Publications
Publications
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(7,643)
- Faculty Publications (1,652)
- January 2008
- Background Note
Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs)
By: Joshua Coval and Erik Stafford
This lesson integrated Merton's (1974) contingent claims model of debt and equity claims with the CAPM, which allows us to examine the risks and pricing of credit portfolios and the derivative claims issued against them. In particular, this model is used to make... View Details
- January 2008
- Background Note
Valuing Risky Debt
By: Joshua Coval and Erik Stafford
This lesson develops the classical structural approach to pricing and hedging credit risk: Merton's (1974) contingent claims model of debt and equity claims. This model is used to make investment and risk management decisions in an over-the-counter (OTC) market for... View Details
Keywords: Borrowing and Debt; Credit; Investment; Price; Risk Management; Mathematical Methods; Valuation
- January 2008
- Article
Innovation Killers: How Financial Tools Destroy Your Capacity to Do New Things
By: Clayton M. Christensen, Stephen P. Kaufman and Willy C. Shih
Most companies aren't half as innovative as their senior executives want them to be (or as their marketing claims suggest they are). What's stifling innovation? There are plenty of usual suspects, but the authors finger three financial tools as key accomplices.... View Details
- 2008
- Chapter
Matching and Market Design
By: Muriel Niederle, Alvin E. Roth and Tayfun Sonmez
Matching is the part of economics concerned with who transacts with whom and how. Models of matching, starting with the Gale-Shapley deferred acceptance algorithm, have been particularly useful in studying labour markets and in helping design clearinghouses to fix... View Details
- January 2008
- Article
Nonemployment Stigma as Rational Herding: A Field Experiment
Long spells of unemployment are known to reduce the likelihood of re-employment, but it is difficult to discern the reasons for this observation. Using an experimental method that controls for search intensity and possible discouragement of job applicants, I document... View Details
- 2008
- Simulation
Pricing Simulation: Universal Car Rental
This web-based simulation presents an engaging context in which students develop their knowledge of pricing by managing a rental car operation (Universal) in Florida and improve regional performance by developing a pricing strategy. The simulation involves three... View Details
Keywords: Competition; Consumer Behavior; Price; Profit; Renting or Rental; Auto Industry; Service Industry; Miami; Orlando; Tampa
- January 2008
- Article
The Five Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy
This article includes a one-page preview that quickly summarizes the key ideas and provides an overview of how the concepts work in practice along with suggestions for further reading. In 1979, a young associate professor at Harvard Business School published his first... View Details
- December 2007 (Revised March 2013)
- Case
Queensland Sugar Limited
By: David E. Bell and Mary L. Shelman
Until industry deregulation in 2006, Queensland Sugar ran Australia's single desk marketing system for raw sugar exports. Since deregulation, eight of the ten Queensland sugar millers have elected to continue collective marketing through QSL. However, several millers... View Details
- December 2007 (Revised January 2008)
- Background Note
Evaluating M&A Deals-Announcement Effects, Risk Arbitrage and Event Risk
The announcement of merger or acquisition conveys new information to the capital markets. This note describes how the stock prices of a Buyer and Target behave after the announcement of a deal. First, for an all-stock deal that is certain to go through, the note... View Details
- 2007
- Working Paper
Competition in Modular Clusters
By: Carliss Y. Baldwin and C. Jason Woodard
The last twenty years have witnessed the rise of disaggregated "clusters," "networks," or "ecosystems" of firms. In these clusters the activities of R&D, product design, production, distribution, and system integration may be split up among hundreds or even thousands... View Details
- November 2007
- Case
The 1995 Release of the Institutional Investor Research Report: The Impact of New Information
By: Boris Groysberg, Nitin Nohria and Derek Haas
In 1995, Institutional Investor magazine began selling a complete ranking of the best equity research analysts. This report allowed research firms to assess the relative quality of each analyst across the industry, and this enabled firms to know nearly as much about... View Details
- November 2007
- Background Note
Asset Allocation I
By: Joshua D. Coval, Erik Stafford, Rodrigo Osmo, John Jernigan, Zack Page and Paulo Passoni
The goal of these simulations is to understand the mathematics of mean-variance optimization and the equilibrium pricing of risk if all investors use this rule with common information sets. Simulation A focuses on five to 10 years of monthly sector returns that are... View Details
- November 2007 (Revised March 2018)
- Case
Maidenform Bras
By: Tom Nicholas
Uses Ida Rosenthal's entrepreneurship in brassieres to explore how economic, social, and demographic changes reshaped gender and business enterprises in early- to mid-20th century America. It shows the importance of timing and geography to Rosenthal's new firm in New... View Details
- November 2007
- Case
AXA MONY
By: Lucy White and Andre F. Perold
AXA's friendly bid for MONY is contested by activist hedge funds suspicious of management's generous change in control contracts. Votes trade after the record date. AXA financed the bid using an unusual conditionally convertible bond which may have affected incentives... View Details
- November 2007
- Article
A Model of Consumer Learning for Service Quality and Usage
By: Raghuram Iyengar, Asim Ansari and Sunil Gupta
In many services, e.g., the wireless service industry, consumers choose a service plan based on their expected consumption. In such situations, consumers experience two forms of uncertainty. First, consumers may be uncertain about the quality of their service provider... View Details
- November – December 2007
- Article
Fundamentally Flawed Indexing
By: Andre F. Perold
A new theory of finance is being advanced as providing definitive proof that holding stocks in proportion to their market capitalizations is an inferior investment strategy. The claim is that capitalization weighting necessarily invests more in overvalued stocks and... View Details
- 2007
- Working Paper
The 'Fees → Savings' Link, or Purchasing Fifty Pounds of Pasta
By: Michael I. Norton and Leonard Lee
Many consumers have had the experience of entering discount membership clubs to make a few purchases, only to leave with enough pasta to outlast a nuclear winter. We suggest that the presence of membership fees can lead consumers to infer a "fees → savings" link,... View Details
- October 2007 (Revised March 2008)
- Case
Dove: Evolution of a Brand
By: John A. Deighton
Examines the evolution of Dove from functional brand to a brand with a point of view after Unilever designated it as a masterbrand, and expanded its portfolio to cover entries into a number of sectors beyond the original bath soap category. The development causes the... View Details
- October 2007 (Revised April 2009)
- Case
TH!NK: The Norwegian Electric Car Company
By: Joseph B. Lassiter III and David Kiron
On August 1, 2007, 61-year-old Jan-Olaf Willums' plane was flying along the Greenland coastline on his way back to Norway after intense discussions with several prominent U.S. venture capital investors, among them Kleiner Perkins and Rockport Capital Partners, about... View Details
- 2007
- Book
An Experiment in Fair Value Accounting? The State of the Art in Research and Thought Leadership on Accounting for Life Assurance in the UK and Continental Europe
By: Joanne G Horton, Richard H. Macve and George Serafeim
"Fair value" is currently the central topic of debate in the development of accounting standards. While it has now been defined to mean an exit price in US GAAP, the IASB is still considering its own definition, and some commentators are arguing for versions of entry... View Details