Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(2,078)
- Faculty Publications (616)
- March 2021 (Revised November 2022)
- Case
Blue Meridian Partners (A): Scaling for Impact
In 2018, Edna McConnell Clark Foundation in a bold move transferred all its assets to a fund pooled with other General Partners and Limited Partners, called Blue Meridian Partners, to focus substantial long range investments in a few carefully chosen nonprofits.The... View Details
- March 2021
- Case
Yale Investments Office: November 2020
By: Josh Lerner, Jo Tango and Alys Ferragamo
David Swensen and the Investments Office staff must decide whether to continue to allocate the bulk of the university's endowment to illiquid investments—hedge funds, private equity, venture capital, real estate, natural resources—given the impact of the COVID-19... View Details
Keywords: University Endowment; Asset Allocation; Real Estate; Equities; Fixed Income; COVID-19; Asset Management; Private Equity; Venture Capital; Natural Resources; Resource Allocation; Investment; Investment Portfolio; Health Pandemics; Financial Crisis; Financial Services Industry; Real Estate Industry; Energy Industry; Connecticut
- Article
How Venture Capitalists Make Decisions
By: Paul A. Gompers, Will Gornall, Steven Kaplan and Ilya Strebulaev
For decades now, venture capitalists have played a crucial role in the economy by financing high-growth start-ups. While the companies they’ve backed—Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and more—are constantly in the headlines, very little is known about what VCs actually... View Details
- 2021
- Other Unpublished Work
Obsolescence of the Obsolescing Bargain: Why Governments Must Get Investor-State Contracts Right
By: Louis T. Wells and Karl P. Sauvant
Gone are the days when governments could easily renegotiate natural resource and other investment contracts if foreign investors, e.g., reaped bonanzas from rising resource prices, surprisingly rich discoveries, or terms that were too favorable. Today, international... View Details
- January 2021 (Revised August 2021)
- Case
ByteDance: TikTok and the Trials of Going Viral
By: William C. Kirby and John P. McHugh
In 2020, TikTok became the most valuable start-up ever. The short-form, video-sharing social media platform emerged as the crown jewel of the Chinese technology firm ByteDance, realizing 850 million monthly users and an estimated worth of $180 billion. However, a... View Details
Keywords: China; Technology; Startup; Start-up; International Strategy; Global Strategy And Leadership; Innovation; Political Risk; Regulations; Trump; Foreign Policy; Foreign Investment; Chinese Internet Market; Global Strategy; Crisis Management; Risk and Uncertainty; Entrepreneurship; Globalized Economies and Regions; Government Legislation; Innovation and Management; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Internet and the Web; Social Media; Technology Industry; China; United States
- Editorial
Why ESG Funds Fail to Scale
By: Gabriel Karageorgiou and George Serafeim
You’ve seen the headlines about the growth in environmental, social, and governance funds. Many investment professionals might read these and believe that launching a new ESG investment firm or ESG offering will be an automatic success. Our analysis of the data shows... View Details
Keywords: ESG; ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) Performance; ESG Disclosure; ESG Disclosure Metrics; ESG Ratings; ESG Reporting; Investment Management; Investment Strategy; Investments; Investment Fund; Sustainability; Sustainable Finance; Sustainable Investing; Investment; Management; Strategy; Investment Portfolio; Finance; Growth and Development; Failure
- January 2021
- Case
The FIRE Savings Calculator
By: Michael Parzen and Paul Hamilton
This case follows Carol Muñoz, a member of the Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE) lifestyle movement. At the age of 45, Carol is considering retiring and living off the $1 million she has accumulated. Using Monte Carlo simulation, Carol forecasts the... View Details
- January 2021 (Revised October 2021)
- Case
eToro: Building the World's Largest Social Trading Network
By: Elie Ofek and Danielle Golan
Social trading platform eToro was preparing for the launch of its expanded offering in the U.S. The company faced critical decisions regarding product-market fit, go-to-market strategy, positioning and monetization. Moreover, it faced the challenge of how best to make... View Details
- December 2020
- Article
Sovereign Debt Portfolios, Bond Risks, and the Credibility of Monetary Policy
By: Wenxin Du, Carolin Pflueger and Jesse Schreger
We document that governments whose local currency debt provides them with greater hedging benefits actually borrow more in foreign currency. We introduce two features into a government's debt portfolio choice problem to explain this finding: risk-averse lenders and... View Details
- October 2020 (Revised February 2024)
- Case
Divesting Harvard's Endowment
By: Daniel Green, Luis M. Viceira and Holly Fetter
