Publications

10 May 2021
Research & Ideas

Who Has Potential? For Many White Men, It’s Often Other White Men

the partners worried the high turnover was damaging the firm’s competitive edge, according to research by Robin Ely, the Diane Doerge Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School,... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

February 2014 (Revised August 2016)
Case

Strava

By: Joseph B. Lassiter III, William A. Sahlman and Sid Misra

Strava is a new fast-growing social network for the avid cyclist and runner. The Strava case traces the entrepreneurial journey of two serial entrepreneurs who have been co-founders in a prior venture, and who have co-founded Strava 3 years ago. The protagonists must... View Details

07 Feb 2007
Research & Ideas

Dividends from Schumpeter’s Noble Failure

Business Cycles was Joseph Schumpeter's least successful book when measured by its professed aims and several other yardsticks. Yet the book contains two vital aspects that have largely been overlooked.... View Details

Keywords: by Thomas K. McCraw

March 2003 (Revised January 2006)
Case

Threshold Sports

By: Richard G. Hamermesh and Todd H Thedinga

Describes the sales, marketing, and operating issues facing Threshold Sports, a small cycling event management company that produces the Pro Cycling Tour. Examines the issues facing the company as it approaches breakeven and attempts to grow the business substantially.... View Details

Keywords: Growth Management; Bicycle Transportation; Service Delivery; Sports; Bicycle Industry; Service Industry

23 Nov 2020
Research & Ideas

COVID Was Supposed to Increase Bankruptcies. Instead, They've Gone Down.

Bankruptcy filings in the United States were expected to soar during this year’s economic recession, induced by COVID-19. Instead, they dropped 27 percent year-over-year through August, driven by an unexpected drop in consumer and small View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne

October 2022 (Revised June 2024)
Case

Driving Decarbonization at BMW

By: Shirley Lu, George Serafeim and Michael W. Toffel

The case describes BMW’s electrification and decarbonization strategy, and how the company measured carbon emissions throughout the life cycle of its vehicles and used tools like carbon abatement cost curves to evaluate decarbonization opportunities. In mid-2022,... View Details

September 1986 (Revised March 1987)
Case

Graves Industries, Inc. (B): Lohnes Marine Hardware Division

Describes events occurring over a four-year period in one division of Graves Industries. The division goes through a business cycle and uses several methods of managing earnings to meet its budget targets. The purpose of the case is to allow the exploration of the... View Details

Keywords: Earnings Management; Crime and Corruption; Ethics

20 Dec 2004
Research & Ideas

How an Order Views Your Company

Over a dozen years ago, HBS professors Ben Shapiro and Kash Rangan conducted research with colleague John J. Sviokla, focusing on the impact that a company's order management cycle (OMC) has on customers. Think of OMC as the process that... View Details

Keywords: by Sarah Jane Johnston

Article

The Asymmetric Experience of Positive and Negative Economic Growth: Global Evidence Using Subjective Well-being Data

By: Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, George Ward, Femke De Keulenaer, Bert Van Landeghem, Georgios Kavetsos and Michael I. Norton

Are individuals more sensitive to losses than gains in terms of economic growth? We find that measures of subjective well-being are more than twice as sensitive to negative as compared to positive economic growth. We use Gallup World Poll data from over 150 countries,... View Details

Keywords: Economic Growth; Business Cycles; Welfare; Perception; Global Range

Find at Harvard

October 2022
Case

Weapons of Self Destruction: Zak Pym Williams and the Cultivation of Mental Wellness

By: Lauren Cohen, Ronnie Stangler and Grace Headinger

Zak Pym Williams, mental health advocate, grappled with the question of how to create a proactive mental health family environment for his children. Having witnessed how mental health challenges such as addiction and depression had impacted the past four generations of... View Details

Keywords: Family; U.S.; Mental Health; Family Business; Entertainment; Values and Beliefs; Ethics; Leading Change; Family and Family Relationships; Well-being; Social Issues; Entertainment and Recreation Industry; United States; California

November 1994 (Revised February 1996)
Case

Toy World, Inc.

By: W. Carl Kester

A shift from seasonal to level production of toys will change the seasonal cycle of Toy World's working capital needs and necessitate new bank credit arrangements. A rewritten version of an earlier case. View Details

Keywords: Working Capital; Business Cycles; Cash Flow; Forecasting and Prediction; Investment Funds; Financial Statements

October 1991 (Revised November 1993)
Case

Dynashears, Inc.

By: Thomas R. Piper

A senior loan officer is reviewing the recent performance of a company that has failed to repay its loan as scheduled. The failure results from a cyclical downturn in sales, coupled with a lag in cutting back production. Inventory risk is minimal. Teaching objective:... View Details

Keywords: Borrowing and Debt; Business Cycles; Financial Condition; Risk and Uncertainty; Failure

24 Sep 2001
Research & Ideas

Five Questions for Debora L. Spar

In the long run, even the most fundamental innovations have a way of being influenced by government, says Harvard Business School professor Debora Spar. That's why business leaders need political skills,... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

Article

Waves in Ship Prices and Investment

By: Robin Greenwood and Samuel G. Hanson

We study the link between investment boom and bust cycles and returns on capital in the dry bulk shipping industry. We show that high current ship earnings are associated with high used ship prices and heightened industry investment in new ships, but forecast low... View Details

Keywords: Business Earnings; Price; Investment; Shipping Industry

Find at Harvard

30 Jul 2015
Working Paper Summaries

Networks and the Macroeconomy: An Empirical Exploration

Keywords: by Daron Acemoglu, Ufuk Akcigit & William Kerr

February 2023
Article

Nonprofits in Good Times and Bad Times

By: Christine L. Exley, Nils H. Lehr and Stephen J. Terry

Need fluctuates over the business cycle. We conduct a survey revealing a desire for nonprofit activities to countercyclically expand during downturns. We then demonstrate, using comprehensive U.S. nonprofit data drawn from millions of tax returns, that the public's... View Details

Keywords: Nonprofit Organizations; Business Cycles; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving

21 Oct 2013
Research & Ideas

Missing the Wave in Ship Transport

Like investing in a mansion when the real-estate market is at its peak, buying a dry bulk ship in a boom time is a terrible long-term investment, according to new research that predicts cycles in the shipping industry. The contrarian... View Details

Keywords: by Kim Girard; Transportation

January 1988 (Revised January 1997)
Case

Digital Equipment Corp.: The Endpoint Model (A)

By: David A. Garvin

Describes a comprehensive manufacturing strategy designed to reduce substantially the cycle time of orders (i.e. the time between the placement of an order by a customer and its delivery to the customer). To launch the strategy Digital has adopted manufacturing... View Details

Keywords: Business Plan; Information; Time Management; Production; Strategic Planning; Strategy; Manufacturing Industry