Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(900)
- Faculty Publications (179)
- 2013
- Article
Boardroom Centrality and Firm Performance
By: David F. Larcker, Eric C. So and Charles C.Y. Wang
Firms with central or well-connected boards of directors earn superior risk-adjusted stock returns. Initiating a long position in the most central firms and a short position in the least central firms earns an average risk-adjusted return of 4.68% per year. Firms with... View Details
- Article
Tax Policy and the Efficiency of U.S. Direct Investment Abroad
By: Mihir A. Desai, C. Fritz Foley and James R. Hines Jr.
Deferral of U.S. taxes on foreign source income is commonly characterized as a subsidy to foreign investment, as reflected in its inclusion among "tax expenditures" and occasional calls for its repeal. This paper analyzes the extent to which tax deferral and other... View Details
- December 2012 (Revised April 2025)
- Case
AmTran Technology Ltd.
By: Willy Shih, Jyun-Cheng Wang and Karen E. Robinson
As an original design manufacturer (ODM) of television sets and leading supplier to Vizio, a market leader in the U.S. for LCD flat panel TVs, AmTran Technology Ltd. uses what founder Alpha Wu describes as a "WE" model in which western companies perform sales,... View Details
Keywords: Modularity; Technology Transitions; Analog; Digital; Television; TV; Flat-panel; ATSC; NTSC; Video; Global Strategy; Innovation and Management; Innovation Leadership; Innovation Strategy; Technological Innovation; Growth and Development Strategy; Product Development; Product Design; Supply Chain; Business Strategy; Competitive Strategy; Technology Adoption; Digital Platforms; Electronics Industry; Taiwan; United States; Japan
- October 2012
- Article
Securitization without Adverse Selection: The Case of CLOs
By: Effi Benmelech, Jennifer Dlugosz and Victoria Ivashina
In this paper, we investigate whether securitization was associated with risky lending in the corporate loan market by examining the performance of individual loans held by CLOs. We employ two different datasets that identify loan holdings for a large set of CLOs and... View Details
- 2012
- Working Paper
What Do Managers Do? Exploring Persistent Performance Differences among Seemingly Similar Enterprises
By: Robert Gibbons and Rebecca Henderson
Social networks and social groups have both been seen as important to discouraging malfeasance and supporting the global pro-social norms that underlie social order, but have typically been treated either as pure substitutes or as having completely independent effects.... View Details
- April 2012
- Case
Pret A Manger
By: Frances X. Frei, Rick Goldberg and Stephanie van Sice
Pret A Manger, a London-based chain of sandwich shops, was known for its fast, genuine service and pre-packaged sandwiches prepared on-site daily. Instructed by its board to grow at 15 percent per year, Pret considered opening "twin" shops in locations too small to... View Details
Keywords: Customer Service Excellence; Growth Planning And Management; Employee Performance Management; Information Management; Production Planning; Employee Attitude Development And Empowerment; Employee Retention; Leadership Development And Career Planning; Service Delivery; Growth and Development Strategy; Business Model; Innovation and Invention; Employees; Performance; London
- April 2012
- Article
Beyond Individual Creativity: The Superadditive Benefits of Multicultural Experience for Collective Creativity in Culturally Diverse Teams
By: Carmit Tadmor, Patricia Satterstrom, Sujin Jang and Jeffrey Polzer
Although recent research has consistently demonstrated the benefits of multicultural experience for individual-level creativity, its potential advantages for collective creativity in culturally diverse teams have yet to be explored. We predicted that multicultural... View Details
- Article
The Stock Selection and Performance of Buy-Side Analysts
We examine the selection and performance of stocks recommended by analysts at a large investment firm relative to those of sell-side analysts during the period mid-1997 and 2004. The buy-side firm's analysts issued less optimistic recommendations for stocks with larger... View Details
- January 2012
- Article
Paying to Be Nice: Consistency and Costly Prosocial Behavior
By: Ayelet Gneezy, Alex Imas, Amber Brown, Leif D. Nelson and Michael I. Norton
Building on previous research in economics and psychology, we propose that the costliness of initial prosocial behavior positively influences whether that behavior leads to consistent future behaviors. We suggest that costly prosocial behaviors serve as a signal of... View Details
- December 2011
- Article
CEO and Board Chair Roles: To Split or Not to Split?
