Publications
Publications
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(6,933)
- Faculty Publications (1,628)
- March 2016 (Revised April 2019)
- Technical Note
ESG Metrics: Reshaping Capitalism?
By: George Serafeim
In the past twenty-five years, the world had seen an exponential growth in the number of companies reporting environmental, social and governance (ESG) data. Investor interest in ESG data also grew rapidly. A growing belief that increasing levels of social inequality... View Details
Keywords: Capitalism; Sustainability; Accountability; Corporate Social Responsibility; Responsibilities To Society; Environment; Social Impact Investment; ESG; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Environmental Sustainability; Measurement and Metrics; Integrated Corporate Reporting; Corporate Accountability; Accounting; Economic Systems
- March 2016
- Teaching Note
Catalina in the Digital Age
By: Uma R. Karmarkar and Robert J. Dolan
"Catalina in the Digital Age" considers how a company with a dominant market position should evolve its established product lines given the rise of novel digital technologies. Since its founding in 1983, Catalina had enjoyed a distinct position in the world of consumer... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
Economic Uncertainty and Earnings Management
By: Luke C.D. Stein and Charles C.Y. Wang
In the presence of managerial short-termism and asymmetric information about skill and effort provision, firms may opportunistically shift earnings from uncertain to more certain times. We document empirically that when financial markets are less certain about a firm's... View Details
- March 2016
- Teaching Note
MasterCard: Driving Financial Inclusion
By: Sunil Gupta
Since joining MasterCard (MC) in 2010, CEO Ajay Banga had made advancing financial inclusion (FI)—bringing formal financial services to marginalized populations—an important goal for the company. In 2014, MC had entered a number of partnerships with governments and... View Details
- March–April 2016
- Article
Scrutiny, Norms, and Selective Disclosure: A Global Study of Greenwashing
By: Christopher Marquis, Michael W. Toffel and Yanhua Zhou
Under increased pressure to report environmental impacts, some firms selectively disclose relatively benign impacts, creating an impression of transparency while masking their true performance. We identify key company- and country-level factors that limit firms' use of... View Details
- Article
Third-party Punishment as a Costly Signal of Trustworthiness
By: Jillian J. Jordan, Moshe Hoffman, Paul Bloom and David G. Rand
Third-party punishment (TPP), in which unaffected observers punish selfishness, promotes cooperation by deterring defection. But why should individuals choose to bear the costs of punishing? We present a game theoretic model of TPP as a costly signal of... View Details
- February 2016 (Revised May 2016)
- Case
Blue Origin, NASA, and New Space (A)
By: Matthew Weinzierl and Angela Acocella
Jeff Bezos, six years after starting a revolution in retailing with Amazon.com, turned his life-long passion for space into a start-up, Blue Origin. Blue (as it was called) was a part of the New Space industry, a collection of startup aerospace engineering companies... View Details
- February 2016 (Revised April 2017)
- Case
Democracy and Women's Rights in America: The Fight over the ERA
By: David Moss, Amy Smekar, Dean Grodzins, Rachel Wilf and Marc Campasano
On the afternoon of June 21, 1982, the Florida Senate prepared to vote on whether to ratify the proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution, which stated that “Equality of Rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
The Customer May Not Always Be Right: Customer Compatibility and Service Performance
This paper investigates the impact of customer compatibility – the degree of fit between the needs of customers and the capabilities of the operations serving them – on customer experiences and firm performance. We use a variance decomposition analysis to quantify the... View Details
- 2016
- Article
Cloaked Trading
By: Lauren Cohen, Dong Lou and Christopher J. Malloy
Using a novel, proprietary database of micro-level trading activities by asset managers, we show strong evidence of asset managers engaging in strategic trading in order to “cloak” their most valuable trades. This takes the form, for instance, of a manager who sells... View Details
- Editorial
How to Turn Around a Country
By: Paul Kazarian and George Serafeim
Change is hard. Especially trying to change an entire country and its public sector that consists of more than 650,000 employees and has an annual budget of approximately 80 billion euros. This is the case of Greece, once the fastest-growing eurozone country, which has... View Details
- 2015
- Working Paper
Replicating Private Equity with Value Investing, Homemade Leverage, and Hold-to-Maturity Accounting
By: Erik Stafford
Private equity funds tend to select relatively small firms with low EBITDA multiples. Publicly traded equities with these characteristics have high risk-adjusted returns after controlling for common factors typically associated with value stocks. Hold-to-maturity... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
Will a Five-Minute Discussion Change Your Mind? A Countrywide Experiment on Voter Choice in France
By: Vincent Pons
This paper provides the first estimate of the effect of door-to-door canvassing on actual electoral outcomes, via a countrywide experiment embedded in François Hollande's campaign in the 2012 French presidential election. While existing experiments randomized... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Transforming the Federal Bureau of Investigation: Outcome and Process Framing
This twelve-year qualitative study examines how Director Robert Mueller and his senior team profoundly transformed the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Drawing on 138 interviews within the FBI and Mueller’s... View Details
- 2016
- Book
An Easy Introduction to Financial Accounting: A Self-Study Guide
By: V.G. Narayanan
This book is a self-study guide written for someone who wishes to teach themselves basic financial accounting. It is based on a course by the same author that has been successfully completed by thousands of students worldwide. It explains concepts in simple language... View Details
- Winter 2016
- Article
Analytics for an Online Retailer: Demand Forecasting and Price Optimization
By: Kris J. Ferreira, Bin Hong Alex Lee and David Simchi-Levi
We present our work with an online retailer, Rue La La, as an example of how a retailer can use its wealth of data to optimize pricing decisions on a daily basis. Rue La La is in the online fashion sample sales industry, where they offer extremely limited-time... View Details
- December 2015
- Case
Stephen Richards: Addressing FAQ
By: Eugene Soltes
Stephen Richards, former global head of sales at Computer Associates, addresses frequently asked questions from "A Letter from Prison." View Details
- 2015
- Chapter
Managerial Responsibility and the Purpose of Business: Doing One's Job Well
By: Nien-he Hsieh
Business managers routinely make decisions that significantly affect the lives of others in both positive and negative ways. In the light of these wide-ranging effects, much scholarship has been devoted to specifying the responsibilities of managers of for-profit... View Details
- 2015
- Working Paper
The Integrity of Private Third-party Compliance Monitoring
By: Jodi L. Short and Michael W. Toffel
Government agencies are increasingly turning to private, third-party monitors to inspect and assess regulated entities’ compliance with law. The integrity of these regulatory regimes rests on the validity of the information third-party monitors provide to regulators.... View Details
Keywords: Regulation; Compliance; Compliance Policies; Conflict Of Interest; Independent Third Party; Inspection; Audit Quality; Auditor; Audit; Environment; Production; Supply Chain; Quality; Government Administration; Working Conditions; Safety; Labor; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Governance Compliance; Accounting Industry; Accounting Industry; Accounting Industry; Accounting Industry; United States
- 2015
- Book
Land Bargains and Chinese Capitalism: The Politics of Property Rights under Reform
By: Meg Rithmire
Land reforms have been critical to the development of Chinese capitalism over the last several decades, yet land in China remains publicly owned. This book explores the political logic of reforms to land ownership and control, accounting for how land development and... View Details