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Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(15,480)
- People (43)
- News (3,321)
- Research (9,126)
- Events (53)
- Multimedia (221)
- Faculty Publications (7,334)
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- 1985
- Chapter
Accounting Lag: The Obsolescence of Cost Accounting Systems
By: Robert S. Kaplan
Keywords: Cost Accounting
- February 2005 (Revised December 2012)
- Background Note
Assessing Accounting Risk
By: David F. Hawkins
Describes a framework that financial analysts can use to assess the likelihood of accounting misstatements in financial statements. View Details
Hawkins, David F. "Assessing Accounting Risk." Harvard Business School Background Note 105-054, February 2005. (Revised December 2012.)
- 2015
- Book
Political Standards: Corporate Interest, Ideology, and Leadership in the Shaping of Accounting Rules for the Market Economy
By: Karthik Ramanna
There are certain institutions underlying our modern market-capitalist system that are largely outside the interest and understanding of the general public—e.g., rulemaking for bank capital adequacy, actuarial standards, accounting standards, and auditing practice. In... View Details
Keywords: Business And Society; Financial Institutions; Financial Reporting; GAAP; IFRS; Lobbying; Capitalism; Sustainability; Accounting; Finance; Business and Government Relations; Leadership; Accounting Industry; Accounting Industry; United States; China; India
Ramanna, Karthik. Political Standards: Corporate Interest, Ideology, and Leadership in the Shaping of Accounting Rules for the Market Economy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. (Reviews by Anat Admati, S.P. Kothari, Lynn Stout, Lawrence Summers, and Luigi Zingales, among others.)
- August 1983
- Background Note
Balance of Payments: Accounting and Presentation
By: David B. Yoffie
Provides an overview of balance of payments accounting and analytical presentation of balance of payments data. Includes sample transactions to illustrate the application of the basic accounting principles and definitions of the standard balances. View Details
Yoffie, David B. "Balance of Payments: Accounting and Presentation." Harvard Business School Background Note 384-005, August 1983.
- September 2011
- Article
Political Instability: Effects on Financial Development, Roots in the Severity of Economic Inequality
By: Mark J. Roe and Jordan I. Siegel
We here bring forward strong evidence that political instability impedes financial development, with its variation a primary determinant of differences in financial development around the world. As such, it needs to be added to the short list of major determinants of... View Details
Keywords: Financial Development; Political Instability; Government and Politics; Finance; Growth and Development; Economics; Equality and Inequality
Roe, Mark J., and Jordan I. Siegel. "Political Instability: Effects on Financial Development, Roots in the Severity of Economic Inequality." Journal of Comparative Economics 39, no. 3 (September 2011): 279–309. (We here bring forward strong evidence that political instability impedes financial development, with its variation a primary determinant of differences in financial development around the world. As such, it needs to be added to the short list of major determinants of financial development. First, structural conditions first postulated by
Engerman and Sokoloff (2002) as generating long-term inequality are shown here empirically to be exogenous determinants of political instability. Second, that exogenously-determined political instability in turn holds back financial development, even when we control for factors prominent in the last decade's cross-country studies of
financial development. The findings indicate that inequality-perpetuating conditions that result in political instability are fundamental roadblocks for international organizations like the World Bank that seek to promote financial development. The evidence here includes country fixed effect regressions and an instrumental model inspired by Engerman and Sokoloff's (2002) work, which to our knowledge has not yet been used in finance and which is consistent with current tests as valid instruments. Four conventional measures of national political instability — Alesina and Perotti's (1996) well-known index of instability, a subsequent index derived from Banks' (2005) work,
and two indices of managerial perceptions of nation-by-nation political instability — persistently predict a wide range of national financial development outcomes for recent decades. Political instability's significance is time consistent in cross-sectional regressions back to the 1960's, the period when the key data becomes available, robust
in both country fixed-effects and instrumental variable regressions, and consistent across multiple measures of instability and of financial development. Overall, the results indicate the existence of an important channel running from structural inequality to political instability, principally in nondemocratic settings, and then to financial
backwardness. The robust significance of that channel extends existing work demonstrating the importance of political economy explanations for financial development and financial backwardness. It should help to better understand which policies will work for financial development, because political instability has causes, cures, and effects quite distinct from those of many of the key institutions most studied in the past decade as explaining financial backwardness.)
- December 2008
- Case
The Financial Crisis of 2008
This case presents excerpts from the speeches of observers to the 2008 financial crisis, including former and current central bankers, a private banker, and a Nobel-prize winning economist. They present different interpretations of the causes of the financial crisis... View Details
Trumbull, J. Gunnar. "The Financial Crisis of 2008." Harvard Business School Case 709-036, December 2008.
- September 2022
- Article
The Impact of Financial Assistance Programs on Health Care Utilization: Evidence from Kaiser Permanente
By: Alyce S. Adams, Raymond Kluender, Neale Mahoney, Jinglin Wang, Francis Wong and Wesley Yin
Most hospitals have financial assistance programs for low-income patients. We use administrative data from Kaiser Permanente to study the effects of financial assistance on health care utilization. Using a regression discontinuity design based on an income threshold... View Details
Keywords: Healthcare; Utilization; Financial Assistance; Health Care and Treatment; Social Issues; Poverty; Health Industry
Adams, Alyce S., Raymond Kluender, Neale Mahoney, Jinglin Wang, Francis Wong, and Wesley Yin. "The Impact of Financial Assistance Programs on Health Care Utilization: Evidence from Kaiser Permanente." American Economic Review: Insights 4, no. 3 (September 2022): 389–407.
