Publications

Keywords: Professor Bill George; Professor Joseph L. Bower; Professor Herman B. Leonard; Professor Lynn S. Paine; Professor Howard Stevenson; Professor Noam Wasserman; Colleges, Universities, and Professional Schools; Educational Services

26 Nov 2013
First Look

First Look: November 26

surrounding their adoption. This finding raises the possibility that even though GPs facilitate some value-increasing acquisitions, they do have, on average, an overall negative effect on shareholder wealth; this effect could be due to GPs weakening the force of the... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

24 Jul 2013
Op-Ed

Detroit Files for Bankruptcy: HBS Faculty Weigh In

start, locate, or invest in a city. As HBS professor Michael Porter has explained in The Competitive Advantage of Nations, political units—whether nations or cities - are in competition with each other and can control their destiny using... View Details

Keywords: by John Macomber, Robert C. Pozen, Eric D. Werker & Benjamin Kennedy; Auto

01 Mar 2012
News

Faculty Books

to avoid them. He explains how to anticipate, avoid, or recover from disastrous mistakes that can strip founders of control and leave them without a financial payoff for their hard work and ideas. View Details

24 Apr 2012
First Look

First Look: April 24

minds of those responsible for governance. When a business is profitable and paying healthy dividends to its stockholders, fraudulent activities and accounting irregularities can go unnoticed. However, when revenue and cash flow decline, internal costs and View Details

Keywords: Carmen Nobel

2011
Working Paper

Non-Audit Services and Financial Reporting Quality: Evidence from 1978-1980

By: Kevin Koh, Shiva Rajgopal and Suraj Srinivasan

We provide evidence for the long-standing concern on auditor conflicts of interest from providing non-audit services (NAS) to audit clients by using rarely explored NAS fee data from 1978 to 1980. Using this earlier setting, we find cross-sectional evidence of improved... View Details

Keywords: Accounting Audits; Financial Reporting; Stocks; Price; Corporate Disclosure; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Service Delivery; Quality; Research

SSRN

September 2009 (Revised August 2012)
Case

Novasys Medical

By: Richard G. Hamermesh and Lauren Barley

Novasys has developed a new medical device and procedure for the treatment of female stress urinary incontinence that is cheaper and can be performed in doctors' offices. In spite of FDA approval, the American Medical Association has been unwilling to approve the... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Policy; Health Care and Treatment; Health Disorders; Product Development; Business and Government Relations; Medical Devices and Supplies Industry; United States

08 Apr 2013
Research & Ideas

Women’s Summit Celebrates ‘Sisterhood of the Traveling Pantsuit’

cheers. "I believe the answer is both." Keep Your Hand Up In the past year, no one person has personified that debate so wholly (or with so much controversy) as Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, whose... View Details

Keywords: by Katie Koch & Harvard Gazette

01 Sep 2004
News

One-on-One with Robert McNamara

McNamara Illustration by Zak Pullen For a man who once commanded huge organizations and made decisions affecting the lives of millions, Robert S. McNamara (MBA 1939) is mostly on his own these days. Dressed casually in khakis and a button-down shirt, he View Details

Keywords: Garry Emmons

September 2014 (Revised February 2017)
Case

Belk: Towards Exceptional Scheduling

By: Ethan Bernstein, Saravanan Kesavan, Bradley Staats and Luke Hassall

With 24,000 staff and over 300 stores, Belk Inc. sought to replace its entirely manual labor scheduling system with an automated software solution from Reflexis. Belk hoped the upgrade would simplify scheduling, reduce time employees spent in non-customer-facing roles,... View Details

18 Mar 2014
First Look

First Look: March 18

anticorruption ratings are domiciled in countries with low corruption risk ratings and strong anticorruption enforcement, operate in high corruption risk industries, have recently faced a corruption enforcement action, employ a Big Four... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

October 2010
Journal Article

The Flattening Firm and Product Market Competition: The Effect of Trade Liberalization on Corporate Hierarchies

By: Maria Guadalupe and Julie Wulf

This paper establishes a causal effect of product market competition on various characteristics of organizational design. Using a unique panel-dataset on firm hierarchies of large U.S. firms (1986-1999) and a quasi-natural experiment (trade liberalization), we find... View Details

Keywords: Business Ventures; Product; Markets; Competition; Organizational Design; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Rank and Position; Organizational Structure; Decision Choices and Conditions; Change; Trade; United States

Find at Harvard

Read Now

December 2007 (Revised March 2013)
Case

Queensland Sugar Limited

By: David E. Bell and Mary L. Shelman

Until industry deregulation in 2006, Queensland Sugar ran Australia's single desk marketing system for raw sugar exports. Since deregulation, eight of the ten Queensland sugar millers have elected to continue collective marketing through QSL. However, several millers... View Details

Keywords: Plant-Based Agribusiness; Goods and Commodities; Trade; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Competition; Marketing Strategy; Supply Chain; Network Effects; Supply and Industry; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Australia

November 2018 (Revised October 2019)
Case

Rebuilding Puerto Rico

By: Laura Alfaro, Laura Phillips Sawyer and Haviland Sheldahl-Thomason

On September 20, 2017, Hurricane Maria swept over Puerto Rico, devastating the island’s infrastructure and agriculture. The natural disaster was layered atop years of mounting financial distress. Before the hurricane, Puerto Rico had accumulated $74 billion in debt and... View Details

Keywords: Natural Disasters; Financial Crisis; Infrastructure; Borrowing and Debt; Economy; Strategic Planning; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Puerto Rico

29 Aug 2006
First Look

First Look: August 29, 2006

the firm-size distribution; controlling for level of economic development, regulation, institutional constraints, and other variables that might affect the business environment; and using different empirical specifications. We further... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

August 2012 (Revised September 2013)
Case

EnerNOC: DemandSMART

By: Michael W. Toffel, Kira Fabrizio and Stephanie van Sice

EnerNOC is an energy company with an innovative business model: it serves as an intermediary between electric utilities and electricity users. It contracts with electricity users willing to reduce demand during periods of peak energy demand, and sells this as excess... View Details

Keywords: Production Planning; Productivity; Environmental Protection; Energy; Environment; Business Government Relations; Laws And Regulation; Business Model; Environmental Sustainability; Innovation and Invention; Opportunities; Risk and Uncertainty; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Supply Chain Management; Production; Energy Conservation; Energy Industry