Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,546)
- Faculty Publications (185)
- January 2020
- Case
SK Group: Social Progress Credits
By: George Serafeim, Ethan Rouen and David Freiberg
SK Group was one of the largest companies South Korea. A family-run conglomerate consisting of around 120 subsidiaries and employing more than 100,000, SK was tightly knit into the fabric of Korean society. SK viewed their future success as contingent upon the strength... View Details
Keywords: Impact; Impact Investing; Impact Measurement; Social Value; Social Development; Conglomerates; Measurement Of Purpose; ESG; ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) Performance; Capital Markets; Innovation; Environmental Impact; Collaboration; Social Enterprise; Social and Collaborative Networks; Social Issues; Measurement and Metrics; Value Creation; Cooperation; Environmental Sustainability; Employment; Accounting; Energy Industry; Telecommunications Industry; Chemical Industry; South Korea
- December 2019
- Case
WeWork Files for an IPO
By: Lynn S. Paine and Will Hurwitz
For the board of The We Company—better known as WeWork—August 14, 2019, promised to be a pivotal day. It was then that WeWork’s IPO prospectus, known as an S-1 filing, would be made public, giving potential investors, the media, and the general public a window into the... View Details
- November 7, 2019
- Article
WeWork’s Saga Is a Cautionary Tale about Golden Parachutes and CEO Pay
While the WeWork saga has dealt another blow to already-low public confidence in business, it should also strengthen cries for fundamental changes to a system that offers supersized compensation for undersized performance. View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
On Her Own Account: How Strengthening Women's Financial Control Affects Labor Supply and Gender Norms
By: Natalia Rigol, Erica Field, Rohini Pande, Simone Schaner and Charity Troyer-Moore
Can greater control over earned income incentivize women to work and influence gender norms? In collaboration with Indian government partners, we provided rural women with individual bank accounts and randomly varied whether their wages from a public workfare program... View Details
- September 2019
- Article
The Effect of Enforcement Transparency: Evidence from SEC Comment-Letter Reviews
By: Miguel Duro, Jonas Heese and Gaizka Ormazabal
This paper studies the effect of the public disclosure of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) comment-letter reviews (CLs) on firms’ financial reporting. We exploit a major change in the SEC’s disclosure policy: in 2004, the SEC decided to make its CLs... View Details
- Article
Reverse the Curse of the Top-5
By: Robert S. Kaplan
The past 40 years has seen a large increase in the number of articles submitted to journals ranked in the top-5 of their discipline. This increase is the rational response, by faculty, to the overweighting of publications in these journals by university promotions and... View Details
- Article
Short-Termism and Capital Flows
By: Jesse M. Fried and Charles C.Y. Wang
During 2007–2016, S&P 500 firms distributed to shareholders $7 trillion via buybacks and dividends, over 96% of their aggregate net income, prompting claims that "short-termism" is impairing firms' ability to invest and innovate. We show that, when taking into account... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
Does Public Ownership and Accountability Increase Diversity? Evidence from IPOs
By: Rembrand Koning and John-Paul Ferguson
Does public ownership improve employment diversity? Organizational researchers theorize that increased transparency to regulators and the public should lead firms to conform to legal and social norms—but that social closure and decoupling should preserve the status... View Details
Keywords: IPO; Initial Public Offering; Employees; Diversity; Gender; Race; Entrepreneurship; United States
- January 2019
- Case
Data.gov (Abridged)
By: Karim R. Lakhani, Robert D. Austin and Yumi Yi
This case presents the logic and execution underlying the launch of Data.gov, an instantiation of President Obama's initiative for transparency and open government. The process used by Vivek Kundra, the federal CIO, and his team to rapidly develop the website and to... View Details
- 2018
- Working Paper
Reverse the Curse of the Top-5
By: Robert S. Kaplan
The past 40 years has seen a large increase in the number of articles submitted to journals ranked in the top-5 of their discipline. This increase is the rational response, by faculty, to the overweighting of publications in these journals by university promotions and... 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
- August 2018 (Revised June 2025)
- Case
Facebook—Can Ethics Scale in the Digital Age?
