Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(529)
- Faculty Publications (114)
- June 2013
- Article
Issuer Quality and Corporate Bond Returns
By: Robin Greenwood and Samuel G. Hanson
We show that the credit quality of corporate debt issuers deteriorates during credit booms, and that this deterioration forecasts low excess returns to corporate bondholders. The key insight is that changes in the pricing of credit risk disproportionately affect the... View Details
- November 2012
- Teaching Note
Brink's Company: Activists Push for a Spin-off (TN)
By: Suraj Srinivasan
The case this Teaching Note addresses studies the decision of the security services company Brink's Corporation to spin off its home security division from the rest of the company. The decision followed intense pressure on the company by three activist hedge funds that... View Details
- October 2012
- Case
Hill Country Snack Foods Co.
By: W. Carl Kester and Craig Stephenson
Hill Country Snack Foods, located in Austin, Texas, manufactures, markets, and distributes snack foods and frozen treats. The CEO is passionate about maximizing shareholder value and believes in keeping tight control over costs and operating the business as efficiently... View Details
- October 2012
- Article
Securitization without Adverse Selection: The Case of CLOs
By: Effi Benmelech, Jennifer Dlugosz and Victoria Ivashina
In this paper, we investigate whether securitization was associated with risky lending in the corporate loan market by examining the performance of individual loans held by CLOs. We employ two different datasets that identify loan holdings for a large set of CLOs and... View Details
- November 2011
- Case
Brink's Company: Activists Push for a Spin-off
By: Suraj Srinivasan, Aldo Sesia and Amy Kaser
The case studies the decision of the security services corporation Brink's Company to spin-off its home security division from the rest of the company. The decision followed intense pressure on the company by three activist hedge funds that felt that Brink's was... View Details
- September 2011 (Revised September 2011)
- Case
Penn Warranty Corporation
By: Richard S. Ruback and Royce Yudkoff
Penn Warranty Corporation sold warranty contracts to the used car market. During the recession in 2008/2009 Penn's sales declined by 26% Instead of growing by 11% as forecasted. Also, disruptions in financial and insurance markets created a cash shortfall. In the... View Details
- March 2011
- Article
Institutional Demand Pressure and the Cost of Corporate Loans
By: Victoria Ivashina and Zheng Sun
Between 2001 and 2007, annual institutional funding in highly leveraged loans went up from $32 billion to $426 billion, accounting for nearly 70% of the jump in total syndicated loan issuance over the same period. Did the inflow of institutional funding in the... View Details
- 2012
- Working Paper
Issuer Quality and Corporate Bond Returns
By: Robin Greenwood and Samuel G. Hanson
We show that the credit quality of corporate debt issuers deteriorates during credit booms, and that this deterioration forecasts low excess returns to corporate bondholders. The key insight is that changes in the pricing of credit risk disproportionately affect the... View Details
- September 2010 (Revised December 2010)
- Case
Santander Consumer Finance
By: J. Gunnar Trumbull, Elena Corsi and Andrew Barron
A Spanish company has to decide if they should expand into the fragmented European consumer finance market and has to make important organizational strategy decisions in the midst of the world economic downturn that followed the 2007 U.S. credit crunch. Since 2002, the... View Details
- June 2010
- Article
A Gap-Filling Theory of Corporate Debt Maturity Choice
By: Robin Greenwood, Samuel G. Hanson and Jeremy C. Stein
We argue that time-series variation in the maturity of aggregate corporate debt issues arises because firms behave as macro liquidity providers, absorbing the large supply shocks associated with changes in the maturity structure of government debt. We document that... View Details
- November 2009
- Case
The HLB Turnaround
By: Lynda M. Applegate, Bhaskar Chakravorti and Laura Winig
Ford Pearson has recently taken over as CEO of HLB, a Chicago-based product design and development firm (and once one of the largest in the business), to help turn it around after a series of crises that had seriously threatened its survival. Pearson has personally... View Details
- June 2009 (Revised November 2020)
- Case
Busse Place
By: Arthur I Segel, William J. Poorvu, Richard Kessler, Justin Seth Ginsburgh and Eric Fleiss
Busse Corporate Center's largest tenant recently declared bankruptcy, leaving the building 38% occupied and significantly overleveraged. In a depressed suburban Chicago office market, Hannah Sanchez, the leasing agent, has to negotiate lease proposals with three... View Details
- March 2009
- Article
Trading Restrictions and Stock Prices
By: Robin Greenwood
Firms can manipulate their stock price by limiting the ability of their investors to sell. I examine a series of corporate events in Japan in which firms actively reduced their float—the fraction of shares available to trade—for periods of one to three months, locking... View Details
- January 2009
- Article
Bank Debt and Corporate Governance
By: Victoria Ivashina, Vinay Nair, Anthony Saunders, Nadia Massoud and Roger Stover
In this paper, we investigate the disciplining role of banks and bank debt in the market for corporate control. We find that relationship bank lending intensity and bank client network have positive effects on the probability of a borrowing firm becoming a target. This... View Details
- December 2007
- Case
Ruling the Modern Corporation: The Debate over Limited Liability in Massachusetts
By: David A. Moss and Eugene Kintgen
In 1830, Governor Levi Lincoln, Jr. urged the Massachusetts state legislature to introduce a limited liability regime for manufacturing corporations similar to that adopted in neighboring states. At least since 1809, shareholders in the state's manufacturing... View Details
- September 2007
- Case
Tetra Pak Argentina
By: Tarun Khanna, Krishna G. Palepu and Gustavo A. Herrero
Deals with the hands-on management of a difficult situation facing the subsidiary of a multinational corporation (Tetra Pak) in a developing country (Argentina). The situation arises from a major economic, social, and institutional breakdown that jeopardizes the... View Details
- 2007
- Chapter
Behavioral Corporate Finance: A Survey
By: Malcolm Baker, Richard Ruback and Jeffrey Wurgler
Research in behavioral corporate finance takes two distinct approaches. The first emphasizes that investors are less than fully rational. It views managerial financing and investment decisions as rational responses to securities market mispricing. The second approach... View Details
- August 2006
- Article
Predicting Returns with Managerial Decision Variables: Is There a Small-Sample Bias?
By: Malcolm Baker, Ryan Taliaferro and Jeffrey Wurgler
Many studies find that aggregate managerial decision variables, such as aggregate equity issuance, predict stock or bond market returns. Recent research argues that these findings may be driven by an aggregate time-series version of Schultz's (2003, Journal of Finance... View Details
- spring 2006
- Article
All's Fair in Love, War, & Bankruptcy: Corporate Governance Implications of CEO Turnover in Financial Distress
Prior discussions of management turnover during financial distress have examined bankrupt and non-bankrupt firms as distinct groupings with little overlap. Separately investigating rates of turnover in-bankruptcy and out-of-bankruptcy, without a direct comparison... View Details
- July 2005 (Revised December 2005)
- Case
General Motors U.S. Pension Funds
By: Luis M. Viceira and Helen Tung
In June 2003, General Motors Corp. (GM) successfully marketed the largest corporate debt offering in U.S. history, worth $17.6 billion. The offering included $13.6 billion worth of debt denominated in dollars, euros, and pounds and $4 billion dollars denominated in... View Details