Publications
Publications
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(825)
- Faculty Publications (251)
- August 2016 (Revised January 2017)
- Case
Accounting for the iPhone Upgrade Program (A)
By: Jonas Heese, Krishna G. Palepu, H. David Sherman and Monica Baraldi
On September 9, 2015, Apple Inc. announced the “iPhone Upgrade Program,” a new way to purchase iPhone models 6s and 6s Plus in Apple’s retail stores throughout the U.S. Next to the strategic implications of the Upgrade Program, financial analysts tried to understand... View Details
- March 22, 2016
- Article
The Globalization of Corporate Environmental Disclosure: Accountability or Greenwashing?
By: Christopher Marquis, Michael W. Toffel and Yanhua Zhou
This article is a layman summary of "Scrutiny, Norms, and Selective Disclosure: A Global Study of Greenwashing," published in Organization Science 27, no. 2 (March–April 2016): 483–504. View Details
- March 2016 (Revised April 2019)
- Technical Note
ESG Metrics: Reshaping Capitalism?
By: George Serafeim
In the past twenty-five years, the world had seen an exponential growth in the number of companies reporting environmental, social and governance (ESG) data. Investor interest in ESG data also grew rapidly. A growing belief that increasing levels of social inequality... View Details
Keywords: Capitalism; Sustainability; Accountability; Corporate Social Responsibility; Responsibilities To Society; Environment; Social Impact Investment; ESG; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Environmental Sustainability; Measurement and Metrics; Integrated Corporate Reporting; Corporate Accountability; Accounting; Economic Systems
- March 2016
- Article
An Analysis of Firms' Self-reported Anticorruption Efforts
By: Paul M. Healy and George Serafeim
We use Transparency International's ratings of self-reported anticorruption efforts for 480 corporations to analyze factors underlying the ratings. Our tests examine whether these forms of disclosure reflect firms' real efforts to combat corruption or are cheap talk.... View Details
- March–April 2016
- Article
Scrutiny, Norms, and Selective Disclosure: A Global Study of Greenwashing
By: Christopher Marquis, Michael W. Toffel and Yanhua Zhou
Under increased pressure to report environmental impacts, some firms selectively disclose relatively benign impacts, creating an impression of transparency while masking their true performance. We identify key company- and country-level factors that limit firms' use of... View Details
- January 26, 2016
- Article
Hiding Personal Information Reveals the Worst
By: Leslie K. John, Kate Barasz and Michael I. Norton
Seven experiments explore people's decisions to share or withhold personal information and the wisdom of such decisions. When people choose not to reveal information—to be "hiders"—they are judged negatively by others (experiment 1). These negative judgments emerge... View Details
- September 2015
- Article
Speaking of the Short-Term: Disclosure Horizon and Managerial Myopia
By: Francois Brochet, Maria Loumioti and George Serafeim
We study conference calls as a voluntary disclosure channel and create a proxy for the time horizon that senior executives emphasize in their communications. We find that our measure of disclosure time horizon is associated with capital market pressures and executives'... View Details
- May 2015
- Article
Admitting Mistakes: Home Country Effect on the Reliability of Restatement Reporting
By: Suraj Srinivasan, Aida Sijamic Wahid and Gwen Yu
We study the frequency of restatements by foreign firms listed on U.S. exchanges. We find that the restatement rate of U.S. listed foreign firms is significantly lower than that of comparable U.S. firms and that the difference depends on the firm's home country... View Details
- May 2015
- Article
What Are We Meeting For? The Consequences of Private Meetings with Investors
By: David H. Solomon and Eugene F. Soltes
Regulation Fair Disclosure was passed in 2000 in response to the concern that certain investors were gaining selective access to privileged firm information. In spite of the passage of this regulation, some investors continue to meet privately with executives. Using a... View Details
- April 2015
- Case
Accor: Designing an Asset-Right Business and Disclosure Strategy
By: Mozaffar Khan and George Serafeim
Sebastien Bazin was now in charge of Accor, the world's largest French hotelier, a CAC 40 company with 3,600 hotels in 92 countries and a market cap of €10 billion. Previously as the European head of Colony Capital, one of the largest private equity groups and the... View Details
- March 2015
- Case
Statoil: Transparency on Payments to Governments
By: George Serafeim
The Statoil case describes the challenge of increasing transparency, in extractive industries, around host county government payments. The case describes Statoil's reasoning behind voluntarily disclosing host country government payments, and the events that led to this... View Details