By early 2020 Harvard University was facing growing pressure from students, faculty, and alumni to divest its $40 billion endowment of financial stakes in fossil fuel producers. Its previous policy of avoiding the issue was quickly becoming outdated—$21 trillion of... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
The Stock Market Value of Human Capital Creation
By: Matthias Regier and Ethan Rouen
We develop a measure of firm-year-specific human capital investment from publicly disclosed personnel expenses (PE) and examine the stock market valuation of this investment. Measuring the future value of PE (PEFV) based on the relation between lagged... View Details
- October 2020
- Article
IQ from IP: Simplifying Search in Portfolio Choice
By: Huaizhi Chen, Lauren Cohen, Umit Gurun, Dong Lou and Christopher J. Malloy
Using a novel database that tracks web traffic on the SEC’s EDGAR servers between 2004 and 2015, we show that mutual fund managers gather information on a very particular subset of firms and insiders, and their surveillance is very persistent over time. This tracking... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Private Equity and COVID-19
By: Paul A. Gompers, Steven N. Kaplan and Vladimir Mukharlyamov
We survey more than 200 private equity (PE) managers from firms with $1.9 trillion of assets under management (AUM) about their portfolio performance, decisionmaking and activities during the Covid-19 pandemic. Given that PE managers have significant incentives to... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Fencing Off Silicon Valley: Cross-Border Venture Capital and Technology Spillovers
By: Ufuk Akcigit, Sina T. Ates, Josh Lerner, Richard Townsend and Yulia Zhestkova
The treatment of foreign investors is a contentious topic in U.S. entrepreneurship policy. We
model a setting where foreign corporate investments in Silicon Valley may allow U.S. entrepreneurs
to pursue technologies that they could not otherwise, but may also lead to... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Venture Capitalists and COVID-19
By: Paul A. Gompers, Will Gornall, Steven N. Kaplan and Ilya A. Strebulaev
We survey over 1,000 institutional and corporate venture capitalists (VCs) at more than 900 different firms to learn how their decisions and investments have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. We compare their survey answers to those provided by a large sample of... View Details
- August 2020 (Revised November 2024)
- Case
NextView Ventures
By: Jo Tango and Nori Gerardo Lietz
David Beisel, Rob Go, and Lee Hower are non-partners at different-and-established venture capital (VC) firms. They decide to leave their positions to start a new seed-stage VC firm. The case covers the genesis of the firm, the formulation of its strategy and... View Details
- July 2020 (Revised January 2021)
- Case
Pattern Brands
By: Sunil Gupta, Elie Ofek and Julia Kelley
In March 2020, direct-to-consumer (DTC) company Pattern Brands needed to decide how to allocate resources across its different brands. Pattern Co-Founders Nick Ling and Emmett Shine hoped to avoid the pitfalls faced by some DTC companies—such as inability to scale and... View Details
Keywords: Direct-to-consumer; Brands and Branding; Marketing Channels; Marketing Strategy; Product Marketing; Product Launch; Product Positioning; Business Model; Business Startups; Growth and Development Strategy; Demand and Consumers; Business Strategy; Diversification; Competitive Advantage; Consumer Products Industry; Retail Industry; North and Central America; United States; New York (city, NY); New York (state, US)
- July 2020
- Case
The Second City: The Future of ‘Yes, and…’
By: Francesca Gino and Jeff Huizinga
Leaders from The Second City, the legendary Improv comedy company, reflect on its broad portfolio of activities through the lens of future opportunities and growth. In particular, they discuss ways in which Second City can further invest in its professional arm, Second... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Best Ideas
By: Miguel Antón, Randolph B. Cohen and Christopher Polk
We find that the stocks in which active mutual fund or hedge fund managers display the most conviction towards ex-ante, their “Best ideas,” outperform the market, as well as the other stocks in those managers’ portfolios, by approximately 2.8 to 4.5 percent per year,... View Details
- June 2020
- Teaching Note
Shiseido Acquires Drunk Elephant
By: Jill Avery
On October 7, 2019, the Shiseido Group announced that it would acquire clean skincare brand Drunk Elephant for $845 million, a valuation of 8.5 times sales. Did Shiseido pay too much or too little for this brand asset? How much was the Drunk Elephant brand worth and... View Details
Keywords: Brand Management; Brand Valuation; Brand Equity; Brand Value; Mergers ＆ Acquisitions; Startup; DTC; Brand Portfolio Strategy; Marketing; Marketing Strategy; Brands and Branding; Mergers and Acquisitions; Valuation; Entrepreneurship; Business Startups; Beauty and Cosmetics Industry; Consumer Products Industry; United States; Japan; Asia; North America