Publications

March 2006 (Revised November 2006)
Case

China: To Float or Not To Float? (D)- Bank of America's Strategic Investment in China Construction Bank

By: Laura Alfaro, Rafael M. Di Tella and Ingrid Vogel

With its $3 billion investment in Chinese state bank China Construction Bank, Bank of America--the second U.S. bank behind Citigroup in terms of assets and market capitalization--was one of several foreign banks directly participating in China's banking sector reform.... View Details

Keywords: Currency Exchange Rate; Banks and Banking; Foreign Direct Investment; International Relations; Banking Industry; China; United States

2019
Working Paper

Decarbonization Factors

By: Alex Cheema-Fox, Bridget LaPerla, George Serafeim, David Turkington and Hui (Stacie) Wang

In the face of accelerating climate change, investors are making capital allocations seeking to decarbonize portfolios by reducing the carbon emissions of their holdings. To understand the performance of portfolio decarbonization strategies and investor behavior... View Details

Keywords: ESG; Investment Management; Factor Investing; Investor Behavior; Climate Change; Environmental Sustainability; Investment; Management

Article

Decarbonization Factors

By: Alex Cheema-Fox, Bridget LaPerla, George Serafeim, David Turkington and Hui (Stacie) Wang

In the face of accelerating climate change, investors are making capital allocations seeking to decarbonize portfolios by reducing the carbon emissions of their holdings. To understand the performance of portfolio decarbonization strategies and investor behavior... View Details

Keywords: ESG; Investment Management; Factor Investing; Investor Behavior; Climate Change; Environmental Sustainability; Investment; Management

June 2022
Case

PFA Pensions: The Climate Plus Product

By: Daniel Green, Victoria Ivashina and Alys Ferragamo

The case explores whether alternative investments play a unique role in achieving low carbon dioxide emissions at the portfolio level. This case is set in April of 2020 and follows Kasper Ahrndt Lorenzen, Chief Investment Officer, and Peter Tind Larsen, Head of... View Details

Keywords: Carbon Emissions; Carbon Footprint; Alternative Assets; Alternative Investment Vehicles; Pension Fund Investing; Private Equity; Renewable Energy; Investment Portfolio; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Environmental Sustainability; Denmark

2021
Working Paper

The Value of Intermediation in the Stock Market

By: Marco Di Maggio, Mark Egan and Francesco Franzoni

We estimate a structural model of broker choice to quantitatively decompose the value that institutional investors attach to broker services. Studying over 300 million institutional equity trades, we find that investors are sensitive to both explicit and implicit... View Details

Keywords: Financial Intermediation; Institutional Investors; Research Analysts; Broker Networks; Equity Trading; Institutional Investing; Financial Services Industry

Spring 2016
Article

Risk Neglect in Equity Markets

By: Malcolm Baker

The link between measures of risk and return within the equity market has been very weak over the past 47 years: in the United States, returns on high-risk stocks have cumulatively fallen short of the returns on low-risk stocks, during a period when the equity market... View Details

Keywords: Asset Allocation; Equity Investment; Behavioral Finance; Private Equity

Article

How Institutional Investors Frame Their Losses: Evidence on Dynamic Loss Aversion from Currency Portfolios

By: Kenneth A. Froot, John Arabadjis, Sonya Cates and Stephen Lawrence

Currency investors exhibit a tendency to cut risk by pairing both longs and shorts following losses and a weaker tendency to add risk following gains. By differentiating between position level, portfolio level, and aggregate cross-portfolio losses in currency... View Details

Keywords: Loss Aversion; Decision Choices and Conditions; Currency; Investment; Risk Management; Behavioral Finance

Article

The Value of Intermediation in the Stock Market

By: Marco Di Maggio, Mark Egan and Francesco Franzoni

We estimate a structural model of broker choice to quantitatively decompose the value that institutional investors attach to broker services. Studying over 300 million institutional equity trades, we find that investors are sensitive to both explicit and implicit... View Details

Keywords: Financial Intermediation; Institutional Investors; Research Analysts; Broker Networks; Equity Trading; Institutional Investing

March 2019 (Revised March 2023)
Case

Accion's Fintech Strategy

By: V. Kasturi Rangan, Michael Chu and Tricia Gregg

Accion, an NGO, had been a pioneer in microfinance since its entry into that sector in the early 1970s. Its investments in Banco Compartamos paid off, when the microfinance bank went IPO in 2007, leaving an influx of $138 million for Accion. Under a new CEO, Michael... View Details

Keywords: Fintech; Impact Investing; Financial Inclusion; Technological Innovation; Strategy; Strategic Planning; Performance Effectiveness; Non-Governmental Organizations; Microfinance; Financial Institutions; Business Growth and Maturation; Customer Focus and Relationships; Industry Growth

2021
Working Paper

Once Bitten, Twice Shy: Learning from Corporate Fraud and Corporate Governance Spillovers

By: Trung Nguyen

This paper finds that investors learn from their experience with corporate fraud and financial misconduct and modify their investment behavior to avoid suspicious firms and increase corporate governance efforts. More specially, mutual funds that experienced corporate... View Details

