Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(519)
- Faculty Publications (166)
- May 2019
- Article
Who Consumes Firm Disclosures? Evidence from Earnings Conference Calls
By: Anne Heinrichs, Jihwon Park and Eugene F. Soltes
Using a set of proprietary records, we examine who consumes quarterly earnings conference calls and under which circumstances the calls are consumed. While there is significant interest in calls by institutional investors and sell-side analysts, we find that investors... View Details
- Article
Four Things No One Will Tell You About ESG Data
By: Sakis Kotsantonis and George Serafeim
As the ESG finance field and the use of ESG data in investment decision-making continue to grow, the authors seek to shed light on several important aspects of ESG measurement and data. This article is intended to provide a useful guide for the rapidly rising number of... View Details
Keywords: ESG; ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) Performance; ESG Reporting; Data Analytics; Sustainability; Sustainability Reporting; CSR; Transparency; Investment Management; Socially Responsible Investing; Sustainable Finance; Sustainable Development; Inclusion; Inclusive Growth; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Corporate Accountability; Investment; Management; Climate Change; Corporate Governance; Diversity; Integrated Corporate Reporting
- November 2018 (Revised January 2020)
- Case
Tesla, Inc. in 2018
By: Siko Sikochi, Suraj Srinivasan and Quinn Pitcher
On August 7, 2018 Elon Musk, Chairman and CEO of Tesla tweeted that he was considering taking Tesla private and had secured funding. Weeks went by without details about a deal and speculation grew that Musk had misled investors. He soon abandoned the idea, but the... View Details
- November 2018 (Revised January 2019)
- Case
Investor Relations Practices at Edwards Lifesciences
By: C. Fritz Foley and F. Katelynn Boland
In January 2017, the senior leadership team at Edwards Lifesciences were preparing for the quarterly earnings call that would cover the fourth quarter of 2016. They faced questions about what types of information they should disclose on the call, as well as during... View Details
- October 2018 (Revised September 2022)
- Case
Stock-Based Compensation at Twitter
By: Jonas Heese, Zeya Yang and Mike Young
Olivia Nash, an analyst at leading hedge fund BlueShark Capital Management, had just finished listening to the hour-long earnings call for Twitter’s Q4 2017 results. Was Twitter doing well? That depended on which numbers she chose to believe. According to Generally... View Details
- Editorial
Why CEOs Should Share Their Long-Term Plans with Investors
By: Christina Rehnberg, George Serafeim and Brian Tomlinson
Rather than requiring less short-term information, the key to combating short-termism is to encourage companies to share more information about their long-term plans. Analysis of companies that have done so suggests that long-term plans are not mere marketing... View Details
- February 2017 (Revised June 2017)
- Supplement
ExxonMobil: Business as Usual? (B)
By: George Serafeim, Shiva Rajgopal and David Freiberg
The case presents ExxonMobil's response to growing pressure to disclose how climate change will impact their business. This includes multiple asset impairments and losing a proxy vote to shareholders to increase climate change related reporting. Supplements the (B)... View Details
Keywords: Oil ＆ Gas; Oil Prices; Oil Companies; Asset Impairment; Predictive Analytics; Sustainability; Environmental Impact; Innovation; Disclosure; Accounting; Valuation; Energy Sources; Ethics; Corporate Disclosure; Governance Compliance; Climate Change; Financial Reporting; Energy Industry; United States
- January 2017 (Revised January 2019)
- Case
The Rise and Fall of Lehman Brothers
By: Stuart C. Gilson, Kristin Mugford and Sarah L. Abbott
With nearly $700 billion in assets, Lehman was the largest U.S. bankruptcy in history. In 2007, Lehman achieved record earnings of over $4 billion on revenues of $60 billion. By September 2008 the fourth largest investment bank in the world was bankrupt. How had a... View Details
Keywords: Bankruptcy; Financial Distress; Accounting Policies; Business Ethics; Financial Reporting; Volatility; Judgments; Financial Crisis; Insolvency and Bankruptcy; Financial Liquidity; Investment Banking; Financial Management; Financial Strategy; Corporate Accountability; Corporate Disclosure; Corporate Governance; Crisis Management; Risk Management; Failure; Business and Government Relations; Ethics; Banking Industry; New York (city, NY)
- 2016
- Working Paper
Patent Disclosures and Standard-Setting
By: Josh Lerner, Haris Tabakovic and Jean Tirole
A key role of standard setting organizations (SSOs) is to aggregate information on relevant intellectual property (IP) claims before deciding on a standard. This article explores the firms’ strategies in response to IP disclosure requirements—in particular, the choice... View Details
- Article
The Scandal Effect
By: Boris Groysberg, Eric Lin, George Serafeim and Robin Abrahams
Executives with scandal-tainted companies on their résumés pay a penalty on the job market, even if they clearly had nothing to do with the trouble. Because the scandal effect is lasting, a company you left long ago could have an impact on your current and future job... View Details
- March 22, 2016
- Article
The Globalization of Corporate Environmental Disclosure: Accountability or Greenwashing?
