Publications

01 Mar 2010
Op-Ed

A Golden Opportunity for Ford and GM

recalled almost 9 million vehicles—more than the entire number it sold the past three years. The irony is that Toyota gained significant market share in the past decade at the expense of its American competitors by offering superior... View Details

Keywords: by Bill George; Auto

11 Apr 2012
Research & Ideas

The High Risks of Short-Term Management

profits (or worse, the short-term benefits come at the expense of long-term value creation). This phenomenon does not come out of the blue, but is attributable to fundamental frictions in capital markets... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Financial Services

April 2015 (Revised April 2015)
Case

Yale University Investments Office: February 2015

By: Josh Lerner

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, real estate—given the impact of the recent market turmoil. The case explores the risks... View Details

Keywords: Asset Management; Resource Allocation; Investment; Venture Capital; Investment Funds; Property; Private Equity

03 Jun 2013
Research & Ideas

The Power of Rituals in Life, Death, and Business

follow-up experiment showed that participants in the ritual experience actually thought the chocolate bar was worth more money than those in the nonritual group—thus showing the retail marketing potential for food-related rituals. The... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

August 1996
Case

ThermoLase

By: William A. Sahlman and Andrew S. Janower

John Hansen, CEO of ThermoLase, must develop a plan of action to exploit the company's new development-stage revolutionary hair removal technology with negligible revenues and a $500 million market capitalization. This nascent public Thermo Electron spin out company... View Details

Keywords: Business or Company Management; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Venture Capital; Business Strategy; Growth and Development Strategy; Business Plan; Beauty and Cosmetics Industry

September 2004 (Revised December 2004)
Case

Bank Leu's Prima Cat Bond Fund

In 2001, Bank Leu, a Swiss private bank, is considering creating the world's first public fund for catastrophe bonds. Cat bonds are securities whose payments depend on the probability of a catastrophe occurring, such as an earthquake or hurricane. Cat bonds are... View Details

Keywords: Risk Management; Bonds; Natural Disasters; Insurance; Capital Markets; Banks and Banking; Banking Industry; Insurance Industry; Switzerland

September 2011
Supplement

Expansion at Narayana Hrudayalaya

By: Tarun Khanna and Tanya Bijlani

Narayana Hrudayalaya has expanded into a multi-specialty health city in Bangalore, with a 25-acre campus that offers complex tertiary care procedures ranging from orthopedics to cancer care. In 2008, NH raised private equity from JP Morgan and Pinebridge Investments to... View Details

Keywords: Investment; Price; Health Care and Treatment; Emerging Markets; Social Enterprise; Expansion; Health Industry; Bangalore; Cayman Islands; Miami

22 Aug 2005
Research & Ideas

Restoring a Global Economy, 1950–1980

movements began to be slowly dismantled. The advent of floating exchange rates permitted a huge explosion in international financial markets from the 1970s, but these capital flows were different than before... View Details

Keywords: by Geoffrey Jones

2010
Working Paper

Crashes and Collateralized Lending

By: Jakub W. Jurek and Erik Stafford

This paper develops a parsimonious static model for characterizing financing terms in collateralized lending markets. We characterize the systematic risk exposures for a variety of securities and develop a simple indifference-pricing framework to value the systematic... View Details

Keywords: Financial Crisis; Borrowing and Debt; Cost of Capital; Credit; Financing and Loans; Interest Rates; Investment; Framework; Risk and Uncertainty; Financial Services Industry

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2017
Chapter

Multinational Activity in Emerging Markets: How and When Does Foreign Direct Investment Promote Growth?

By: Laura Alfaro

Among the prominent economic trends in recent decades is the exponential increase in flows of goods and capital driven by technological progress and a falling number of restrictions. A key driver of this phenomenon has been the cross-border production, foreign... View Details

Keywords: Multinational Activity; Growth; Spillovers; Complementarities; Foreign Direct Investment; Emerging Markets; Growth and Development; Multinational Firms and Management

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03 Mar 2008
First Look

First Look: March 4, 2008

avoidance activities advance shareholder interests? This paper tests alternative theories of corporate tax avoidance that yield distinct predictions on the valuation of corporate tax avoidance. Unexplained differences between income reported to View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

16 Jun 2021
HBS Case

Cruising in Crisis: How Carnival Is Riding Out the COVID-19 Storm

unexpected economic blow, Gilson says. “There’s something that’s very distinctive about the economic shock we’ve just gone through,” he says. “It’s remarkable how much cash public companies have been able to raise in the capital View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Travel

11 Apr 2023
Research & Ideas

Is Amazon a Retailer, a Tech Firm, or a Media Company? How AI Can Help Investors Decide

companies. Portfolio managers and analysts have been using the Global Industry Classification Standard, or GICS—a taxonomy of 11 sectors, 25 industry groups, and additional subsets—to compare stocks since 1999. Periodically, Standard & Poor’s and Morgan Stanley... View Details

Keywords: by Danielle Kost; Consumer Products; Real Estate; Financial Services; Retail

August 2006
Article

Predicting Returns with Managerial Decision Variables: Is There a Small-Sample Bias?

By: Malcolm Baker, Ryan Taliaferro and Jeffrey Wurgler

Many studies find that aggregate managerial decision variables, such as aggregate equity issuance, predict stock or bond market returns. Recent research argues that these findings may be driven by an aggregate time-series version of Schultz's (2003, Journal of Finance... View Details

Keywords: Prejudice and Bias; Fairness; Managerial Roles; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Equity; Bonds; Financial Markets; Investment; Capital Markets; Borrowing and Debt; Investment Return

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December 2019
Supplement

The Business of Pain: Johnson & Johnson and the Promise of Opioids (B)

By: Erik Snowberg, Trevor Fetter and Amy W. Schulman

This case is designed to provide an engrossing overview of stakeholder capitalism through a vigorous discussion of the conflicts that can arise when trying to serve multiple stakeholders. In 2007, Johnson & Johnson’s (J&J) subsidiary Janssen has to decide whether or... View Details

Keywords: Opioids; Addiction; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Product Launch; Ethics; Society; Pharmaceutical Industry

09 Feb 2010
First Look

First Look: Feb. 9

just as global capital markets are imploding in the fall of 2008. NovoCure, Ltd., has developed an electrical-field-based therapy, called Tumor Treating fields, for the treatment of cancerous tumors. The... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

28 Jan 2008
Research & Ideas

Billions of Entrepreneurs in China and India

in which the countries are different. These dimensions pervade all aspects of societal existence, whether that means raising capital to start a new business, the nature of markets, copyrights, the media, movies, and religion, as well as... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

12 Sep 2023
What Do You Think?

Who Gets the Loudest Voice in DEI Decisions?

social, and governance issues at the heart of so-called “stakeholder capitalism.” Corporations that become too visible in support of stakeholder capitalism run the risk of losing public investors, such as pension funds in states in which... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

May 2020
Case

Trust Merchant Bank

By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell, Pippa Tubman Armerding, Dilyana Karadzhova Botha and Salim Dewji

Trust Merchant Bank (TMB), a leading bank in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), needs to decide whether to enter the soon-to-be-liberalized insurance industry. Since its founding in 2004, TMB has played a pivotal role in reshaping the DRC banking landscape by... View Details

Keywords: Retail Banking; Financial Services; Financial Inclusion; Turnaround; Fintech; Banks and Banking; Financial Condition; Insurance; Corporate Strategy; Expansion; Business Model; Family Business; Entrepreneurship; Information Technology; Monopoly; Banking Industry; Insurance Industry; Africa; Congo, Democratic Republic of the