Publications
Publications
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(227)
- Faculty Publications (88)
- March 2013
- Article
The Unintended Consequences of Ownership Transfer Planning
By: Josh Baron and Marion McCollom Hampton
The article discusses the challenges of passing down family businesses across generations, highlighting complexities in executive succession and estate planning. It emphasizes how emotional factors, complicated family dynamics, and unintended consequences influence... View Details
- Article
Agency Costs, Mispricing, and Ownership Structure
By: Sergey Chernenko, C. Fritz Foley and Robin Greenwood
Standard theories of corporate ownership assume that because markets are efficient, insiders ultimately bear all agency costs that they create and therefore have a strong incentive to minimize conflicts of interest with outside investors. We argue that if equity is... View Details
- 2012
- Working Paper
Risky Business: The Impact of Property Rights on Investment and Revenue in the Film Industry
By: Venkat Kuppuswamy and Carliss Y. Baldwin
Our paper tests a key prediction of property rights theory, specifically, that agents will respond to marginal incentives embedded in property rights when making non-contractible, revenue-enhancing investments (Grossman and Hart, 1986; Hart and Moore, 1990). Using rich... View Details
- 2012
- Working Paper
How Short-Termism Invites Corruption—And What to Do About It
Researchers and business leaders have long decried short-termism: the excessive focus of executives of publicly traded companies-along with fund managers and other investors-on short-term results. The central concern is that short-termism discourages long-term... View Details
- February 2012 (Revised August 2014)
- Case
Poles Apart on PZU (A)
By: Francesca Gino, Vincent Dessain, Karol Misztal and Michael Khayyat
In October 2008, Andrzej Klesyk, CEO of Poland's largest insurer PZU, reflected on possible ways of resolving a decade-long cross-border shareholder conflict at his company. Owned 55% by the Polish State Treasury and 33% by the Dutch insurer Eureko as of October 2008,... View Details
- April 2011
- Teaching Note
Porcini's Pronto: "Great Italian cuisine without the wait!" (Brief Case)
By: James L. Heskett and Richard Luecke
Teaching Note to 4277. View Details
- April 2011
- Supplement
Porcini's Pronto: 'Great Italian cuisine without the wait!', Spreadsheet Supplement (Brief Case)
By: James L. Heskett and Richard Luecke
- April 2011
- Article
Ethical Breakdowns: Good People often Let Bad Things Happen. Why?
By: Max H. Bazerman and Ann E. Tenbrunsel
Companies are spending a great deal of time and money to install codes of ethics, ethics training, compliance programs, and in-house watchdogs. If these efforts worked, the money would be well spent. But unethical behavior appears to be on the rise. The authors observe... View Details
- February 2011
- Supplement
The Fox Islands Wind Project (B)
By: Joseph B. Lassiter III and Evan Richardson
Fox Island Wind Cooperative faces criticism from local residents. View Details
- Article
The Impact of Corporate Social Responsibility on Investment Recommendations
By: Ioannis Ioannou and George Serafeim
Using a large sample of publicly traded U.S. firms over 16 years, we investigate the impact of corporate socially responsible (CSR) strategies on security analysts' recommendations. Socially responsible firms received more favorable recommendations in recent years... View Details
- March 2010
- Article
Interpersonal Authority in a Theory of the Firm
This paper develops a theory of the firm in which a firm's centralized asset ownership and low-powered incentives give the manager, as an equilibrium outcome, interpersonal authority over employees (in a world with open disagreement). The paper thus provides... View Details
- June 2009
- Article
Highbrow Films Gather Dust: Time-inconsistent Preferences and Online DVD Rentals
By: Katherine L. Milkman, Todd Rogers and Max H. Bazerman
We report on a field study demonstrating systematic differences between the preferences people anticipate they will have over a series of options in the future and their subsequent revealed preferences over those options. Using a novel panel data set, we analyze the... View Details
- February 2009 (Revised October 2012)
- Case
Tata Motors in Singur: Public Purpose and Private Property (B)
By: Laura Alfaro, Lakshmi Iyer and Namrata Arora
In October 2008, Tata Motors canceled their car manufacturing plant in West Bengal state, in the face of widespread farmer protests over land acquisition issues. This meant abandoning a project in which the company had invested $300 million and delaying the launch of... View Details
- 2009
- Chapter
Entrepreneurship and the History of Globalization
By: G. Jones and R. Daniel Wadhwani
In this article, we build on the recent efforts of scholars to reintroduce entrepreneurship into the research agenda of business historians. We examine the value and limitations of adapting recent social scientific theories and methods on entrepreneurship to research... View Details
- July 2008 (Revised October 2012)
- Case
Affinity Plus (A)
By: Dennis Campbell and Peter Tufano
The executive team at Affinity Plus Federal Credit Union has pushed the concept of members first deeply throughout the organization, empowering employees to put member-owners' interests ahead of either the organization's interests or their own interests. As a result of... View Details
- April 2008
- Supplement
Chunghwa Telecom Co., Ltd. (B)
By: Paul W. Marshall, Michael Shih-ta Chen and Keith Chi-ho Wong
In late November 2000, Chung Telecom Co., Ltd., the once-monopolized telecom operator owned by the Taiwanese government, was on its way to privatization. Mr. C.K. Mao, Chairman of the company, was headed the job only three months earlier, after its prior chairman... View Details
Keywords: State Ownership; Jobs and Positions; Monopoly; Privatization; Competition; Decisions; Motivation and Incentives; Labor and Management Relations; Resignation and Termination; Compensation and Benefits; Price; Status and Position; Telecommunications Industry; Public Administration Industry; Taiwan
- November 2007
- Article
Innovation and Incentives: Evidence from Corporate R&D
By: Josh Lerner and Julie Wulf
Beginning in the late 1980s, American corporations began increasingly linking the compensation of central research personnel to the economic objectives of the corporation. This paper examines the impact of the shifting compensation of the heads of corporate research... View Details
- 2007
- Working Paper
Interpersonal Authority in a Theory of the Firm
This paper develops a theory of the firm in which a firm's centralized asset ownership and low-powered incentives give a manager 'interpersonal authority' over employees (in a world with differing priors). The paper derives such interpersonal authority as... View Details
- May 2007
- Article
Corporate Financing Decisions When Investors Take the Path of Least Resistance
By: Malcolm Baker, Joshua Coval and Jeremy Stein
We explore the consequences for corporate financial policy that arise when investors exhibit inertial behavior. One implication of investor inertia is that, all else equal, a firm pursuing a strategy of equity-financed growth will prefer a stock-for-stock merger to... View Details