Publications
Publications
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(7,519)
- Faculty Publications (1,633)
- January 2019
- Supplement
The De Beers Group: Launching GemFair for Artisanal Diamonds
By: Benjamin C. Esty and Daniel Fisher
In April 2018, the De Beers Group launched a pilot project called GemFair to create a new supply of ethically and environmentally sourced diamonds from artisanal and small-scale mines (ASM) in Sierra Leone. Whether this project would yield a meaningful supply of rough... View Details
- January 4, 2019
- Article
How Companies Can Balance Social Impact and Financial Goals
By: Marya L. Besharov, Wendy K. Smith and Michael Tushman
It’s notoriously difficult for a business to manage two separate-but-equal goals—making money and creating social value at the same time, for example, or managing an existing business at the same time that you invent a new one. Most attempts at managing these... View Details
- January 2019 (Revised July 2019)
- Case
New Balance: Managing Orders and Working Conditions
By: Michael W. Toffel, Eileen McNeely and Matthew Preble
New Balance Athletics, Inc., a major U.S.-based athletic footwear and apparel brand, sources most of its footwear products from independent suppliers whose factories are located in China, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Monica Gorman, vice president of responsible leadership... View Details
Keywords: Footwear; Athletic Footwear; Manufacturing; CSR; Sustainability; Quality Management; Supply Chains; Operations; Management; Production; Working Conditions; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Labor and Management Relations; Supply Chain Management; Supply Chain; Order Taking and Fulfillment; Apparel and Accessories Industry; Consumer Products Industry
- January 2019
- Case
Capitalism, Entrepreneurship and Responsibility
By: Geoffrey Jones
This case contains excerpts from prominent business leaders and others expressing their views on the responsibilities, if any, of business leaders to other stakeholders in society. It begins with an excerpt from Andrew Carnegie, the nineteenth century steel magnate, in... View Details
- January 2019 (Revised October 2019)
- Case
Rural Taobao: Alibaba's Expansion into Rural E-Commerce
By: Tarun Khanna, Ryan Allen, Adam Frost and Wesley Koo
Alibaba's Rural Taobao initiative had been launched in 2014 as a public service initiative to increase e-commerce adoption in China’s remote rural areas. In the first two iterations of the initiative, dubbed “1.0” and “2.0,” Alibaba had partnered with local businesses... View Details
Keywords: Strategy; Business Growth; Ecommerce; Corporate Social Responsibility; Business And Government; Emerging Market; Digital Platforms; Internet and the Web; Emerging Markets; Rural Scope; Growth and Development Strategy; Competitive Strategy; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Business and Government Relations; Decision Making; E-commerce; China
- 2019
- Article
CEO Materialism and Corporate Social Responsibility
By: Robert Davidson, Aiyesha Dey and Abbie Smith
We study the role of individual CEOs in explaining corporate social responsibility (CSR) scores. We find that CEO fixed effects explain 59% of the variation in CSR scores, whereas firm fixed effects explain 2% of the variation in CSR scores. Specifically, firms led by... View Details
- January–February 2019
- Article
Corporate Purpose and Financial Performance
By: Claudine Gartenberg, Andrea Prat and George Serafeim
We construct a measure of corporate purpose within a sample of U.S. companies based on approximately 500,000 survey responses of worker perceptions about their employers. We find that this measure of purpose is not related to financial performance. However, high... View Details
- Article
Health as a Way of Doing Business
By: Howard Koh, Sara J. Singer and Amy C. Edmondson
For too long, the worlds of business and health have been mired in a checkered, sometimes contentious, history. Millions of deaths worldwide can be attributed to risk factors including tobacco use, alcohol and drug misuse, and suboptimal dietary intake linked to... View Details
- 2019
- Article
Turning Lead into Gold: How Do Entrepreneurs Mobilize Resources to Exploit Opportunities?