By: Christopher Marquis, Michael W. Toffel and Yanhua Zhou
This article is a layman summary of "Scrutiny, Norms, and Selective Disclosure: A Global Study of Greenwashing," published in Organization Science 27, no. 2 (March–April 2016): 483–504. View Details
- 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
- 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
- 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
- January 26, 2016
- Article
Hiding Personal Information Reveals the Worst
By: Leslie K. John, Kate Barasz and Michael I. Norton
Seven experiments explore people's decisions to share or withhold personal information and the wisdom of such decisions. When people choose not to reveal information—to be "hiders"—they are judged negatively by others (experiment 1). These negative judgments emerge... View Details
- March 2015
- Case
Statoil: Transparency on Payments to Governments
By: George Serafeim
The Statoil case describes the challenge of increasing transparency, in extractive industries, around host county government payments. The case describes Statoil's reasoning behind voluntarily disclosing host country government payments, and the events that led to this... View Details
Keywords: Corruption; Disclosure; Disclosure Strategy; Regulation; Industry Self-regulation; Corporate Governance; Corporate Accountability; Bribery; Sustainability; Corporate Social Responsibility; Government Legislation; Cost vs Benefits; Corporate Disclosure; Mining; Mining Industry; United States
- January 2015
- Article
Competing with Privacy
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Andres Hervas-Drane
We analyze the implications of consumer privacy for competition in the marketplace. We consider a market where firms set prices and disclosure levels for consumer information, and consumers observe both before deciding which firm to patronize and how much information... View Details
- November 2014
- Article
The Impact of Corporate Sustainability on Organizational Processes and Performance
By: Robert G. Eccles, Ioannis Ioannou and George Serafeim
We investigate the effect of corporate sustainability on organizational processes and performance. Using a matched sample of 180 U.S. companies, we find that corporations that voluntarily adopted sustainability policies by 1993—termed as High Sustainability... View Details
Keywords: Sustainability; Sustainability Management; Sustainability Research; Sustainability Reporting; Sustainability Targets; Corporate Social Responsibility; Corporate Accountability; Reporting; Corporate Governance; Investor Clientele; Investor Communication; Stock Market; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Environmental Sustainability; Performance; United States
- October 2014 (Revised March 2015)
- Case
Integrated Reporting at Aegon
By: Robert G. Eccles, George Serafeim, Sydney Ribot and Michael Krzus
In 2011, Aegon adopted integrated reporting—a corporate reporting approach that sought to present company performance in a holistic light by considering medium- to long-term issues, stakeholder opinions, and the relationship between material financial and nonfinancial... View Details
- Article
Corporate Social Responsibility and Access to Finance
By: Beiting Cheng, Ioannis Ioannou and George Serafeim
In this paper, we investigate whether superior performance on corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies leads to better access to finance. We hypothesize that better access to finance can be attributed to a) reduced agency costs due to enhanced stakeholder... View Details