- 2010
- Working Paper
The Many Faces of Nonprofit Accountability
By: Alnoor Ebrahim
What does it mean for a nonprofit organization to be accountable? Nonprofit leaders tend to pay attention to accountability once a problem of trust arises—a scandal in the sector or in their own organization, questions from citizens or donors who want to know if their... View Details
Keywords: Corporate Accountability; Corporate Disclosure; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Leadership; Mission and Purpose; Performance Evaluation; Nonprofit Organizations; Business Strategy
Ebrahim, Alnoor. "The Many Faces of Nonprofit Accountability." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 10-069, February 2010.
- 2021
- Working Paper
Accounting for Workforce Impact at Scale
By: Adel Fadhel, Katie Panella, Ethan Rouen and George Serafeim
Using new data on workforce composition and wages, we systematically measure the employment impact at U.S. firms from 2008 to 2020, including 2,682 unique firms and 22,322 firm-year observations. We document significant variation across industries and firms within each... View Details
Keywords: Impact Accounting; ESG; Employee Turnover; Wages; Employment; Measurement and Metrics; Human Capital; Diversity; United States
Fadhel, Adel, Katie Panella, Ethan Rouen, and George Serafeim. "Accounting for Employment Impact at Scale." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 22-018, December 2021.
- Article
High School Curriculum and Financial Outcomes: The Impact of Mandated Personal Finance and Mathematics Courses
By: Shawn Cole, Anna Paulson and Gauri Kartini Shastry
Financial literacy and cognitive capabilities are convincingly linked to the quality of financial decision-making. Yet, there is little evidence that education intended to improve financial decision-making is successful. Using plausibly exogenous variation in exposure... View Details
Keywords: Financial Literacy; Cognitive Capability; Secondary Education; Personal Finance; Decision Making
Cole, Shawn, Anna Paulson, and Gauri Kartini Shastry. "High School Curriculum and Financial Outcomes: The Impact of Mandated Personal Finance and Mathematics Courses." Journal of Human Resources 51, no. 3 (Summer 2016): 656–698.
- 17 Sep 2007
- Working Paper Summaries
Evidence on the Effects of Unverifiable Fair-Value Accounting
Keywords: by Karthik Ramanna & Ross L. Watts
- September 1979 (Revised July 1993)
- Background Note
Liberal Art of Accounting
By: William J. Bruns Jr. and Julie H. Hertenstein
Keywords: Accounting
Bruns, William J., Jr., and Julie H. Hertenstein. "Liberal Art of Accounting." Harvard Business School Background Note 180-024, September 1979. (Revised July 1993.)
- March 1999
- Article
CFA Level 1 and II Accounting and Financial Analysis Review
By: David F. Hawkins
Hawkins, David F. "CFA Level 1 and II Accounting and Financial Analysis Review." Accounting Bulletin, no. 77 (March 1999).
- Research Summary
Do Measures of Financial Constraints Measure Financial Constraints?
Financial constraints are fundamental to empirical research in finance and economics. In joint work with Alexander Ljunqvist, we propose two novel tests to evaluate how well measures of financial constraints actually capture constraints. We find that firms... View Details
- Article
The Disintermediation of Financial Markets: Direct Investing in Private Equity
By: Lily Fang, Victoria Ivashina and Josh Lerner
We examine twenty years of direct private equity investments by seven large institutions. These direct investments perform better than public market indices, especially buyout investments and those made in the 1990s. Outperformance by the direct investments, however,... View Details
Keywords: Financial Intermediation; Direct Investment; Co-investment; Private Equity; Entrepreneurship; Financial Markets
Fang, Lily, Victoria Ivashina, and Josh Lerner. "The Disintermediation of Financial Markets: Direct Investing in Private Equity." Journal of Financial Economics 116, no. 1 (April 2015): 160–178.
- January 1999
- Article
International Accounting Standards: New Interim Financial Reporting Standard Now Effective
By: David F. Hawkins
Hawkins, David F. "International Accounting Standards: New Interim Financial Reporting Standard Now Effective." Accounting Bulletin, no. 74 (January 1999).
- August 2002 (Revised September 2002)
- Background Note
Financial Analysis of Microsoft
Contains a detailed analysis of Microsoft's financial performance from 1985 to 2001. During this time, Microsoft improved its profitability and cash flow generation--changes that led to a dramatic rise in valuation. Also addresses the issue of determining how much... View Details
Sahlman, William A. "Financial Analysis of Microsoft." Harvard Business School Background Note 803-019, August 2002. (Revised September 2002.)
- September 2013
- Teaching Note
The Case of the Unidentified Industries—2013
By: Mihir A. Desai, William E. Fruhan, Jr. and Elizabeth A. Meyer
Helps students to understand how the characteristics of a business are reflected in its financial statements. This case consists of an exercise in which students are given balance sheet data in percentage form and other selected financial data for companies in 14... View Details
- Article
Evolution of Management Accounting
By: Robert S. Kaplan
Keywords: Cost Accounting
Kaplan, Robert S. "Evolution of Management Accounting." Accounting Review 59, no. 3 (July 1984): 390–418.
- October 2012
- Case
Dispensers of California, Inc.
By: David A. Wilson and David Hawkins
An investor seeking capital must prepare projected financial statements for a new business. View Details