities on key analyst outcome... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
Employee Ownership and Wealth Inequality: A Path to Reducing Wealth Concentration
By: Thomas Dudley and Ethan Rouen
This paper examines the impact of an economy-wide shift to broad-based employee ownership on wealth concentration in the United States. Relying on government data, we show that if all private firms became 30% employee-owned, the wealth distribution would be profoundly... View Details
- August 2021
- Supplement
Aligning Mission and Margin at Southern Bancorp
By: Brian Trelstad
Video Supplement for HBS Case No. 321-099. In October 2020, after spending almost a decade to turnaround Southern Bancorp, an Arkansan bank founded with the mission to provide financial services to rural, underserved communities, CEO Darrin Williams is wondering how... View Details
- August 2021
- Article
Multiple Imputation Using Gaussian Copulas
By: F.M. Hollenbach, I. Bojinov, S. Minhas, N.W. Metternich, M.D. Ward and A. Volfovsky
Missing observations are pervasive throughout empirical research, especially in the social sciences. Despite multiple approaches to dealing adequately with missing data, many scholars still fail to address this vital issue. In this paper, we present a simple-to-use... View Details
- July 2021
- Teaching Plan
Aligning Mission and Margin at Southern Bancorp
By: Rebecca Henderson, Brian Trelstad and Eren Kuzucu
Teaching Plan for HBS Case No. 321-099. In October 2020, after spending almost a decade to turnaround Southern Bancorp, an Arkansan bank founded with the mission to provide financial services to rural, underserved communities, CEO Darrin Williams is wondering how... View Details
- July 2021
- Article
Redistribution through Markets
By: Piotr Dworczak, Scott Duke Kominers and Mohammad Akbarpour
Policymakers frequently use price regulations as a response to inequality in the markets they control. In this paper, we examine the optimal structure of such policies from the perspective of mechanism design. We study a buyer-seller market in which agents have private... View Details
- June 2021
- Case
Mobileye 2021: Robotaxi and/or Consumer AV?
By: David B. Yoffie, Danielle Golan and Nicole Tempest Keller
In March 2021, Amnon Shashua, co-founder and CEO of Israel-based Mobileye, was preparing to meet with Intel’s new CEO, Pat Gelsinger, to review plans for the future. Mobileye had been acquired by California-based Intel in 2017, but still operated independently.... View Details
- 2021
- Article
Designing, Not Checking, for Policy Robustness: An Example with Optimal Taxation
By: Benjamin B. Lockwood, Afras Sial and Matthew C. Weinzierl
Economists typically check the robustness of their results by comparing them across plausible ranges of parameter values and model structures. A preferable approach to robustness—for the purposes of policymaking and evaluation—is to design policy that takes these... View Details
- April 2021
- Case
Distinct Software
By: Das Narayandas, Arijit Sengupta and Jonathan Wray
Distinct Software (disguised name), a global enterprise software company, is at an important point in its growth trajectory where the luster of its mantra of “grow and win at any cost” has dimmed with increasing competition and margin pressures. To help navigate its... View Details
- April–May 2021
- Article
The Influence of Loan Officers on Loan Contract Design and Performance
By: Robert Bushman, Janet Gao, Xiumin Martin and Joseph Pacelli
We investigate the extent to which loan officers generate independent, individual effects on the design and performance of syndicated loans. We construct a large database containing the identities of loan officers involved in structuring syndicated loan deals, allowing... View Details
- March 2021 (Revised October 2021)
- Case
Aligning Mission and Margin at Southern Bancorp
By: Rebecca M. Henderson, Brian Trelstad and Eren Kuzucu
In October 2020, after spending almost a decade to turnaround Southern Bancorp, an Arkansan bank founded with the mission to provide financial services to rural, underserved communities, CEO Darrin Williams is wondering how Southern Bancorp should continue to grow.... View Details
- Article
Tariff Passthrough at the Border and at the Store: Evidence from U.S. Trade Policy
By: Alberto Cavallo, Gita Gopinath, Brent Neiman and Jenny Tang
We use micro data collected at the border and the store to characterize the price impact of recent US trade policy on importers, exporters, and consumers. At the border, import tariff passthrough is much higher than exchange rate passthrough. Chinese exporters did not... View Details
Keywords: Trade Policy; Tariffs; Exchange Rate Passthrough; Economics; Trade; Policy; Currency Exchange Rate; Price; United States
- 2021
- Working Paper
Competitive Two-Part Tariffs
By: Jorge Tamayo and Guofu Tan
We study competitive two-part tariffs in a model of asymmetric duopoly firms that offer (vertically and horizontally) differentiated products. We show that the sign of the markup for each product depends on the average expected demand among all customers as well as the... View Details
- January 2021 (Revised March 2021)
- Supplement
E-Commerce Analytics for CPG Firms (C): Free Delivery Terms
By: Ayelet Israeli and Fedor (Ted) Lisitsyn
The E-Commerce Analytics group at the traditional CPG firm was in charge of compiling various online sales reports, as well as making data-driven recommendations for sales and marketing tactics. In a series of exercises, students address different data challenges for... View Details
Keywords: Data; Data Analysis; Data Analytics; Data Sharing; CPG; Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG); Delivery Planning; Customer Lifetime Value; Online Channel; Retail; Retail Analytics; Retailing Industry; Ecommerce; Grocery; Grocery Delivery; Margins; Retention; Analytics and Data Science; Analysis; Retail Industry; Consumer Products Industry; United States
- January 2021 (Revised March 2021)
- Exercise
E-Commerce Analytics for CPG Firms (C): Free Delivery Terms
By: Ayelet Israeli and Fedor (Ted) Lisitsyn
The E-Commerce Analytics group at the traditional CPG firm was in charge of compiling various online sales reports, as well as making data-driven recommendations for sales and marketing tactics. In a series of exercises, students address different data challenges for... View Details
Keywords: Data; Data Analysis; Data Analytics; Data Sharing; CPG; Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG); Delivery Planning; Customer Lifetime Value; Online Channel; Retail; Retail Analytics; Retailing Industry; Ecommerce; Grocery; Grocery Delivery; Margins; Analytics and Data Science; Retention; E-commerce; Retail Industry; Consumer Products Industry; United States
- January 2021 (Revised March 2021)
- Case
Jumia's Path to Profitability
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell, Pippa Tubman Armerding and Gamze Yucaoglu
The case opens in September 2019 as Sacha Poignonnec and Jeremy Hodara, co-founders and co-CEOs of Jumia, the leading Pan-African e-commerce platform, are contemplating the company’s path to profitability in the aftermath of a fragile investor sentiment, as the company... View Details
Keywords: Retail; Business Models; Business Model; Business Startups; Emerging Markets; For-Profit Firms; Strategy; Digital Platforms; Information Technology; Technology Adoption; Value Creation; Globalization; Entrepreneurship; Competition; Expansion; Logistics; Profit; Resource Allocation; Diversification; Corporate Strategy; Retail Industry; Technology Industry; Africa