Publications

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25 Jan 2010
Research & Ideas

A Macroeconomic View of the Current Economy

partial one. By their control over the money supply, central bankers can essentially set interest rates, especially short-term interest rates. And that's the basis of monetary policy. It's because View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

January 2018 (Revised October 2020)
Case

The Rise and Rise (?) of Walmart (A): Battling Kmart

By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell, Eric Van den Steen and Karen Elterman

This case, set in 1990, describes the history of Walmart and asks what competitive strategies Kmart might adopt in response to Walmart's success. It discusses the strategy and organization of both companies in terms of HR practices, store location, distribution,... View Details

Keywords: Walmart; Kmart; Organization; Company Culture; Pricing; Procurement; Supercenter; Strategy; Competition; Organizational Culture; Competitive Strategy; Retail Industry; United States; Bentonville; Arkansas

Educators

2006
Working Paper

The Value of a 'Free' Customer

By: Sunil Gupta, Carl F. Mela and Jose M. Vidal-Sanz

Central to a firm's growth and marketing policy is the revenus and profit potential of its customer assets. As a result, there has been a recent proliferation of work regarding customer lifetime value. However, extant research in this area is silent regarding how to... View Details

Keywords: Customer Value and Value Chain; Auctions; Network Effects; Business Strategy

July 2008
Supplement

The Politics and Economics of Accounting for Goodwill at Cisco Systems (B)

By: Karthik Ramanna

Studies the role of Cisco in setting current US accounting standards for acquisitions and goodwill. Students are asked to analyze an acquisition in the context of an ongoing political debate on mergers accounting. View Details

Keywords: Goodwill Accounting; Standards; Mergers and Acquisitions; Business and Government Relations; United States

July 2008
Case

The Politics and Economics of Accounting for Goodwill at Cisco Systems (A)

By: Karthik Ramanna

Studies the role of Cisco in setting current U.S. accounting standards for acquisitions and goodwill. Students are asked to analyze an acquisition in the context of an ongoing political debate on mergers accounting. View Details

Keywords: Goodwill Accounting; Mergers and Acquisitions; Standards; Business and Government Relations; United States

Educators

Web

The Art of "Posting" - The Art of American Advertising

study of advertising in the United States. 34 The Associated Billposters of the United States and Canada began to regulate the industry, including setting prices and length... View Details

2022
Article

Pills in a World of Activism and ESG

By: Guhan Subramanian and Caley Petrucci

Easterbrook and Fischel’s The Economic Structure of Corporate Law advances their now famous passivity thesis, which posits that managers should remain passive in the face of an unsolicited tender offer for the company’s shares. Consistent with the broader... View Details

Keywords: Investment Activism; Governance Controls; Business and Shareholder Relations

27 Feb 2019
Research & Ideas

The Hidden Cost of a Product Recall

experience them,” Stern says. “At the same time, we see that competitors are likely to accelerate their own innovation activities to take advantage of these weaknesses.” Stern, along with Indiana University Assistant Professor George P.... View Details

Keywords: by Danielle Kost; Manufacturing; Consumer Products; Auto; Medical Devices & Supplies

March 2016
Article

An Analysis of Firms' Self-reported Anticorruption Efforts

By: Paul M. Healy and George Serafeim

We use Transparency International's ratings of self-reported anticorruption efforts for 480 corporations to analyze factors underlying the ratings. Our tests examine whether these forms of disclosure reflect firms' real efforts to combat corruption or are cheap talk.... View Details

Keywords: Corruption; Corporate Performance; Growth; Disclosure; Disclosure Strategy; Sustainability; Crime and Corruption; Corporate Disclosure; Performance; Sales

Forthcoming
Article

Reputation Burning: Analyzing the Impact of Brand Sponsorship on Social Influencers

By: Mengjie Cheng and Shunyuan Zhang

The growth of the influencer marketing industry warrants an empirical examination of the effect of posting sponsored videos on influencers' reputations. We collected a novel dataset of user-generated YouTube videos created by prominent English-speaking influencers in... View Details

Keywords: Reputation; Mathematical Methods; Marketing Reference Programs; Social Media; Brands and Branding

Find at Harvard

07 Jun 2023
Blog Post

My One Case: MBA Class of 2023 Looks Back

Peterson (A).” The case discusses the problems that a recent MBA graduate faces when he joins a new company and has a difficult time managing people. A lot of us are trained to be individual contributors from a young age. View Details

Mar 2020
Conference Presentation

A New Analysis of Differential Privacy's Generalization Guarantees

By: Christopher Jung, Katrina Ligett, Seth Neel, Aaron Roth, Saeed Sharifi-Malvajerdi and Moshe Shenfeld

We give a new proof of the "transfer theorem" underlying adaptive data analysis: that any mechanism for answering adaptively chosen statistical queries that is differentially private and sample-accurate is also accurate out-of-sample. Our new proof is elementary and... View Details

Keywords: Machine Learning; Transfer Theorem; Mathematical Methods

25 Jun 2020
Blog Post

Harvard Business School Class of 2021 Student Profiles

The Class of 2021 is facing a time unlike any other in human history. In these unprecedented times, we at HBS are so grateful that these students will lead us into a better future filled with possibility, inclusivity, innovation, and... View Details

Article

Asset Accumulation and Labor Force Participation of Disability Insurance Applicants

By: Pian Shu

This paper provides empirical evidence of the existence of forward-looking asset-accumulation behavior among disability-insurance applicants, previously examined only in the theoretical literature. Using panel data from the RAND Health and Retirement Study, I show that... View Details

Keywords: Disability Insurance; Asset Accumulation; Labor Force Participation; Assets; Behavior; Employment; Insurance; Insurance Industry; United States