Publications

Educators

April 2020
Teaching Note

Oaktree: Pierre Foods Investment

By: Victoria Ivashina, Michael Harmon and Terrence Shu

Teaching Note for HBS No. 219-018. This case is a setting to discuss “loan to own” investment strategy that is often pursued by distressed investors. The aftermath of the 2007 financial crisis left many companies with poor liquidity and limited ability to obtain... View Details

Keywords: Distress Investing; Investment; Debt Securities; Strategy; Restructuring

May 2017
Teaching Note

Partners Group: Ain't No Mountain High Enough

By: Nori Gerardo Lietz

Partners Group (PG), a Swiss-based PE manager, initiated a series of strategic shifts and evolved from a predominately fund-of-funds manager into a large, multi-asset class PE firm focused on direct investments. PG was the first PE firm to go public in 2006. A number... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Entrepreneurship; Management Practices and Processes; Private Equity

2014
Working Paper

Making the Numbers? 'Short Termism' & the Puzzle of Only Occasional Disaster

By: Hazhir Rahmandad, Nelson P. Repenning and Rebecca Henderson

Much recent work in strategy and popular discussion suggests that an excessive focus on "managing the numbers"―delivering quarterly earnings at the expense of longer term investments―makes it difficult for firms to make the investments necessary to build competitive... View Details

Keywords: Earnings Management; Competitive Advantage

August 2013
Article

Corporate Ownership Structure and the Choice Between Bank Debt and Public Debt

By: Chen Lin, Yue Ma, Paul Malatesta and Yuhai Xuan

This paper examines the relation between a borrowing firm's ownership structure and its choice of debt source using a novel, hand-collected data set on corporate ownership, control, and debt structures for 9,831 firms in 20 countries from 2001 to 2010. We find that the... View Details

Keywords: Governance; Ownership; Borrowing and Debt; Corporate Finance

Find at Harvard

2010
Working Paper

Making the Numbers? 'Short Termism' and the Puzzle of Only Occasional Disaster

By: Nelson P. Repenning and Rebecca Henderson

Much recent work in strategy and popular discussion suggests that an excessive focus on "managing the numbers"—delivering quarterly earnings at the expense of longer-term investments—makes it difficult for firms to make the investments necessary to build competitive... View Details

Keywords: Investment; Performance Improvement; Competitive Advantage; Earnings Management; Management Practices and Processes; Revenue; Quality; Competency and Skills; Motivation and Incentives; Auto Industry; United States

16 Jan 2013
Research & Ideas

The Messy Link Between Slave Owners and Modern Management

the United States, Rosenthal stumbled across an unexpected source of innovation. Rosenthal, a Harvard-Newcomen Fellow in business history at Harvard Business School, found that southern plantation owners kept complex and meticulous... View Details

Keywords: by Katie Johnston

Research Summary

Overview

Having grown up in a developing country, Professor Sikochi’s research focus is driven by a desire to understand how capital flows to firms and entrepreneurs with the ultimate goal to help build capital markets in the developing economies. To this end, he conducts... View Details

Web

Curriculum - Business & Environment

meat sector. Compared to intensive agricultural practices, Aleph's cultured (or lab-grown) meat solution held the promise of considerably reducing greenhouse gas emissions, as well as the use of land and water, while providing a new View Details

Profile

Merve Ciplak

small talk and get right to it, building off of conversations that may have started five months ago but remain relevant now.” The diversity Merve values has an impact on her ambitions as well. “I don’t feel pressured to fulfill one kind of path,” she says. “Instead,... View Details

07 Nov 2023
News

Love and Money

ways around spending or saving. And that's very helpful in any kind of relationship, especially in families. So I guess that's the way I would start to think about that. Money is a source of great conflict in relationships of all kinds.... View Details

19 Dec 2023
Research & Ideas

15 Podcast Episodes That Grabbed Listeners in 2023

Global Sustainability Personal at Bühler The global food supply chain is a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental challenges. Many companies avoid these issues or make token efforts to reduce their impact... View Details

Keywords: by Danielle Kost

18 Apr 2023
Research & Ideas

What Happens When Banks Ditch Coal: The Impact Is 'More Than Anyone Thought'

Consumers who are eager to mitigate climate change can take many actions, such as reducing the number of airline flights they take or installing solar panels on their homes. But the planet is in a race against time, and individual action alone won’t help most countries... View Details

Keywords: by Barbara DeLollis; Financial Services; Mining

2014
Working Paper

The Organizational and Geographic Drivers of Absorptive Capacity: An Empirical Analysis of Pharmaceutical R&D Laboratories

By: Francesca Lazzeri and Gary P. Pisano

Scholars and practitioners alike now recognize that a firm's capacity to assimilate and use know-how from external sources—what Cohen and Levinthal (1990) called "absorptive capacity"—plays a central role in innovation performance. In recent years, a common strategy... View Details

Keywords: Geographic Location; Industry Clusters; Knowledge Acquisition; Pharmaceutical Industry; San Francisco; San Diego; Massachusetts

SSRN

Web

Nonprofit Board Service - Alumni

in the process of sourcing and succeeding in this meaningful work. Starting or Increasing Your Board Role Introduction to the Role of a Nonprofit Board Member Board Source: Leading resource to inspiring board leadership and empower boards... View Details

18 Jun 2024
Research & Ideas

Industrial Decarbonization: Confronting the Hard Challenges of Cement

Cities like Cairo; Chongqing, China; Delhi; and Kinshasa, Congo are experiencing population explosions accompanied by unprecedented demand for homes, offices, factories, and infrastructure. In the United States, the Biden Administration’s policy-driven infrastructure... View Details

Keywords: by by Janelle Conaway; Green Technology; Energy; Industrial Products; Manufacturing

14 Dec 2010
Working Paper Summaries

Regulating for Legitimacy: Consumer Credit Access in France and America

Keywords: by Gunnar Trumbull

Research Summary

Competitive Strategy

By: Michael E. Porter

Porter is engaged in a major new body of work on the theoretical foundations of competitive positioning and the underpinnings of sustainable competitive advantage. This research highlights the distinction between positioning and operational effectiveness; the... View Details

May 2024
Background Note

Pricing Strategy and Channels of Distribution: Where Value Delivery and Value Capture Intersect

By: Elie Ofek

Channels of distribution are a critical component of a firm’s go-to-market strategy. A company may elect to sell its products directly to customers (DTC) without the assistance of any intermediaries or, alternatively, it may seek several channel partners to help it... View Details

Keywords: Price; Distribution Channels; Business Strategy; Markets

Educators

2023
Article

Benchmarking Large Language Models on CMExam—A Comprehensive Chinese Medical Exam Dataset

By: Junling Liu, Peilin Zhou, Yining Hua, Dading Chong, Zhongyu Tian, Andrew Liu, Helin Wang, Chenyu You, Zhenhua Guo, Lei Zhu and Michael Lingzhi Li

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have transformed the field of question answering (QA). However, evaluating LLMs in the medical field is challenging due to the lack of standardized and comprehensive datasets. To address this gap, we introduce CMExam,... View Details

Keywords: Large Language Model; AI and Machine Learning; Analytics and Data Science; Health Industry