Publications

SSRN

Article

The Cost of Capital for Alternative Investments

By: Jakub W. Jurek and Erik Stafford

Traditional risk factor models indicate that hedge funds capture pre-fee alphas of 6% to 10% per annum over the period from 1996 to 2012. At the same time, the hedge fund return series is not reliably distinguishable from the returns of mechanical S&P 500 put-writing... View Details

Keywords: Hedge Funds; Required Returns; Downside Risk; Index Options; Investment Funds; Cost of Capital; Investment Return; Risk and Uncertainty; Financial Services Industry

June 2013
Article

Issuer Quality and Corporate Bond Returns

By: Robin Greenwood and Samuel G. Hanson

We show that the credit quality of corporate debt issuers deteriorates during credit booms, and that this deterioration forecasts low excess returns to corporate bondholders. The key insight is that changes in the pricing of credit risk disproportionately affect the... View Details

Keywords: Quality; Bonds; Forecasting and Prediction; Credit

2023
Working Paper

Can Digitalization Improve Public Services? Evidence from Innovation in Energy Management

By: Robyn C. Meeks, Jacquelyn Pless and Zhenxuan Wang

This paper examines how digitalization impacts public service provision through a study of the U.S. power sector. We exploit the staggered timing of electric utilities’ investments in “smart” meters and find that electricity losses per unit sold decrease by 3.6%. This... View Details

Keywords: Electric Utility; Energy Management; Smart Meters; Energy; Climate Change; State Ownership; Private Ownership; Technology Adoption; Energy Industry; Utilities Industry; United States

October 1999 (Revised July 2002)
Case

WingspanBank.com (A)

By: Sandra J. Sucher and Daniel Galvin

The case describes the new product development process for WingspanBank.com, an Internet-only financial services "infomediary" created by a team from Bank One's First USA division. The creation of the bank is described from concept development to prelaunch decision... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Decision Making; Information Management; Management Practices and Processes; Managerial Roles; Product Development; Performance Consistency; Competitive Advantage; Internet; Financial Services Industry; Web Services Industry; United States

April 9, 2021
Article

How Blockchain Can Simplify Partnerships

By: Fabrice Lumineau, Wenqian Wang, Oliver Schilke and Laura Huang

Collaborations that require information sharing and mutual trust between companies, suppliers, and clients can be tough, particularly in the remote era. But blockchain’s distributed ledger—and its use of smart contracts—can simplify the process, creating a common,... View Details

Keywords: Blockchain; Collaboration; Partners and Partnerships; Performance Effectiveness

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March 2002
Article

The Potential Role of Economic Cost Models in the Regulation of Telecommunications in Developing Countries

What is the efficient cost of providing telecommunications services to a certain area or type of customer? As developing countries build up their capacity to regulate infrastructure monopolies, cost models are likely to prove increasingly important in answering... View Details

Keywords: Information; Cost; Mathematical Methods; Developing Countries and Economies; Telecommunications Industry

2020
Working Paper

An Empirical Guide to Investor-Level Private Equity Data from Preqin

By: Juliane Begenau, Claudia Robles-Garcia, Emil Siriwardane and Lulu Wang

This note provides guidance on the use of investor-level private equity data from Preqin for empirical research. Preqin primarily sources its cash flow data through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with U.S. public pensions. Our focus is on the components of... View Details

Keywords: Private Equity Returns; Prequin Data; Private Equity; Analytics and Data Science; Investment Return

SSRN

29 Jan 2018
News

How to Build Trust with Colleagues You Rarely See

October 25, 2022
Article

Why Sharing Economic Growth with the Community Is Good Business

By: José A. Tiburcio, Lino Miguel Dias and Robert S. Kaplan

Subsistence dairy ranchers in Central America struggle to stay afloat during the dry season when grass is scarce. Global life sciences company Bayer has launched a program to enable them to produce their own corn silage feed. The results of this program are helping to... View Details

Keywords: Sharing Economy; Innovation; Economic Growth; Poverty; Production; Supply Chain; Social Enterprise; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Central America

25 Apr 2012
News

Harvard Business School Holds 16th Annual Business Plan Contest

19 Feb 2021
News

Was a three-week trip to New Orleans for work or vacation? Both.

03 Sep 2014
Working Paper Summaries

Supply Chain Screening Without Certification: The Critical Role of Stakeholder Pressure

Keywords: by Susan A. Kayser, John W. Maxwell & Michael W. Toffel

May 2024
Article

Moral Thin-Slicing: Forming Moral Impressions from a Brief Glance

By: Julian De Freitas and Alon Hafri

Despite the modern rarity with which people are visual witness to moral transgressions involving physical harm, such transgressions are more accessible than ever thanks to their availability on social media and in the news. On one hand, the literature suggests that... View Details

Keywords: Moral Judgement; Thin Slices; Social Media; Fake News; Misinformation; Moral Sensibility; News; Behavior

February 2016 (Revised September 2020)
Case

T-Mobile in 2013: The Un-Carrier

By: John Beshears, Francesca Gino, Jonathan Lee and Sean (Yixiang) Wang

By 2013, the U.S. wireless industry was in the midst of a costly transition. As consumers began to embrace more sophisticated mobile devices, the industry's four main players spent heavily to improve their infrastructures for providing reliable high-speed data... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Product Positioning; Competition; Wireless Technology; Telecommunications Industry; United States

Educators

Holacracy and other forms of self-organization have received a lot of press. Proponents hail them as "flat" environments that foster flexibility, engagement, productivity, and efficiency. Critics say they're naive, unrealistic experiments. My coauthors and I argue,... View Details

2017
Article

A Brief Money Management Scale and Its Associations with Personality, Financial Health, and Hypothetical Debt Repayment

By: Masha Ksendzova, Grant Edward Donnelly and Ryan Howell

Money management is essential for financial health, and more research is needed to better assess people’s money management practices. Therefore, we factor-analyzed 205 scaled questions from previous money management measures to select the best items and examined their... View Details

Keywords: Budgeting; Debt; Money Management; Financial Health; Scale Development; Budgets and Budgeting; Personal Finance; Behavior; Decision Making

20 Apr 2020
News

Digital Transformation: Business Leaders Still Struggling to Cope

April 2019 (Revised April 2021)
Case

Wayfair

By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Susie L. Ma and Matthew G. Preble

In 2016 Niraj Shah and Steve Conine, founders of online home goods retailer Wayfair, are faced with a decision about how to improve user experience on their e-commerce sites. A key driver of consumer interest and conversion to purchase in the home category is visual... View Details

Keywords: Visual Assets; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Decision Making; Business or Company Management; Growth Management; Innovation and Invention; Operations; Strategy; Technology; Retail Industry; Service Industry; United States; Massachusetts

Educators

February 2020
Case

Highfields Capital and McDonald's

By: Mark Egan and Robin Greenwood

McDonald’s reported its fifth consecutive quarter of declining same-store sales growth in early 2015. Despite McDonald’s recent poor performance, Jonathon S. Jacobson, the founder and Chief Investment Officer of Boston-based Highfields Capital Management, had initiated... View Details

Keywords: McDonald's; Stocks; Performance Improvement; Operations; Finance; Restructuring; Value Creation; Financial Services Industry

Educators