By: George A. Riedel and Carin-Isabel Knoop
Since its founding in 2004, Facebook has built a phenomenally successful business at global scale to become the fifth most valuable public company in the world. The revelation of Cambridge Analytica events in March 2018, where 78 million users' information was leaked... View Details
- May 2018 (Revised October 2020)
- Supplement
La Ribera Health Department (B): Epilogue
By: Regina E. Herzlinger, Emer Moloney and Daniela Beyersdorfer
The La Ribera case studies depict an innovative low cost/high quality privately financed hospital model struggling to achieve alignment with the Six Factors. It is reimbursed by the public sector in a Spanish environment whose Consumers, Structure, and Public Policy... View Details
- March 2018
- Teaching Note
Making Target the Target: Boycotts and Corporate Political Activity (A) and (B)
By: Nien-hê Hsieh and Victor Wu
Through the challenges facing Target, the case examines the ways in which corporations can become involved in political and legislative debates and processes, ranging from campaign contributions to lobbying. In 2016, Target CEO Brian Cornell must determine how to... View Details
Keywords: Public Opinion; Social Issues; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Mission and Purpose; Problems and Challenges; Laws and Statutes; Rights; Crisis Management; Risk Management; Media; Political Elections; Taxation; Corporate Accountability; Values and Beliefs; Fairness; Diversity; Customers; Communication; Business and Government Relations; Retail Industry; United States
- February 2018 (Revised June 2021)
- Case
New Constructs: Disrupting Fundamental Analysis with Robo-Analysts
By: Charles C.Y. Wang and Kyle Thomas
This case highlights the business challenges associated with a financial technology firm, New Constructs, that created a technology that can quickly parse complicated public firm financials to paint a clearer economic picture of firms, remove accounting distortions,... View Details
- January 2018
- Case
Partners In Health: Costing Primary Care in Haiti
By: Robert S. Kaplan and Mahek A. Shah
Partners in Health, a global NGO focused on delivering health care to residents of rural underserved communities, conducts a project on the cost of primary care at five sites in the Central Highlands of Haiti. It devises a simple approach for tracking the resources... View Details
- January–February 2018
- Article
The New CEO Activists
By: Aaron K Chatterji and Michael W. Toffel
Though corporations have been lobbying the government and making campaign donations for a long time now, in recent years a dramatic new trend has emerged in U.S. politics: CEOs are taking very public stands on thorny political issues that have nothing to do with their... View Details
- November 2017
- Case
The 'Wonder Drug' That Killed Babies
By: Joshua Lev Krieger, Tom Nicholas and Matthew Preble
In the early 1960s, a popular drug taken by patients worldwide for a range of maladies was found to cause severe birth defects and other health problems in babies born to mothers who had taken it during a certain stage of fetal development. As many as 10,000 children... View Details
Keywords: Regulation; Business and Government Relations; Business and Community Relations; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Product Marketing; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Business History; Health; Government Legislation; Corporate Accountability; Ethics; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Public Administration Industry; Public Administration Industry; United States; United Kingdom; Australia; Germany; Europe
- October 2017 (Revised April 2024)
- Case
Snap Inc. Goes Public (A)
By: Lynn Sharp Paine and Will Hurwitz
Snap Inc.’s chairman must decide how to address investor concerns about the company’s unprecedented plans to issue only non-voting shares in its upcoming IPO. The case is set in early 2017 following the public availability of Snap’s IPO filing with the U.S. Securities... View Details
Keywords: Ethics; Capital Structure; Corporate Accountability; Governing and Advisory Boards; Corporate Governance; Going Public; Business and Shareholder Relations; Leadership; Management; Mobile and Wireless Technology; Venture Capital; Technology Industry; Telecommunications Industry; Information Technology Industry; United States; California
- October 2017
- Supplement
Snap Inc. Goes Public (B)
By: Lynn Sharp Paine and Will Hurwitz
Supplements the (A) case.
Snap Inc.’s chairman must decide how to address investor concerns about the company’s unprecedented plans to issue only non-voting shares in its upcoming IPO. View Details
Snap Inc.’s chairman must decide how to address investor concerns about the company’s unprecedented plans to issue only non-voting shares in its upcoming IPO. View Details
Keywords: Ethics; Capital Structure; Corporate Accountability; Governing and Advisory Boards; Corporate Governance; Going Public; Business and Shareholder Relations; Leadership; Management; Mobile and Wireless Technology; Venture Capital; Technology Industry; Telecommunications Industry; Information Technology Industry; United States; California