Keywords: Institutional Investors; Investor Experience; Shareholder Voting; Corporate Fraud; Corporate Governance; Institutional Investing; Behavior; Change; Learning

2015
Case

Advanced Leadership Pathways: Issa Baluch and the African Agribusiness Knowledge and Innovation Leadership Initiative (AKILI)

By: Rosabeth M. Kanter and Renee Vuillaume

A veteran of the freight forwarding industry, Issa Baluch wanted to transform the education space in Africa by introducing hands-on practical teaching in agriculture and agribusiness. In the summer of 2015 his vision of a practical learning institute for African... View Details

2013
Book

Wall Street Research: Past, Present, and Future

By: Boris Groysberg and Paul M. Healy

Wall Street equity analysts provide research products and services on publicly-traded companies to institutional and retail investors to help them make more profitable investment decisions. During the last ten years Wall Street research has been battered by a series of... View Details

Keywords: Financial Analysts; Investment Banks; Conflicts Of Interest; Accounting; Financial Institutions; Financial Services Industry; United States

Research Summary

Markets of Progress: Coffee, Commerce, and Community in the Soconusco, Chiapas, 1867-1920

Markets of Progress presents a new holistic story of rural development in Mexico at the turn of the century. In the Soconusco, as in regions throughout the world, the accelerating circulation of commodities and capital, ideas and immigrants reshaped society... View Details

Keywords: Commodities; Coffee; Mexico; Foreign Investment; Institutions; Immigration; Developing Agriculture; Development; Export Crop; Emerging Market; Property Rights; Labor History; History; Capital Markets; Business History; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Latin America; Mexico; Central America

May 2021
Article

The Firm Next Door: Using Satellite Images to Study Local Information Advantage

By: Jung Koo Kang, Lorien Stice-Lawrence and Forester Wong

We use novel satellite data that track the number of cars in the parking lots of 92,668 stores for 71 publicly listed U.S. retailers to study the local information advantage of institutional investors. We establish car counts as a timely measure of store-level... View Details

Keywords: Satellite Images; Store-level Performance; Institutional Investors; Local Advantage; Overweighting; Processing Costs; Alternative Data; Big Data; Emerging Technologies; Information; Quality; Institutional Investing; Decision Making; Behavioral Finance; Analytics and Data Science

2025
Working Paper

With a Little Help from My Family: Informal Startup Financing

By: Brian K. Baik, Johan Ludvig S. Karlsen and Katja Kisseleva

Using Norwegian administrative data, we identify family equity investments in startups and examine their effects on investor returns and firm behavior. Informal investors earn lower returns than external individuals, and the firms they back are less likely to secure... View Details

Keywords: Early Stage Finance; Informal Investment; Household Finance; Risk Taking; Entrepreneurial Finance; Entrepreneurship; Personal Finance; Family and Family Relationships; Business Startups; Investment; Norway

August 2018 (Revised September 2018)
Case

LendingClub (A): Data Analytic Thinking (Abridged)

By: Srikant M. Datar and Caitlin N. Bowler

LendingClub was founded in 2006 as an alternative, peer-to-peer lending model to connect individual borrowers to individual investor-lenders through an online platform. Since 2014 the company has worked with institutional investors at scale. While the company assigns... View Details

Keywords: Data Science; Data Analytics; Investing; Loans; Investment; Financing and Loans; Analytics and Data Science; Analysis; Forecasting and Prediction; Business Model

2022
Working Paper

Multinationals and Varieties of Capitalism: When U.S. Giants Stepped into the Swiss Coordinated Labor Market in the 1950s

By: Sabine Pitteloud

This working paper investigates unintended consequences of U.S. FDI in Switzerland in the 1950s-1960s: the increased competition that U.S. firms generated within the national labor market and the challenge their hiring practices constituted for the institutional... View Details

Keywords: Multinationals; Capitalism; Business ＆ Government Relations; Foreign Direct Investment; Immigration Policy; History; Switzerland; Americanization; R＆D; Labor History; Labor Market Institutions; Tax Havens; ＂USA,＂; Business Interest Association; Lobbying; Labor and Management Relations; Business History; Multinational Firms and Management

November 2012
Case

The World Bank in 2012: Choosing a Leader

By: Lakshmi Iyer and Ian McKown Cornell

In 2012, the World Bank faced important questions in terms of its future strategy and mission. Should the Bank continue to focus on micro-level development initiatives, such as the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), or return to traditional macro-level financial... View Details

Keywords: Economic Development; Millennium Development Goals; World Bank; International Institutions; Leadership; Development Economics; Emerging Markets; Foreign Direct Investment; Financial Services Industry; Public Administration Industry

January–February 2021
Article

Cross‐firm Return Predictability and Accounting Quality

By: Wen Chen, Mozaffar Khan, Leonid Kogan and George Serafeim

We test the hypothesis that if poor accounting quality (AQ) is associated with poor investor understanding of firms’ revenue and cost structures, then poor AQ stocks likely respond more slowly than good AQ stocks to new non‐idiosyncratic information that affects both... View Details

Keywords: Accounting Quality; Earnings Quality; Stock Returns; Investment Strategy; Accounting; Business Earnings; Quality; Investment Return; Investment; Strategy