Publications

September 1998 (Revised July 1999)
Case

Costco Companies, Inc.

By: David E. Bell and Ann Leamon

Costco Companies, one of the major players in the wholesale club industry, has developed a new class of membership that offers discounted services--auto, health, and home insurance, business credit card processing, real estate services--in exchange for a higher annual... View Details

Keywords: Cost vs Benefits; Cost Management; Brands and Branding; Marketing Strategy; Supply and Industry; Service Delivery; Service Operations; Risk and Uncertainty; Retail Industry

September 2012 (Revised July 2013)
Case

Can the Eurozone Survive?

By: Dante Roscini and Jonathan Schlefer

The sovereign debt crisis that took Greece by storm in 2010 began to spread to other European markets. Within a few months Ireland and Portugal had also lost access to the sovereign debt markets and had to rely on supranational loans for their financing. The risk of... View Details

Keywords: Sovereign Debt Crisis; Currency Areas; Financial Crisis; Borrowing and Debt; Currency Exchange Rate; International Relations; Banking Industry; European Union; Germany; France; Italy; Spain; Greece; Portugal

21 Jul 2009
First Look

First Look: July 21

for making CBA more effective, rather than eliminating CBA as a decision-making tool. Download the paper: http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/10-001.pdf Reputation and Competition: Evidence from the Credit Rating Industry (revised) Authors:Bo... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

2019
Working Paper

Do Banks Have an Edge?

By: Juliane Begenau and Erik Stafford

Overall, no! We show that the level and time series variation in cash flows for most bank activities are well matched by capital market portfolios with similar interest rate and credit risk to what banks report to hold. Ignoring operating expenses, bank loans earn high... View Details

Keywords: Banks; Market Efficiency; Bank Capital; Bank Debt; CAPM; Banking; Bank Deposits; Bank Funding Advantage; Leverage; Maturity Transformation; Replicating Portfolio; Efficiency; Banks and Banking; Capital Markets; Performance Evaluation; Performance Efficiency; Banking Industry; United States

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October 1994
Case

Bankers Trust: Global Investment Bank

By: Andre F. Perold and Kuljot Singh

In October 1992, Eugene Shanks, president of Bankers Trust New York Corp., and Brian Walsh, head of the Global Investment Bank (GIB) business unit, are considering a proposal for a large and complex financing involving the North Sea Oil Co. (NSOC). The financing... View Details

Keywords: Risk and Uncertainty; Credit Derivatives and Swaps; Risk Management; Value Creation; Business History; Capital Markets; Financing and Loans; Financial Markets; Corporate Finance; Banking Industry; Energy Industry

2016
Working Paper

Credit-Market Sentiment and the Business Cycle

By: David Lopez-Salido, Jeremy C. Stein and Egon Zakrajsek

Using U.S. data from 1929 to 2013, we show that elevated credit-market sentiment in year t – 2 is associated with a decline in economic activity in years t and t + 1. Underlying this result is the existence of predictable mean reversion in credit-market conditions.... View Details

Keywords: Investment; Credit; Macroeconomics

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July 23, 2019
Article

Is the U.S. on Its Way to Becoming a Cashless Society?

By: Shelle Santana

The rise of digital payments, including credit cards, debit cards, and mobile payments systems, have contributed to the steady shift in payment practices among consumers. According to the FDIC, cash represented just 30% of all payments in 2017, and the percentage of... View Details

Keywords: Payment Methods; Cash; Credit Cards; Consumer Behavior; Change; United States

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January 2018 (Revised January 2021)
Case

Colombia's 4G Road Program: The Pacífico 3 Bond Offer

By: John Macomber, Maria Fernanda Miguel and Mariana Cal

Colombia conceived its 4G (Fourth Generation) Road Program to try to attract $17 billion from the private sector for investment in toll roads. The nation had also created the National Infrastructure Agency of Colombia (ANI) to oversee multiple investments, and the... View Details

Keywords: Private Public Partnerships; Infrastructure; Projects; Finance; Emerging Markets; Colombia

