Publications

January 2024
Article

A Cost Model for a Low Threshold Clinic Treating Opioid Use Disorder

By: Sarah E. Wakeman, Elizabeth Powell, Syed Shehab, Grace Herman, Laura Kehoe and Robert S. Kaplan

The US fee-for-service payment system under-reimburses clinics offering access to comprehensive treatments for opioid use disorder (OUD). The funding shortfall limits a clinic’s ability to expand and improve access, especially for socially marginalized patients with... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Cost; Equality and Inequality; Health Industry

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Victoria Ivashina is the Lovett-Learned Professor of Finance and Head of the Finance Unit at Harvard Business School. She also serves as a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a Research Fellow at the Center for Economic Policy... View Details

Keywords: banking; federal government; financial services; investment banking industry; private equity (LBO funds); private equity (other)

14 Dec 2021
Op-Ed

To Change Your Company's Culture, Don't Start by Trying to Change the Culture

CEOs who had led successful corporate transformations and came to the same conclusion in a Harvard Business Review article: “[These leaders] say that culture isn’t something you 'fix.' Rather, in their experience, cultural change is what you get after you’ve put new... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Beer

27 Oct 2009
Working Paper Summaries

Stock Price Fragility

Keywords: by Robin Greenwood & David Thesmar

14 Nov 2007
Working Paper Summaries

Accountability in Complex Organizations: World Bank Responses to Civil Society

Keywords: by Alnoor S. Ebrahim & Steve Herz

2021
Working Paper

No-fault Default, Chapter 11 Bankruptcy, and Financial Institutions

By: Robert C. Merton and Richard T. Thakor

This paper analyzes the costs and benefits of a no-fault-default debt structure as an alternative to the typical bankruptcy process. We show that the deadweight costs of bankruptcy can be avoided or substantially reduced through no-fault-default debt, which permits a... View Details

Keywords: No-fault Default; Chapter 11; Insolvency and Bankruptcy; Borrowing and Debt; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Financial Institutions; Contracts

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Working Paper

Covenant-Light Contracts and Creditor Coordination

By: Bo Becker and Victoria Ivashina

In 2015, 70% of newly issued leveraged loans had weaker enforcement features, called covenant-light or "cov-lite"; this is nearly a three-time increase in cov-lite issuance compared to a previous peak in 2007. We evaluate whether this development can be attributed to... View Details

Keywords: Credit Cycles; Loan Contracts; Debt Covenants; Contracts; Financing and Loans; Credit; Borrowing and Debt

SSRN

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Article

Real Effects of Relational Contracts

By: Steven Blader, Claudine Gartenberg, Rebecca Henderson and Andrea Pratt

How important are factors such as "firm culture" and "employee engagement" in driving firm performance? Increasing evidence from a wide range of fields suggests that productivity differs widely across firms, even after the inclusion of careful controls for factors such... View Details

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June 2023
Supplement

Roche: ESG and Access to Healthcare

By: George Serafeim

In May 2022, Roche Group, one of the largest healthcare companies in the world, hosted its first ESG investor event focused exclusively on its efforts to impact access to healthcare. While Roche had recently set an ambitious goal to double the number of patients that... View Details

May 2022 (Revised June 2024)
Case

LOOP: Driving Change in Auto Insurance Pricing

By: Elie Ofek and Alicia Dadlani

John Henry and Carey Anne Nadeau, co-founders and co-CEOs of LOOP, an insurtech startup based in Austin, Texas, were on a mission to modernize the archaic $250 billion automobile insurance market. They sought to create equitably priced insurance by eliminating pricing... View Details

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Technological Innovation; Equality and Inequality; Prejudice and Bias; Growth and Development Strategy; Customer Relationship Management; Price; Insurance Industry; Financial Services Industry

June 2010 (Revised August 2011)
Case

Tennant Company: Innovating Within and Beyond the Core

By: Lynda M. Applegate, Toby E. Stuart and James Weber

Tennant, a leading producer of floor cleaning equipment, must determine the business model to use for its new chemical-free cleaning technology. In 2005, Tennant Company had developed an innovative, environmentally friendly cleaning technology that could potentially... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Business Startups; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Disruptive Innovation; Organizational Structure; Business Strategy; Value Creation; Consumer Products Industry; Industrial Products Industry

23 Jun 2023
HBS Case

This Company Lets Employees Take Charge—Even with Life and Death Decisions

back to our organizations?’ And as companies face employee reductions in this economic climate, perhaps they should consider doing so in a way that removes layers of organizational structure as well.” How Buurtzorg works Jos de Blok, one... View Details

Keywords: by Annelena Lobb; Health

Research Summary

The Ownership of Deep Metaphors

By: Gerald Zaltman

Deep metaphors are basic orienting structures of human thought. They guide in subtle and overt ways how customers and managers process information about any product, service, or activity and event. It is essential for a firm to understand deep metaphors as they are... View Details

February 2025
Case

Managing EPS at Stanley Black & Decker?

By: Jonas Heese, Joseph Pacelli, Yuan Zou and James Barnett

The case explores Stanley Black and Decker’s (SBD) 2022 financial restatement announcement, which related to how SBD accounted for certain equity issuances in 2019. These transactions had a minimal effect on earnings but significantly reduced shares outstanding, and... View Details

Keywords: Accounting; Financial Reporting; Ethics; Finance; Accounting Industry; Construction Industry; Manufacturing Industry

2023
Working Paper

The Equity Market Implications of the Retail Investment Boom

By: Philippe van der Beck and Coralie Jaunin

This paper quantifies the impact of Robinhood traders on the US equity market. Within a structural model, we estimate retail and institutional demand curves and derive aggregate pricing implications via market clearing. The inelastic nature of institutional demand... View Details

Keywords: Institutional Investing; Financial Markets; Price; Financial Instruments

SSRN

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

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2020
Working Paper

Contract Duration and the Costs of Market Transactions

By: Alexander MacKay

The optimal duration of a supply contract balances the costs of reselecting a supplier against the costs of being matched to an inefficient supplier when the contract lasts too long. I develop a structural model of contract duration that captures this tradeoff and... View Details

Keywords: Vertical Relationships; Transaction Costs; Contract Duration; Identification; Supply Chain; Cost; Contracts; Auctions; Mathematical Methods

SSRN

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2016
Working Paper

Experimental Evidence on Policies Aimed at Closing the Gender Gap in Willingness to Guess on Multiple-Choice Tests

By: Katherine Baldiga Coffman

Research has shown that women skip more questions than men on multiple-choice tests with penalties for wrong answers. We propose and test five policy changes aimed at eliminating this source of gender bias in test scores. Our data show that simply removing the penalty... View Details

Keywords: Competition; Behavior; Decision Choices and Conditions; Gender