Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(2,257)
- Faculty Publications (513)
- March 2022
- Article
Gender Gaps in Venture Capital Performance
By: Paul A. Gompers, Vladimir Muhkarlyamov, Emily Weisburst and Yuhai Xuan
We explore gender differences in performance in a comprehensive sample of venture capital investments in the United States. Investments by female venture capital investors have significantly lower success rates than investments by their male colleagues when controlling... View Details
- February 2022 (Revised January 2024)
- Supplement
Winning Business at Russell Reynolds (C)
By: Ethan Bernstein and Cara Mazzucco
In an effort to make compensation drive collaboration, Russell Reynolds Associates’ (RRA) CEO Clarke Murphy sought to re-engineer the bonus system for his executive search consultants in 2016. As his HR analytics guru, Kelly Smith, points out, that risks upsetting—and... View Details
- 2022
- Book
Deep Purpose: The Heart and Soul of High-Performance Companies
By: Ranjay Gulati
This book offers a compelling reassessment and defense of purpose as a management ethos, documenting the vast performance gains and social benefits that become possible when firms manage to get purpose right. Few business topics have aroused more skepticism in recent... View Details
- January 2022 (Revised March 2022)
- Module Note
Analysis of Financial and Non-Financial Information for Forecasting Performance
This note describes the main themes and cases of a teaching module on the analysis of information from, and outside of, financial statements for forecasting firms’ future financial performance. The module’s pedagogical goal is to deepen students’ understanding of the... View Details
- January 2022 (Revised February 2022)
- Case
Introducing EVA at ISS: A Better Way to Evaluate CEO Performance and Compensation?
By: Jonas Heese, Charles C.Y. Wang and James Weber
In early 2019, Anthony Campagna, the global director of fundamental research at ISS EVA, a unit of the proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), was preparing to release ISS's analyses of public company performance and CEO compensation ahead of Say... View Details
- January 2022
- Article
Pushed into a Crowd: Repositioning Costs, Resources, and Competition in the RTE Cereal Industry
By: Young Hou and Dennis Yao
This paper exploits a natural experiment involving self-regulation in the ready-to-eat (RTE) breakfast cereal industry to evaluate the performance impact of product repositioning. It then examines how a product's brand equity value declines with repositioning distance... View Details
- January 2022
- Article
Replicating Private Equity with Value Investing, Homemade Leverage, and Hold-to-Maturity Accounting
By: Erik Stafford
The contributions of asset selection and incremental leverage to buyout investment performance are more important than typically assumed or estimated to be. Buyout funds select small firms with distinct value characteristics. Public equities with these characteristics... View Details
- 2021
- Chapter
Business Continuity Insurance in the Next Disaster
By: Samuel Gregory Hanson, Adi Sunderam and Eric Zwick
This article draws lessons from the business support policies pursued in the COVID-19
pandemic to guide policy design for the next disaster. We contrast the performance
of the Paycheck Protection Program to the Main Street Lending Program to illustrate
how design... View Details
- December 2021
- Article
Employee Responses to Compensation Changes: Evidence from a Sales Firm
By: Jason Sandvik, Richard Saouma, Nathan Seegert and Christopher Stanton
What are the long-term consequences of compensation changes? Using data from an inbound sales call center, we study employee responses to a compensation change that ultimately reduced take-home pay by 7% for the average affected worker. The change caused a significant... View Details
- October 2021
- Article
And the Children Shall Lead: Gender Diversity and Performance in Venture Capital
By: Paul A. Gompers and Sophie Calder-Wang
With an overall lack of gender and ethnic diversity in the innovation sector documented in Gompers and Wang (2017), we ask the natural next question: Does increased diversity lead to better firm performances? In this paper, we attempt to answer this question using a... View Details
- October 2021
- Article
Board Design and Governance Failures at Peer Firms
By: Shelby Gai, J. Yo-Jud Cheng and Andy Wu
Our study introduces board committees as a crucial determinant of board actions. We examine how directors who structurally link different board committees—referred to as multi-committee directors (MCDs)—explain why some board actions are merely symbolic while others... View Details
- Article