January 2008
Background Note

Convertible Arbitrage

By: Joshua Coval and Erik Stafford

The goal of this simulation is to understand how convertible bonds can be viewed as a portfolio of simpler securities and to introduce an over-the-counter market. The convertible bonds that are available during the simulation are at-the-money and in-the-money so that... View Details

Keywords: Bonds; Investment Portfolio; Price; Risk Management; Mathematical Methods

September 1994 (Revised April 1995)
Case

Banque Paribas: Paribas Derives Garantis

In March 1993, the management of Paribas Capital Markets is making a final review of the proposal to set up Paribas Derives Garantis (PDG), a special-purpose subsidiary of Compagnie Financiere de Paribas (CFP), that would guarantee derivative products offered by Banque... View Details

Keywords: Credit Derivatives and Swaps; Business Subsidiaries; Banks and Banking; Financial Services Industry

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Research Summary

Overview

Professor Schreger studies international finance and macroeconomics, with an emphasis on sovereign debt. Following a series of sovereign debt crises in the 1980s and 1990s, which caused defaults among emerging markets governments on their foreign currency obligations,... View Details

September 2024
Case

InfraCredit and the Project Inception Facility

By: John Macomber, Namrata Arora and Maagatha Kalavadakken

Around the world, large infrastructure projects are frequently stymied by the high cost and high uncertainty of the project inception phase: the research and engineering and planning prior to financial close and start of construction. Could there be a new kind of... View Details

Research Summary

Notes on the Impact of Wealth in Bargaining

Joint work with Chen-Ying Huang, National Taiwan University.

We provide the first investigation of the politically important question of whether wealthy individuals are advantaged or disadvantaged in bargaining. We show that in a simple Nash-Rubinstein style model,... View Details

2016
Working Paper

The Stock Market and Bank Risk-Taking

By: David S. Scharfstein and Antonio Falato

We argue that stock market pressure to generate earnings encourages banks to increase risk. We measure risk using confidential supervisory ratings as well as financial information released in regulatory filings. We document that there is an increase in the risk-taking... View Details

Keywords: Stock Market; Financial Markets; Business Earnings; Banks and Banking; Risk and Uncertainty

SSRN

21 Nov 2022
Research & Ideas

Buy Now, Pay Later: How Retail's Hot Feature Hurts Low-Income Shoppers

with Gen Z shoppers in their teens and 20s. The payment method made up $97 billion—or 2.1 percent—of total US e-commerce sales in 2020, a figure that is expected to double by 2024. BNPL is so lucrative, merchants are paying fintech companies roughly twice the amount... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne; Retail; Financial Services; Technology

Forthcoming
Article

The Stock Market and Bank Risk-Taking

By: David S. Scharfstein and Antonio Falato

We argue that stock market pressure to generate earnings encourages banks to increase risk. We measure risk using confidential supervisory ratings as well as financial information released in regulatory filings. We document that there is an increase in the risk-taking... View Details

Keywords: Stock Market; Financial Markets; Business Earnings; Banks and Banking; Risk and Uncertainty

The U.S. financial services industry grew from 4.9% of GDP in 1980 to 7.9% of GDP in 2007. A sizeable portion of the growth can be explained by rising asset management fees, which in turn were driven by increases in the valuation of tradable assets, particularly... View Details

The Stock Market and Bank Risk-Taking

We argue that stock market pressure to generate earnings encourages banks to increase risk. We measure risk using confidential supervisory ratings as well as financial information released in regulatory filings. We document that there is an increase in the risk-taking... View Details

March 2006 (Revised November 2010)
Background Note

Protecting Foreign Investors

By: Louis T. Wells Jr.

Describes the emergence of several kinds of efforts to assure the safety of foreign investment in emerging markets: international arbitration, expanded official political risk insurance, credit from government agencies, and intervention by investors' home governments.... View Details

Keywords: Foreign Direct Investment; Risk Management; Emerging Markets; Agreements and Arrangements; Business and Government Relations; Safety