By: David R. Clough, Tommy Pan Fang, Balagopal Vissa and Andy Wu
The mobilization of resources is a central and defining feature of entrepreneurship. As the body of empirical research on entrepreneurial resource mobilization has grown, the literature has become increasingly fragmented. We review the literature on entrepreneurs’... View Details
Keywords: Resource Mobilization; Entrepreneurship; Organizations; Theory; Research; Strategy; Opportunities
- December 2018
- Case
The Global-Local Tension: Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao Leading with 'International Values and Local Roots' (A)
By: Tsedal Neeley
Vittorio Colao, CEO of telecommunication giant Vodafone, must respond to reports of disturbing accounting practices at two of Vodafone’s operating companies. In one case, €60 million have been misreported due to a series of failures to check manual accounting... View Details
- December 2018
- Supplement
The Global-Local Tension: Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao Leading with 'International Values and Local Roots' (B)
By: Tsedal Neeley
Vittorio Colao, CEO of telecommunication giant Vodafone, must respond to reports of disturbing accounting practices at two of Vodafone’s operating companies. In one case, €60 million have been misreported due to a series of failures to check manual accounting... View Details
- December 2018
- Case
The Swedish Academy #MeToo Scandal and the Reputation of the Nobel Prize
By: Stephen A. Greyser and Mats Urde
This case focuses on the potential for “reputational contagion” to the Nobel Prize from a scandal affecting one of its independent network member entities, the Swedish Academy. The latter is responsible for selecting the Nobel Prize in Literature, by appointment of... View Details
- Article
The Social Purpose of Corporations
By: Nien-he Hsieh, Marco Meyer, David Rodin and Jens van ‘t Klooster
To think about the purpose of corporations is to think about what corporations are for. In this article, we argue that the concept of a purpose has an important role in thinking about the moral evaluation of corporations. We make three contributions. First, we... View Details
- 2018
- Working Paper
OTC Intermediaries
By: Andrea L. Eisfeldt, Bernard Herskovic, Sriram Rajan and Emil Siriwardane
Over-the-counter (OTC) markets for financial assets are dominated by a relatively small number of core intermediaries and a large number of peripheral customers. In this paper, we develop a model of trade in a core-periphery network and estimate its key structural... View Details
- November 2018 (Revised January 2019)
- Module Note
Responsibilities to Investors (Abridged)
By: Lena G. Goldberg and Joseph L. Badaracco
This note focuses on managers’ responsibilities—economic, legal, and ethical—to investors. In capitalist and some socialist economies, these responsibilities traditionally have been grounded in fiduciary duties and are typically part of the common law or statutory law... View Details
- November 2018 (Revised December 2018)
- Case
CalSTRS Takes on Gun Violence
By: Vikram S Gandhi and Caitlin Reimers
In Spring of 2018, Chris Ailman, CIO of the $200 billion pension plan for California public school teachers (CalSTRS) was mandated by his board to “prioritize engagement with makers and retailers of firearms in California” following a series of gun-related tragedies in... View Details
- November 2018 (Revised January 2022)
- Case
JUUL and the Vaping Revolution
By: Michael W. Toffel, John Masko and Sarah Mehta
In late 2019, San Francisco-based electronic cigarette (e-cigarette) maker JUUL Labs (pronounced “jewel”) faced intense pressure. Sales of JUUL products exceeded $1 billion in 2018, dominating the e-cigarette category. While JUUL Labs’ stated goal was to help current... View Details
Keywords: Electronic Cigarettes; E-Cigarettes; Vaping; Nicotine Replacement; JUUL; Juuling; Advertising; Digital Marketing; Customers; Innovation and Invention; Marketing; Ethics; Brands and Branding; Marketing Communications; Marketing Strategy; Product Marketing; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Social Issues; Information Technology; Technology Industry; San Francisco; California
- November 2018
- Case
frog design
By: Srikant M. Datar and Caitlin N. Bowler
The case follows the genesis and development of Palo, a radical urban communications hub designed to replace payphone booths on Manhattan’s city streets, through a joint venture between frog design and a venture-backed firm LQD WiFi. The case explores the complexity of... View Details
- November–December 2018
- Article
Uncertainty about Managers' Reporting Objectives and Investors' Response to Earnings Reports: Evidence from the 2006 Executive Compensation Disclosures
By: Fabrizio Ferri, Ronghuo Zheng and Yuan Zou
- October 2018
- Case
Corruption and Business in Emerging Markets
By: Geoffrey Jones, Tarun Khanna and Nataliya Langburd Wright
The case is built around video clips from top business leaders in emerging markets who were interviewed for Harvard Business School’s innovative Creating Emerging Markets oral history project. Corruption is a widespread problem in emerging markets, and this case is... View Details