Publications

SSRN

Paul Gompers, Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, specializes in research on financial issues related to start-up, high growth, and newly public companies. Professor Gompers has an appointment in both the View Details

Keywords: electronics; health care; high technology; information technology industry; investment banking industry; pharmaceuticals; semiconductor; venture capital industry

October 2013
Article

Corporate Venturing

By: Josh Lerner

For decades, large companies have been wary of corporate venturing. But as R&D organizations face pressure to rein in costs and produce results, companies are investing in promising start-ups to gain knowledge and agility. The logic of corporate venturing is... View Details

Keywords: Venture Capital; Knowledge Acquisition; Corporate Strategy; Research and Development; Business Startups; Innovation and Invention

Find at Harvard

June 2008 (Revised February 2013)
Case

Vignettes on Governance of Private Equity Firms

By: G. Felda Hardymon, Ann Leamon and Eugenia Adofo

In a series of vignettes, Nigella Hardy-Smyth of an international development agency that invests in emerging markets private equity firms must decide how to handle various situations that arise. As a member of the Limited Partner Advisory Board of each of the five... View Details

Keywords: Private Equity; Investment Funds; Corporate Governance; Governing and Advisory Boards; Managerial Roles; Emerging Markets; Partners and Partnerships

02 Jan 2020
News

This Is the Gender Gap in Self-Promotion

22 Feb 2000
Research & Ideas

Social Capital Markets: Creating Value in the Nonprofit World

The Harvard Business School Initiative on Social Enterprise is embarking on a new intellectual endeavor to understand a fast-changing and fertilearena — the Social Capital Markets. For years, money given to nonprofits has been thought of... View Details

Keywords: by Anne Kavanagh

March 2009 (Revised September 2011)
Case

Zopa: The Power of Peer-to-Peer Lending

By: Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, Isabel Fernandez-Mateo and David Chen

Zopa, a U.K.-based peer-to-peer lending company, connected individual lenders and borrowers via an online interface. The company charged a small fee for completed loan transactions but has not turned a profit. Zopa offered two platforms, Markets and Listings. Markets... View Details

Keywords: Financing and Loans; Personal Finance; Market Participation; Digital Platforms; Social and Collaborative Networks; Financial Services Industry; United Kingdom

May 2022
Article

Coins for Bombs: The Predictive Ability of On-Chain Transfers for Terrorist Attacks

By: Dan Amiram, Evgeny Lyandres and Daniel Rabetti

This study examines whether we can learn from the behavior of blockchain-based transfers to predict the financing of terrorist attacks. We exploit blockchain transaction transparency to map millions of transfers for hundreds of large on-chain service providers. The... View Details

Keywords: Blockchain; Bitcoin; Accounting; AI and Machine Learning; National Security; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms

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This study examines whether we can learn from the behavior of blockchain-based transfers to predict the financing of terrorist attacks. We exploit blockchain transaction transparency to map millions of transfers for hundreds of large on-chain service providers.... View Details

Blog Post

Health Care Transparency: The Fox Is Guarding the Chicken Coop in Washington Again

By: Regina E. Herzlinger

Now that more people can shop directly for their own health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, they have been transformed from potential patients to consumers, and like any other consumers of goods or services, they want to know if what they're buying is any... View Details

Keywords: Transparency; Health Care; Health Insurance; Health Care and Treatment; Health Industry

Read Now

2022
Working Paper

The Fed and the Secular Decline in Interest Rates

By: Sebastian Hillenbrand

In this paper I document a striking fact: a narrow window around Fed meetings fully captures the secular decline in U.S. Treasury yields since 1980. By contrast, yield movements outside this window are transitory and wash out over time. This is surprising because the... View Details

Keywords: United States Treasury; Monetary Policy; Yield Curve; Central Banking; Interest Rates; Valuation

SSRN

April 2010 (Revised May 2017)
Case

Tremblant Capital Group

By: Robin Greenwood

Brett Barakett, CEO and founder of Tremblant Capital Group, a New York–based hedge fund, must decide what to do with his fund's position in Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, which has dropped in value by more than 40% in recent months. Tremblant is a hedge fund that... View Details

Keywords: Business Earnings; Behavioral Finance; Stocks; Investment Funds; Consumer Behavior; Competitive Advantage; Financial Services Industry; New York (city, NY)

28 Oct 2009
Lessons from the Classroom

HBS Begins Teaching Consumer Finance

look at what functions they perform. In the classroom, we study four functions: payments, movements of money from today to tomorrow (savings and investing), movements of money from tomorrow back to today... View Details

Keywords: by Roger Thompson; Financial Services; Education

January 2025
Case

Index and Active Investing: Vanguard and the New Frontier of Active ETFs

By: Marco Sammon, Luis M. Viceira and Jonathan Kanagasabai

This case explores Vanguard’s strategic decision-making process as it considers entering the growing market for actively managed exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Set in 2024, the case places students in the position of Rodney Comegys, Vanguard’s global head of the Equity... View Details

Keywords: Asset Management; Financial Strategy; Investment Funds; Investment Portfolio; Financial Services Industry

February 2025
Supplement

Intenseye: Powering Workplace Health and Safety with AI (B)

By: Michael W. Toffel, Shane Greenstein and Sadika El Hariri

Intenseye used its $25 million series A funds to refine and expand its digital safety platform while refining its target markets and ideal customer profile. As the company implemented new approaches to create value for its clients, such as developing an AI-powered... View Details

14 Jul 2015
First Look

First Look: July 14, 2015

Case 315-109 Pearson Affordable Learning Fund An in-house venture capital fund for affordable private schools at the base of the pyramid established by Pearson, the world's largest education company, PALF... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

20 Oct 2010
Working Paper Summaries

Financing Risk and Bubbles of Innovation

Keywords: by Ramana Nanda & Matthew Rhodes-Kropf; Financial Services

March 1986 (Revised July 1986)
Case

Applications for Financial Futures

Consists of a series of four brief descriptions of the use of financial futures as hedging vehicles: a savings and loan hedging the rollover of three-month money market certificates with T-bill futures, a corporate debt issuer hedging the cost of a future debt issue... View Details

Keywords: Financial Instruments

February 2016 (Revised February 2017)
Case

Mattermark

By: Jeffrey Bussgang and Annelena Lobb

Mattermark, a software-as-a-service company that sold software allowing companies to access financial information about privately-held companies and startups, was at a turning point. CEO Danielle Morrill had to allocate investment funding from a Series A round. She... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Applications and Software; Business Startups; Marketing; Strategy; Technology Industry; United States