Publications
Publications
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(5,088)
- Faculty Publications (1,028)
- Winter 2023
- Article
Moral Firms?
Building a new political economy requires transforming our markets, our institutions, and our policy and regulatory regimes. In this essay, I argue that it also requires transforming the purpose of the firm: from a singular focus on maximizing financial returns to the... View Details
- December 2022
- Article
Conflicting Interests and the Effect of Fiduciary Duty: Evidence from Variable Annuities
By: Mark Egan, Shan Ge and Johnny Tang
We examine the variable annuity market to study conflicts of interest and the effect of fiduciary duty in brokerage markets. Insurers typically pay brokers higher commissions for selling more expensive annuities. Our results indicate that sales are four times as... View Details
- December 2022
- Article
Does Industry Employment of Active Regulators Weaken Oversight?
By: Jonas Heese
I study whether industry employment of active regulators weakens oversight. To examine this question, I exploit that the Financial Reporting Enforcement Panel (FREP), the German capital-market regulator responsible for enforcing public firms’ compliance with accounting... View Details
- December 2022
- Article
Initial Coin Offering (ICO) Success and Post-ICO Performance
By: Evgeny Lyandres, Berardino Palazzo and Daniel Rabetti
We compile a comprehensive data set of initial coin offerings (ICOs) from 19 data sources including 11 ICO aggregators. We alleviate severe limitations of available ICO data by performing the first systematic analysis of ICO data quality. We use our data set to study... View Details
- November 2022
- Case
Goonj: Growing in the Face of a Pandemic
By: V. Kasturi Rangan and Priyank Narayan
Founded by the husband and wife team of Anshu and Meenakshi Gupta in 1999, Goonj had quickly emerged as one of the leading disaster relief and rural development organizations in India. Their main mode of development was through providing a clothing kit to the village... View Details
- November 2022
- Case
Ajax Health: A New Model for Medical Technology Innovation
By: Regina E. Herzlinger and Ben Creo
This case teaches key success factors for both startup and established MedTech firms. It examines how to structure a firm to maximize innovation and financial returns with organizational structures that better align the incentives for the different skill sets... View Details
- November 2022 (Revised October 2024)
- Case
'A Marshall Plan for Africa': James Mwangi and Equity Group Holdings
By: Caroline M. Elkins, Debora L. Spar, Zeke Gillman and Julia M. Comeau
Financial Inclusion. Dignity. Trust. These were the core principles driving James Mwangi’s transformation of Equity Building Society, insolvent in 1991, into what is, today, Equity Group Holdings, East and Central Africa’s largest retail banking institution. Raised in... View Details
- November 2022
- Article
A Language-Based Method for Assessing Symbolic Boundary Maintenance between Social Groups
By: Anjali M. Bhatt, Amir Goldberg and Sameer B. Srivastava
When the social boundaries between groups are breached, the tendency for people to erect and maintain symbolic boundaries intensifies. Drawing on extant perspectives on boundary maintenance, we distinguish between two strategies that people pursue in maintaining... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
How Do Investors Value ESG?
By: Malcolm Baker, Mark Egan and Suproteem K. Sarkar
Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) objectives have risen to near the top of the agenda for corporate executives and boards, driven in large part by their perceptions of shareholder interest. We quantify the value that shareholders place on ESG using a revealed... View Details
- November 2022
- Article
My Boss' Passion Matters as Much as My Own: The Interpersonal Dynamics of Passion Are a Critical Driver of Performance Evaluations
By: Jon M. Jachimowicz, Andreas Wihler and Adam D. Galinsky
Companies often celebrate employees who successfully pursue their passion. Academic research suggests that these positive evaluations occur because of the passion percolating inside the employee. We propose that supervisors are also a key piece of this puzzle:... View Details
- November 2022
- Article
The Sharp Spikes of Poverty: Financial Scarcity Is Related to Higher Levels of Distress Intensity in Daily Life
By: Jon M. Jachimowicz, Erin L. Frey, Sandra C. Matz, Bertus F. Jeronimus and Adam D. Galinsky
Although income is an important predictor of life satisfaction, the precise forces that drive this relationship remain unclear. We propose that financial resources afford individuals a path to reducing the distressing impact of everyday hassles, in turn increasing... View Details
Keywords: Distress; Affect; Control; Financial Scarcity; Life Satisfaction; Income; Poverty; Well-being
- October 2022 (Revised January 2023)
- Case
Century Bank: Closing Time?