By: Aiyesha Dey, Ellen Engel and Xiaohui Liu
We examine the performance and compensation implications of firms' decisions to combine the roles of CEO and board chairman (duality). We document that firms that split the CEO and chairman positions due to investor pressure have significantly lower announcement... View Details
- Article
The Learning Effects of Monitoring
By: Dennis Campbell, Marc Epstein and F. Asis Martinez-Jerez
This paper investigates the relationship between monitoring, decision making, and learning among lower-level employees. We exploit a field-research setting in which business units vary in the "tightness" with which they monitor employee decisions. We find that tighter... View Details
- September 2011 (Revised July 2012)
- Case
Building Watson: Not So Elementary, My Dear!
By: Willy Shih
This case is set inside IBM Research's efforts to build a computer that can successfully take on human challengers playing the game show Jeopardy! It opens with the machine named Watson offering the incorrect answer "Toronto" to a seemingly simple question during the... View Details
- September 2011
- Article
On Testing Business Models
By: D. Huelsbeck, K. Merchant and Tatiana Sandino
This study explored management decisions regarding formal empirical testing of business models. It documented a test of one company's business model under seemingly favorable conditions for such a test – a successful single product firm following a consistent strategy... View Details
- July – August 2011
- Article
What Factors Drive Analyst Forecasts?
A firm's competitive environment, its strategic choices, and its internal capabilities are considered important determinants of its future performance. Yet there is little evidence on whether analysts' forecasts of firm performance actually reflect any of these factors... View Details
- 2011
- Article
Scalable Detection of Anomalous Patterns With Connectivity Constraints
By: Skyler Speakman, Edward McFowland III and Daniel B. Neill
We present GraphScan, a novel method for detecting arbitrarily shaped connected clusters in graph or network data. Given a graph structure, data observed at each node, and a score function defining the anomalousness of a set of nodes, GraphScan can efficiently and... View Details
- March 2011
- Article
What Do Dividends Tell Us About Earnings Quality
By: Douglas Skinner and Eugene F. Soltes
Over the past 30 years, there have been significant changes in the distribution of earnings (cross-sectional variation has increased, with increasing left skewness) as well as in corporate payout policy, with many fewer firms paying dividends and the emergence of stock... View Details
Keywords: Distribution; Business Earnings; Change; Policy; Stocks; Investment Return; Performance Consistency; Quality
- 2011
- Working Paper
What Do CEOs Do?
By: Oriana Bandiera, Luigi Guiso, Andrea Prat and Raffaella Sadun
We develop a methodology to collect and analyze data on CEOs' time use. The idea-sketched out in a simple theoretical set-up-is that CEO time is a scarce resource and its allocation can help us identify the firm's priorities as well as the presence of governance... View Details
- November 2010
- Article
Stress-Test Your Strategy: The 7 Questions to Ask
By: Robert Simons
An economic downturn can quickly expose the shortcomings of your business strategy. But can you identify its weak points in good times as well? And can you focus on those weak points that really matter? I identify seven questions all executives should ask in order to... View Details
- April 2010
- Course Overview Note
Managing Human Capital
By: Boris Groysberg
Managing Human Capital, a second-year elective course at Harvard Business School, seeks to create business leaders who understand human resources practices essential to firm performance and who think strategically about managing their own careers. This Managing Human... View Details
- April 2010
- Article
Performance Persistence in Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital
This paper presents evidence of performance persistence in entrepreneurship. We show that entrepreneurs with a track record of success are much more likely to succeed than first-time entrepreneurs and those who have previously failed. In particular, they exhibit... View Details