Keywords: Corruption; Disclosure; Disclosure Strategy; Regulation; Industry Self-regulation; Corporate Governance; Corporate Accountability; Bribery; Sustainability; Corporate Social Responsibility; Government Legislation; Cost vs Benefits; Corporate Disclosure; Mining; Mining Industry; United States
- February 2015
- Article
'Open' Disclosure of Innovations, Incentives and Follow-on Reuse: Theory on Processes of Cumulative Innovation and a Field Experiment in Computational Biology
By: Kevin J. Boudreau and Karim R. Lakhani
Most of society's innovation systems―academic science, the patent system, open source, etc.―are "open" in the sense that they are designed to facilitate knowledge disclosure among innovators. An essential difference across innovation systems is whether disclosure is of... View Details
- January 2015
- Article
Competing with Privacy
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Andres Hervas-Drane
We analyze the implications of consumer privacy for competition in the marketplace. We consider a market where firms set prices and disclosure levels for consumer information, and consumers observe both before deciding which firm to patronize and how much information... View Details
- November 2014
- Article
The Impact of Corporate Sustainability on Organizational Processes and Performance
By: Robert G. Eccles, Ioannis Ioannou and George Serafeim
We investigate the effect of corporate sustainability on organizational processes and performance. Using a matched sample of 180 U.S. companies, we find that corporations that voluntarily adopted sustainability policies by 1993—termed as High Sustainability... View Details
Keywords: Sustainability; Sustainability Management; Sustainability Research; Sustainability Reporting; Sustainability Targets; Corporate Social Responsibility; Corporate Accountability; Reporting; Corporate Governance; Investor Clientele; Investor Communication; Stock Market; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Environmental Sustainability; Performance; United States
- October 2014 (Revised March 2015)
- Case
Integrated Reporting at Aegon
By: Robert G. Eccles, George Serafeim, Sydney Ribot and Michael Krzus
In 2011, Aegon adopted integrated reporting—a corporate reporting approach that sought to present company performance in a holistic light by considering medium- to long-term issues, stakeholder opinions, and the relationship between material financial and nonfinancial... View Details
- May 2014
- Article
Incorporating Field Data into Archival Research
By: Eugene F. Soltes
I explore the use of field data in conjunction with archival evidence by examining Iliev, Miller, and Roth's (2014) analysis of an amendment to the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. This regulatory amendment allowed depositary banks to cross-list firms without the... View Details
- Article
Corporate Social Responsibility and Access to Finance
By: Beiting Cheng, Ioannis Ioannou and George Serafeim
In this paper, we investigate whether superior performance on corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies leads to better access to finance. We hypothesize that better access to finance can be attributed to a) reduced agency costs due to enhanced stakeholder... View Details
- January 2014
- Teaching Note
Mandatory Environmental, Social, and Governance Disclosures in the European Union
By: George Serafeim
- January 2014 (Revised January 2014)
- Case
Showdown at Cracker Barrel
By: Suraj Srinivasan and Tim Gray
In the fall of 2011, activist investor, Sardar Biglari, has acquired nearly 10% ownership in the Cracker Barrel restaurant chain. He believes that the board and senior management have failed and the company has underperformed relative to its peers. When he is denied a... View Details
Keywords: Boards; Activist Investors; Proxy Battles; Shareholder Activism; Peer Firm; Ratio Analysis; Financial Accounting; Financial Analysis; Board Of Directors; Boards Of Directors; Financial Intermediaries; Financial Analysts; CEO Turnover; New CEO; Peer Groups; Hedge Fund; Hedge Funds; Proxy Contest; Proxy Fight; Proxy Advisor; Proxy Battle; Financial Statement Analysis; Financial Strategy; Corporate Governance; Corporate Disclosure; Governing and Advisory Boards; Competition; Valuation; Business Strategy; Value Creation; Business and Shareholder Relations; Financial Reporting; Financial Statements; Retail Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; United States
- Winter 2013
- Article
Fear of Rejection? Tiered Certification and Transparency
By: Emmanuel Farhi, Josh Lerner and Jean Tirole
The sub-prime crisis has shone a harsh spotlight on the practices of securities underwriters, which provided too many complex securities that proved to ultimately have little value. This uproar calls attention to the fact that the literature on intermediaries has... View Details