Publications

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06 Jan 2012
Op-Ed

Where Green Corporate Ratings Fail

a leading rating organization. The Carbon Disclosure Project, a nongovernmental group that encourages companies around the world to disclose climate-change information, ranked News Corporation "#1 in... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Toffel & Auden Schendler; Information; Publishing

30 Jul 2001
What Do You Think?

What’s the Future of Corporate Governance?

Summing Up Future Corporate Governance: Different, But More Effective? Shann Turnbull suggests that the world of corporate governance will benefit from the establishment of "a new type of View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

September–October 2020
Article

Social-Impact Efforts That Create Real Value

By: George Serafeim

Until the mid-2010s few investors paid attention to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data—information about companies’ carbon footprints, labor policies, board makeup, and so forth. Today the data is widely used by investors. How can organizations create... View Details

20 Jan 2003
Research & Ideas

Fixing Corporate Governance: A Roundtable Discussion at Harvard Business School

With corporate America rocked by revelations of conflict of interest, malfeasance, negligence, and greed, a group of HBS professors recently gathered to review the current crisis. Is it a case of dé jà vu or an unprecedented, systemic... View Details

Keywords: by Garry Emmons

Article

Strategic Disclosure: The Case of Business School Rankings

By: Michael Luca and Jonathan Smith

We empirically analyze disclosure decisions made by 240 MBA programs about which rankings to display on their websites. We present three main findings. First, consistent with theories of countersignaling, top schools are least likely to disclose their rankings, whereas... View Details

Keywords: Voluntary Disclosure; Shrouded Attributes; Information Unraveling; Rankings; Higher Education; Corporate Disclosure; Rank and Position

June 2020
Article

Lazy Prices

By: Lauren Cohen, Christopher J. Malloy and Quoc Nguyen

We explore the implications of a subtle "default" choice that firms make in their regular reporting practices, namely that firms typically repeat what they most recently reported. Using the complete history of regular quarterly and annual filings by U.S. corporations... View Details

Keywords: Default Behavior; Inertia; Firms; Disclosure; Information; Business or Company Management; Behavior; Annual Reports; Corporate Disclosure; Financial Reporting; United States

SSRN

2022
Working Paper

The Evolution of ESG Reports and the Role of Voluntary Standards

By: Ethan Rouen, Kunal Sachdeva and Aaron Yoon

We examine the evolution of ESG reports of S&P 500 firms from 2010 to 2021. The percentage of firms releasing these voluntary disclosures increased from 35% to 86% during this period, although the length of these documents experienced more modest growth. Using a... View Details

Keywords: Voluntary Disclosure; Textual Analysis; Modeling And Analysis; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; AI and Machine Learning; Accounting

SSRN

January 2015
Article

Competing with Privacy

By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Andres Hervas-Drane

We analyze the implications of consumer privacy for competition in the marketplace. We consider a market where firms set prices and disclosure levels for consumer information, and consumers observe both before deciding which firm to patronize and how much information... View Details

Keywords: Information Acquisition; Information Disclosure; Online Privacy; Privacy Regulation; Information; Rights; Internet and the Web; Competition; Internet and the Web; Corporate Disclosure; Ethics; Knowledge Acquisition

27 May 2010
Conference Presentation

Corporate Environmental Disclosure: A Research Overview

By: Michael W. Toffel

Keywords: Corporate Disclosure; Natural Environment

05 May 2003
Research & Ideas

Sharing the Responsibility of Corporate Governance

Rhetoric and Independence Are Not Enough: Empowering Managers and Directors to Do What Is Right, you challenge the adequacy of the Business Roundtable's assertion that the selection of a well-qualified and ethical CEO is the most important role of a View Details

Keywords: by Carla Tishler

24 Nov 2003
Research & Ideas

Boards and Corporate Governance: A Balanced Scorecard Approach

time, managers and corporations seek capital for their ideas, but in doing so they have an inherent conflict of interest about what information to disclose. Therefore, for this complex system to work smoothly requires a governance system... View Details

Keywords: Re: Robert S. Kaplan & Krishna G. Palepu

09 May 2016
Working Paper Summaries

What Do Measures of Real-Time Corporate Sales Tell Us About Earnings Surprises and Post-announcement Returns?

Keywords: by Kenneth A. Froot, Namho Kang, Gideon Ozik, and Ronnie Sadka; Financial Services

2017
Working Paper

The Benefits of Selective Disclosure: Evidence from Private Firms

By: Joan Farre-Mensa

Private firms’ ability to communicate confidentially with selected investors implies that valuation disagreements between firms and investors are larger at public firms than at private ones. Consistent with the notion that misvaluation concerns lead public firms to... View Details

Keywords: Finance; Equity; Private Companies; Corporate Cash; Precautionary Motives; Share Issuance; IPOs; Selective Disclosure; Private Ownership; Cash; Market Timing; Corporate Finance; Public Ownership; Corporate Disclosure; United States

SSRN

23 May 2000
Research & Ideas

Minding the Muse: The Impact of Downsizing on Corporate Creativity

Not long ago, the senior management of a leading high-tech company was surprised to learn that research showed their R&D groups' creative performance to be in a prolonged slump following a corporate downsizing. The company's... View Details

Keywords: by Peter K. Jacobs

Apr 2011 - 15 Apr 2011
Conference Presentation

The Globalization of Corporate Environmental Disclosure: Accountability or Greenwashing?

By: Michael W. Toffel

Keywords: Globalization; Corporate Disclosure

26 May 2003
Research & Ideas

Corporate Transparency Improves For Foreign Firms in U.S. Markets

define corporate transparency as the quantity and quality of information a company provides its various constituents including shareholders and other capital providers, suppliers, customers, employees, etc. In this paper, we measure this... View Details

Keywords: by Cynthia Churchwell

November 29, 2005
Comment

Transparency Needed in Berkeley Lab Nanotechnology

By: Michael W. Toffel

Argues that the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory should be significantly more transparent about the health and environmental issues associated with its new nanotechnology facility. View Details

Keywords: Disclosure; Transparency; Nanotechnology; Precautionary Principle; Corporate Disclosure

May 2019
Article

Who Consumes Firm Disclosures? Evidence from Earnings Conference Calls

By: Anne Heinrichs, Jihwon Park and Eugene F. Soltes

Using a set of proprietary records, we examine who consumes quarterly earnings conference calls and under which circumstances the calls are consumed. While there is significant interest in calls by institutional investors and sell-side analysts, we find that investors... View Details

Keywords: Disclosure; Conference Calls; Firm News; Corporate Disclosure; Business Earnings; Situation or Environment

Purchase

November 2018 (Revised January 2020)
Case

Tesla, Inc. in 2018

By: Siko Sikochi, Suraj Srinivasan and Quinn Pitcher

On August 7, 2018 Elon Musk, Chairman and CEO of Tesla tweeted that he was considering taking Tesla private and had secured funding. Weeks went by without details about a deal and speculation grew that Musk had misled investors. He soon abandoned the idea, but the... View Details

Keywords: Disclosure Regulation; Board Independence; Corporate Governance; Business and Shareholder Relations; Governing and Advisory Boards