Decarbonization Factors
By: Alex Cheema-Fox, Bridget LaPerla, George Serafeim, David Turkington and Hui (Stacie) Wang
In the face of accelerating climate change, investors are making capital allocations seeking to decarbonize portfolios by reducing the carbon emissions of their holdings. To understand the performance of portfolio decarbonization strategies and investor behavior... View Details
- October 2021
- Article
Directors' Perceptions of Board Effectiveness and Internal Operations
By: J. Yo-Jud Cheng, Boris Groysberg, Paul M. Healy and Rajesh Vijayaraghavan
We contribute to the growing literature on the effectiveness of corporate boards by examining the effect of two insights that have been largely unexplored in prior studies that use public data. First, since boards’ responsibilities are wide-ranging, more holistic... View Details
- September 2021
- Article
Network Interconnectivity and Entry into Platform Markets
By: Feng Zhu, Xinxin Li, Ehsan Valavi and Marco Iansiti
Digital technologies have led to the emergence of many platforms in our economy today. In certain platform networks, buyers in one market purchase services from providers in many other markets, whereas in others, buyers primarily purchase services from providers within... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
Multi-location Workers in Multinational Firms? Tradeoffs in Contextual Specialization of Employees and Organizational Outcomes
We study how “contextual specialization,” the act of focusing workers’ organizational tasks within a particular locational context, and “contextual non-specialization,” the practice of diversifying workers’ organizational tasks among multiple locational contexts,... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Should Human Capital Development Programs Be Voluntary or Mandatory? Evidence from a Field Experiment
By: Jason Sandvik, Richard Saouma, Nathan Seegert and Christopher Stanton
In a field experiment, we find large differences in productivity treatment effects between voluntary and mandatory workplace mentorship programs. A significant portion of this difference is due to the best employees opting into the program when it is voluntary and... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
Multiple Team Membership, Turnover, and On-Time Delivery: Evidence from Construction Services
By: Hise O. Gibson, Bradely R. Staats and Ananth Raman
Firms who want to compete in dynamic markets are finding that they must build more agile operations to ensure success. One way for a firm to increase organizational agility is to allocate employees to multiple project teams, simultaneously—a practice known as multiple... View Details
- July 2021
- Article
Big Data for Social Benefits: Innovation as a Mediator of the Relationship between Big Data and Corporate Social Performance
By: Goran Calic and Maryam Ghasemaghaei
Over the last decade, the use big data in firms has seen a rapid increase. Whilst scholars have begun to unpack the relationship between big data utilisation and financial performance, significant uncertainty exists about the ethical uses of this new asset. Whether... View Details
- 2021
- Article
Decarbonizing Everything
By: Alex Cheema-Fox, Bridget LaPerla, George Serafeim, David Turkington and Hui (Stacie) Wang
We analyze how the use of different climate risk measures leads to different portfolio carbon outcomes and risk-adjusted returns. Our findings are synthesized in a rules-based investment framework, which selects a different type of climate metric across industries and... View Details
Keywords: Climate Risk; ESG; ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) Performance; ESG Disclosure; ESG Disclosure Metrics; ESG Ratings; Investing; Investing For Impact; Investment Strategy; Environment; Decarbonization; Climate Change; Environmental Sustainability; Environmental Management; Environmental Accounting; Investment; Strategy; Investment Portfolio; Investment Return
- July 2021
- Article
Material Sustainability Information and Stock Price Informativeness
By: Jody Grewal, Clarissa Hauptmann and George Serafeim
As part of the SEC’s revision of Regulation S-K, many investors proposed the mandatory disclosure of sustainability information in the form of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data. However, progress is contingent on collecting evidence regarding which... View Details
Keywords: Voluntary Disclosure; Accounting Standards; Sustainability; Nonfinancial Information; Corporate Social Responsibility; Stock Price Informativeness; Synchronicity; Environmental Sustainability; Corporate Disclosure; Corporate Accountability; Stocks; Price; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Accounting; Standards