Publications

SSRN

June 2022 (Revised November 2023)
Case

Platinum Capital

By: Jo Tango and Alys Ferragamo

How should a venture capital firm divide compensation and decision rights between its founders and its next-generation partners? Platinum Capital faced this decision in July 2020. Platinum’s younger partners had just requested a piece of the firm’s highly lucrative... View Details

Keywords: Decision Rights; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Compensation and Benefits; Governance; Retention; Negotiation; Partners and Partnerships

Educators

March 2022
Supplement

Transforming Kimball International, Inc. (B)

By: Lynn S. Paine and Will Hurwitz

Supplements the (A) case. View Details

2022
Working Paper

ESG: Hyperboles and Reality

By: George Serafeim

ESG has rapidly become a household name leading to both confusion about what it means and creating unrealistic expectations about its effects. In this paper, I draw on more than a decade of research to dispel several myths about ESG and provide answers to important... View Details

Keywords: ESG; ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) Performance; ESG Disclosure; ESG Reporting; ESG Ratings; Sustainability; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Environmental Sustainability; Performance; Corporate Disclosure; Reports

SSRN

2017
Article

High-Skilled Migration and Agglomeration

By: Sari Pekkala Kerr, William R. Kerr, Çağlar Özden and Christopher Parsons

This paper reviews recent research regarding high-skilled migration. We adopt a data-driven perspective, bringing together and describing several ongoing research streams that range from the construction of global migration databases, to the legal codification of... View Details

Keywords: Migration; Talent; Diaspora; Agglomeration; Diasporas; Industry Clusters; Talent and Talent Management; Immigration

Find at Harvard

April 2011 (Revised March 2021)
Case

BANEX and the No Pago Movement (A)

By: Shawn Cole and Baily Blair Kempner

This case examines Grassroots Capital's decision of whether or not to continue investing in a Bolivian microfinance bank that is suffering financial distress. View Details

Keywords: Base Of The Pyramid; Political Risk; Microfinance; Insolvency and Bankruptcy; Government and Politics; Investment; Risk Management; Financial Services Industry; Bolivia

Educators

2009
Working Paper

Mental Health in the Aftermath of Conflict

By: Quy-Toan Do and Lakshmi Iyer

We survey the recent literature on the mental health effects of conflict. We highlight the methodological challenges faced in this literature, which include the lack of validated mental health scales in a survey context, the difficulties in measuring individual... View Details

Keywords: Ethnicity; War; Health Disorders; Policy; Health Care and Treatment; Conflict and Resolution; Bosnia and Hercegovina

November 2008 (Revised April 2010)
Case

Youth Villages

By: Allen S. Grossman, Cathy Ross and William Foster

Tennessee-based nonprofit Youth Villages had an impressive record of serving emotionally and behaviorally troubled youth and their families, with higher success rates and lower costs than most child services providers. Yet expanding to offer its services on a broader... View Details

Keywords: Growth and Development Strategy; Service Operations; Business and Government Relations; Nonprofit Organizations; Expansion; Tennessee

Educators

2008
Working Paper

Just Keep My Money! Supporting Tax-time Savings with U.S. Savings Bonds

By: Peter Tufano

This paper reports the results of a 2007 experiment testing if specific process simplification can foster increased take-up rates for savings products, particularly by low-to-moderate income (LMI) households. Tax refund recipients at certain H&R Block tax preparation... View Details

Keywords: Household; Income; Bonds; Investment; Personal Finance; Saving; Taxation; United States

2008
Working Paper

The Contingent Nature of Public Policy and Growth Strategies in the Early Twentieth-Century U.S. Banking Industry

By: Christopher Marquis and Zhi Huang

While effects of public policy are one of the foundations of organizational theory, less explored is how these effects may depend on other external environmental factors. We focus on how policy is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition to understand the growth... View Details

Keywords: Banks and Banking; Business History; Growth and Development Strategy; Business and Government Relations; Banking Industry; United States

2007
Chapter

Legal Origin vs. the Politics of Creditor Rights: Bond Markets in Brazil, 1850-2002

By: Aldo Musacchio

This paper explores the question: Do institutions persist over time and determine current economic outcomes? Specifically, does the adoption or inheritance of a legal tradition in the past determine the subsequent course of institutional and financial development? This... View Details

Keywords: History; Rights; Common Law; Code Law; Financial Markets; Credit; Economy; Government and Politics; Financial Services Industry

October 1987 (Revised October 1989)
Background Note

Moving Ideas into Action: Mastering the Art of Change

By: Rosabeth M. Kanter

Discusses elements in organizing a large scale change effort: defining a shared vision, coalition building, management structure and process, communication and education, local participation and innovation, standards and measures, and symbols and signals. View Details

Keywords: Change Management; Communication; Policy; Innovation and Invention; Standards; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Strategy

Find at Harvard

14 Sep 2015
News

Cold Call: The Launch of a New Podcast Series

01 Dec 2009
News

Faculty Research Online

“I Read Playboy for the Articles”: Justifying and Rationalizing Questionable Preferences When people behave in ways that might appear selfish, prejudiced, or perverted, they employ a host of strategies designed to justify questionable behavior with rational excuses: “I... View Details

Keywords: Colleges, Universities, and Professional Schools; Educational Services; Publishing Industries (except Internet); Information

01 Sep 2015
News

Faculty Q&A: The Working World

How did you become interested in the impact of high-skill immigrant labor? In the 1990s I helped develop a wireless data technology for a Korean company. The inventor was a Korean scientist living in Silicon Valley, so I spent a lot of time flying back and forth... View Details

Keywords: Julia Hanna

01 Mar 2006
News

In Memoriam

HBS professor J. Keith Butters, an authority on finance and taxation, died in Lexington, Massachusetts, in December. He was 90. The Thomas D. Casserly Jr. Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus, Butters retired from the HBS faculty in 1986 after 43 years of... View Details

Keywords: J. Keith Butters; Colleges, Universities, and Professional Schools; Educational Services

July 2022
Teaching Note

TraceTogether

By: Mitchell Weiss and Sarah Mehta

This Note provides guidance for teaching "TraceTogether," HBS Case No. 820-111. View Details

Keywords: Government Administration; Crisis Management; Health; Health Pandemics; Innovation and Invention; Innovation Leadership; Innovation Strategy; Technological Innovation; Social Issues; Mobile and Wireless Technology; Technology Adoption; Health Industry; Public Administration Industry; Singapore