Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(655)
- Faculty Publications (147)
- August 2021
- Article
Don't Take Their Word for It: The Misclassification of Bond Mutual Funds
By: Huaizhi Chen, Lauren Cohen and Umit Gurun
We provide evidence that bond fund managers misclassify their holdings, and that these misclassifications have a real and significant impact on investor capital flows. In particular, many funds report more investment grade assets than are actually held in their... View Details
- June 2021 (Revised November 2021)
- Case
Equity Bank: Charting the Future
By: Lauren Cohen, Michael Chitavi and Spencer C. N. Hagist
After climbing the ranks among Kenya's financial institutions from 66th to 1st, and toppling a quarter of the market share held by mobile money giant Safaricom, CEO James Mwangi must now guide Equity Bank into its next stage of development beyond "Equity 3.0." Should... View Details
- April 2021
- Article
Today's Surgeon Compensation Models Fall Short: Aligning Incentives to Create More Equitable and Value-based Compensation Models
By: Susanna Gallani, Mary Witkowski, Lauren Haskins, Haley Jeffcoat, Vinita Mujumdar and Frank Opelka
Modern medicine is undergoing a transformation that involves innovative surgical approaches, increased medical treatment options, clinical care pathways that require collaboration beyond hospital walls, and health data captured by electronic health records and other... View Details
- March 2021
- Case
Litigation Finance 2.0: LexShares
By: Lauren Cohen, Spencer C. N. Hagist and Yago Zavalia Gahan
Litigation finance—also referred to as third party litigation funding—was in its relative infancy as an asset class when Jay Greenberg and Max Volsky made a platform-play in the space. Seven years later, the market was far from "mainstream," but nonetheless had grown... View Details
- February 2021
- Case
Lidya: Bringing Nigerian FinTech Innovation to Global Small and Medium Enterprises
By: Lauren Cohen and Spencer C.N. Hagist
Lidya CEO Tunde Kehinde must size up options for the expansion of his novel lending practices that drastically reduce the credit cycle in his developing Nigeria, and determine if expansion into Eastern Europe will prove successful or disastrous. View Details
- February 2021 (Revised August 2021)
- Case
Equity Bank: Challenging a Giant
By: Lauren H. Cohen, Michael Chitavi and Spencer C. N. Hagist
Equity Bank and CEO Dr. James Mwangi must find a way to advance from their hard-fought ascension to second largest bank in Kenya by toppling financial giant Safaricom. Doing so means developing a new strategy and tackling technological frontiers no institution in the... View Details
- November 2020
- Case
The 1,000-Year Plan: Lee Kum Kee and Sustaining a Family Culture
By: Lauren Cohen, Dawn H. Lau and Billy Chan
The Lee family, whose Hong Kong-based Lee Kum Kee company has established itself as a legend within the Chinese and Asian sauce world, sets out to create a daring new vision of what family legacy means. With the family business having been established in 1888, and by... View Details
- November 2020
- Article
Casting Conference Calls
By: Lauren Cohen, Dong Lou and Christopher J. Malloy
We explore a subtle but important mechanism through which firms can control information flow to the markets. We find that firms that “cast” their conference calls by disproportionately calling on bullish analysts tend to underperform in the future. Firms that call on... View Details
- October 2020
- Article
IQ from IP: Simplifying Search in Portfolio Choice
By: Huaizhi Chen, Lauren Cohen, Umit Gurun, Dong Lou and Christopher J. Malloy
Using a novel database that tracks web traffic on the SEC’s EDGAR servers between 2004 and 2015, we show that mutual fund managers gather information on a very particular subset of firms and insiders, and their surveillance is very persistent over time. This tracking... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
The ESG-Innovation Disconnect: Evidence from Green Patenting
By: Lauren Cohen, Umit G. Gurun and Quoc H. Nguyen
No firm or sector of the global economy is untouched by innovation. In equilibrium, innovators will flock to (and innovation will occur where) the returns to innovative capital are the highest. In this paper, we document a strong empirical pattern in green patent... View Details
