Publications

February 18, 2022
Article

Why Really Smart Executives Do Really Stupid Things

By: Rosabeth M. Kanter

CEO exits due to workplace misconduct are all too common. Over and over we hear about top officials at companies, universities or in government resigning, either because they had affairs with subordinates in their inner circles or made verbal advances to junior workers... View Details

Keywords: CEO; Misconduct; Management; Behavior

September 2016
Case

Health Leads: Reaching for Impact (Abridged)

By: V. Kasturi Rangan and Sarah Appleby

A nonprofit in the healthcare arena explores strategies to achieve system-level impact. Founded in 1996 with a volunteer-staffed help desk at Boston Medical Center connecting low-income patients with basic resources like heating assistance, job training, and childcare... View Details

Keywords: Scaling Social Enterprise; Scaling Social Impact; Health Care Delivery; Health Care Outcomes; Health Care Reform; Nonprofit; Nonprofit Scaling; Social Enterprise; Health Care and Treatment; Nonprofit Organizations; Growth and Development Strategy; Health Industry; United States

May 2014
Article

Clear and Present Danger: Planning and New Venture Survival amid Political and Civil Violence

By: Shon R. Hiatt and Wesley Sine

Although entrepreneurs constitute a key economic driving force for many countries, they often face unstable environments due to violence and civil unrest. Yet, we know very little about how environments characterized by high levels of political and civil violence... View Details

Keywords: Conflict; Violence; Political Turmoil; Civil Unrest; Entrepreneurship; Business Startups; Government and Politics; Balance and Stability; Crime and Corruption; Business Strategy; Planning; Colombia

2011
Other Unpublished Work

What Do Private Firms Look Like?

By: John Asker, Joan Farre-Mensa and Alexander Ljungqvist

Private firms in the U.S. are not subject to public reporting requirements, so relatively little is known about their characteristics and behavior—until now. This Data Appendix describes a new database on private U.S. firms, created by Sageworks Inc. in cooperation... View Details

Keywords: Data and Data Sets; Behavior; Public Sector; Corporate Disclosure; Private Sector; Financial Statements; United States

SSRN

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

Keywords: Equity; Stock Shares; Investment; Investment Return; Price; Market Transactions; Japan

19 Dec 2023
Research & Ideas

$15 Billion in Five Years: What Data Tells Us About MacKenzie Scott’s Philanthropy

categorized these organizations using standard classifications used by the nonprofit world. So, what did we find? Scott directed funds to larger organizations The average Scott grantee took in five times more revenue than the typical... View Details

Keywords: by Matthew Lee, Brian Trelstad, and Ethan Tran

June 2015 (Revised January 2017)
Case

Greece's Debt: Sustainable?

By: George Serafeim

The case "Greece's Debt: Sustainable?" describes the Greek economic crisis, bailout from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the debt restructuring that followed. Because of a lack of trust in Greece's ability to repay its debt, two... View Details

Keywords: Debt Crisis; Accounting; Debt Sustainability; Austerity; Solvency Opinions; Borrowing and Debt; Restructuring; Valuation; Accrual Accounting; Fair Value Accounting; Economy; Greece

14 Dec 2015
HBS Seminar

Brian Tomlin, Professor of Business Administration, Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth

Program

Risk Management for Corporate Leaders—Virtual

Summary All organizations—even those with sophisticated models of risk exposure—are vulnerable to disaster. In most organizations, risk management attempts to avoid disasters by emphasizing compliance, internal controls, and conformance to View Details

Research Summary

Exclusivity and Control (joint with A. Hagiu)

We analyze platform competition for content in the presence of strategic interactions between content distributors and content providers. Contrary to standard results concerning double marginalization and pricing of complementary goods, we prove that a platform gaining... View Details

2022
Working Paper

Social Protection and Social Distancing During the Pandemic: Mobile Money Transfers in Ghana

By: Dean Karlan, Matt Lowe, Robert Osei, Isaac Osei-Akoto, Benjamin N. Roth and Christopher Udry

We study the impact of mobile money transfers to a representative sample of low-income Ghanaians during the COVID-19 pandemic. The announcement of the upcoming transfers affects neither consumption, well-being, nor social distancing. Once disbursed,... View Details

Keywords: Social Distancing; Social Welfare; Economic Relief; Health Pandemics; Poverty

Article

Agility Hacks

By: Amy C. Edmondson and Ranjay Gulati

In the past 20 years, the agile approach to improving products, services, and processes has swept the business world. Rooted in software development, agile has spread to many other functions, and some companies have turned much of their organization, including the... View Details

Keywords: Agile Practices; Agile Project Management; Projects; Management Practices and Processes; Groups and Teams; Innovation Strategy

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May 2020
Article

Measuring Collaboration in Modern Organizations

By: Stephen Michael Impink, Andrea Prat and Raffaella Sadun

Internal communication has been a central theme in organizational economics, as employee collaboration provides insight into the structure of firms. Use of electronic communications data can be transformational for organizational economics, as these data provide a... View Details

Keywords: Collaboration; Employees; Interactive Communication; Measurement and Metrics; Organizations; Performance

July 2014
Article

Smart Money? The Effect of Education on Financial Outcomes

By: Shawn A. Cole, Anna Paulson and Gauri Kartini Shastry

Household financial decisions are important for household welfare, economic growth and financial stability. Yet, our understanding of the determinants of financial decision-making is limited. Exploiting exogenous variation in state compulsory schooling laws in both... View Details

Keywords: Personal Finance; Investment; Decisions; Behavior; Financial Condition

October 2009
Article

Democratizing Entry: Banking Deregulations, Financing Constraints, and Entrepreneurship

By: William R. Kerr and Ramana Nanda

We examine entrepreneurship and creative destruction following US banking deregulations using Census Bureau data. US banking reforms brought about exceptional growth in both entrepreneurship and business closures. Most of the closures, however, were the new ventures... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Market Entry and Exit; Capital Markets; Banks and Banking; Growth and Development; Disruptive Innovation

July 2002 (Revised October 2002)
Case

Taj Hotel Group

By: Thomas J. DeLong and Vineeta Vijayaraghavan

R.K. Krishna Kumar, managing director and head of Taj Hotel Group, has to decide whether to reexamine a promotion decision. In an attempt to deliver a level of service quality that met global standards at the Indian hotel chain, Kumar had introduced new personnel... View Details

Keywords: Decision Making; Human Resources; Leadership Development; Management Teams; Organizational Culture; Alignment; India

October 1991 (Revised June 1996)
Case

Lotus MarketPlace: Households

By: Lynn S. Paine

Managers at Lotus and Equifax must decide what to do about their new jointly developed database and software product Lotus MarketPlace which has been criticized as a threat to individual privacy. The Product, which would allow small businesses to buy targeting mail... View Details

Keywords: Information; Business or Company Management; Rights; Ethics; Marketing Communications; Applications and Software; Product Marketing; Information Technology Industry