By: Lauren Cohen, Grace Headinger and Bill Kwon
Barry Sloane, second-generation Chairman, President, and CEO of his family’s bank, Century Bank, weighed whether to sell to Eastern Bank. As a small regional bank, Century faced a number of challenging trends, such as digitization and market share decline in the coming... View Details
Keywords: Family Office; Business Exit; Banking; Family; Massachusetts; Boston; United States; Acquisition; Business Exit or Shutdown; Family Business; Family and Family Relationships; Interpersonal Communication; Decision Making; Finance; Banks and Banking; Risk and Uncertainty; Emotions; Banking Industry; Boston; Massachusetts; United States
- October 2022
- Case
Sustainable Finance at Itau BBA
By: George Serafeim, Maria Loumioti and Benjamin Maletta
As of August 2022, the Itau BBA had structured dozens of sustainability linked bonds, which made future interest payments a function of the borrower meeting a target for a sustainability metric, and had solidified its reputation as a pioneer of sustainable finance in... View Details
Keywords: Sustainable Finance; Corporate Social Responsibility; Environmental Sustainability; Growth Strategy; Debt Contracting; Performance Metrics; Risk Assessment; ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) Performance; Financial Instruments; Risk Management; Debt Securities; Measurement and Metrics; Pulp and Paper Industry; Pulp and Paper Industry; Latin America
- October 2022 (Revised January 2025)
- Case
Founders First Capital Partners: An Approach to Capital Access Equity
By: Brian Trelstad, Mel Martin and Amy Klopfenstein
In June 2021, Kim T. Folsom, the founder and CEO of revenue-based financing firm Founders First Capital Partners (FFCP), must decide whether to issue another loan to OnShore Technology Group, an up-and-coming software validation company. FFCP provided revenue-based... View Details
- October 2022
- Case
Star Magnolia Capital: Becoming Experts at Finding Experts
By: Lauren Cohen, Hao Gao, River Ewing and Grace Headinger
Shinya Deguchi, Founder and Managing Partner of Star Magnolia Capital, a Shanghai-based multi-family office (MFO), considered how to convince a new prospective family that the MFO’s endowment model approach would best suit their needs. In recent decades, there has been... View Details
- September 16, 2022
- Article
A Causal Test of the Strength of Weak Ties
By: Karthik Rajkumar, Guillaume Saint-Jacques, Iavor I. Bojinov, Erik Brynjolfsson and Sinan Aral
The authors analyzed data from multiple large-scale randomized experiments on LinkedIn’s People You May Know algorithm, which recommends new connections to LinkedIn members, to test the extent to which weak ties increased job mobility in the world’s largest... View Details
- September 2022
- Case
ROI vs. ROI: The Grupo Baobá Family Office
By: Lauren Cohen, Hao Gao, Jiawei Ye and Grace Headinger
Fernando Scodro, a third-generation member of his family, mulled over the next step in integrating an ESG strategy into his family office’s investment portfolio. While his family office, Grupo Baobá, had made excellent progress in incorporating his family’s values into... View Details
- September 2022 (Revised January 2023)
- Case
Bear to Bull: An Analyst’s Journey with Netflix
By: Aiyesha Dey, Joseph Pacelli, Jennifer G. Lawson and Tom Quinn
Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter said “hell freezing over” was more likely than him upgrading the “sell” rating he had maintained on movie and television streaming giant Netflix since 2011, despite meteoric subscriber and share price growth. In 2022, however,... View Details
- September 2022
- Article
The Impact of Financial Assistance Programs on Health Care Utilization: Evidence from Kaiser Permanente
By: Alyce S. Adams, Raymond Kluender, Neale Mahoney, Jinglin Wang, Francis Wong and Wesley Yin
Most hospitals have financial assistance programs for low-income patients. We use administrative data from Kaiser Permanente to study the effects of financial assistance on health care utilization. Using a regression discontinuity design based on an income threshold... View Details
- August 2022
- Supplement
Sweet Teez Bakery: Projecting the Dough’s Rise Financial Supplement
By: Emily R. McComb, Mel Martin and Amy Klopfenstein
Abstract: In 2021, the HBS Impact Investment Fund student team met with entrepreneur Teresa Maynard, who had applied for a $25,000 impact investment loan. The students thought the former Harvard Data Scientist’s bakery business, Sweet Teez Bakery, showed promise.... View Details