- September 2020 (Revised December 2021)
- Case
Building India's 2.0: PayNearby
By: Lauren Cohen and Spencer C. N. Hagist
Headquartered in Mumbai, India, FinTech startup Nearby Technologies has seen its flagship brand, PayNearby, rapidly flourish across most of its target market within just four years. The unprecedented success of its payment app, which allows users to access banking... View Details
- September 3, 2020
- Article
How to Measure a Company's Real Impact
By: Ronald Cohen and George Serafeim
Impact transparency will reshape capitalism. By shifting the pursuit of profit away from negligently creating problems to purposefully creating valuable solutions for the world, it will redefine success, so that its measure is not just money, but the positive impact we... View Details
Keywords: Impact; Impact Investing; Impact Measurement; Impact Investment; Impact Investment Funds; Accountability; Accounting Information; Corporate Performance; Sustainability; Social Impact; Capitalism; Accounting; Corporate Accountability; Performance; Measurement and Metrics; Social Enterprise; Society
- August 2020 (Revised October 2020)
- Case
Rapid7: The Price of Principle
By: Lauren H. Cohen and Spencer C. N. Hagist
- 2020
- Working Paper
Best Ideas
By: Miguel Antón, Randolph B. Cohen and Christopher Polk
We find that the stocks in which active mutual fund or hedge fund managers display the most conviction towards ex-ante, their “Best ideas,” outperform the market, as well as the other stocks in those managers’ portfolios, by approximately 2.8 to 4.5 percent per year,... View Details
- June 2020
- Article
Lazy Prices
By: Lauren Cohen, Christopher J. Malloy and Quoc Nguyen
We explore the implications of a subtle "default" choice that firms make in their regular reporting practices, namely that firms typically repeat what they most recently reported. Using the complete history of regular quarterly and annual filings by U.S. corporations... View Details
- May 2020
- Teaching Note
fidentiaX: The Tradable Insurance Marketplace on Blockchain
By: Alexander Braun, Lauren H. Cohen and Jiahua Xu
- December 2019
- Article
Patent Trolls: Evidence from Targeted Firms
By: Lauren Cohen, Umit Gurun and Scott Duke Kominers
We provide the first large-sample evidence on the behavior and impact of nonpracticing entities (NPEs) in the intellectual-property space. We find that, on average, NPEs appear to behave as opportunistic “patent trolls.” NPEs sue cash-rich firms and target cash in... View Details
- October 2019
- Case
China Merchants Bank: Ushering in the Era of Family Office in China
By: Lauren Cohen, Hao Gao, Billy Chan and Dawn H. Lau
China Merchants Bank, the sixth-largest lender in China, intends to boost its family office business as a result of an increase in the population of ultra-high net worth individuals. Already ranked China’s number-one private bank with AUM exceeding US$300 billion, the... View Details
- August 2019
- Case
Simón Cohen at Henco: Sustaining 'High Performance, Happy People'
By: Francesca Gino, Jeff Steiner, Arianna Camacho and Paul Green
Simón Cohen—Founder of Henco Logistics—transformed a small Mexican logistics company into a major player within the industry. Cohen credits the firm’s focus on employee happiness as the key ingredient to its success, an approach he developed following a personal... View Details
Keywords: Work/life Balance; Growth Strategy; Corporate Culture; Motivation; Values; Authentic Leadership Development; Leadership; Personal Development and Career; Motivation and Incentives; Values and Beliefs; Service Operations; Organizational Culture; Growth and Development Strategy; Service Industry
- May 2019 (Revised May 2020)
- Case
fidentiaX: The Tradable Insurance Marketplace on Blockchain
By: Alexander Braun, Lauren H. Cohen and Jiahua Xu
Three years ago, Alvin Ang and his partner founded fidentiaX in Singapore, with the ambition to create the world’s first marketplace for tradable insurance policies on blockchain. With a 26-page white paper, the start-up closed a successful fundraising round through an... View Details