Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(783)
- Faculty Publications (254)
- June 2011
- Article
Truth in Giving: Experimental Evidence on the Welfare Effects of Informed Giving to the Poor
By: Christina Fong and Felix Oberholzer-Gee
It is often difficult for donors to predict the value of charitable giving because they know little about the persons who receive their help. This concern is particularly acute when making contributions to organizations that serve heterogeneous populations. While we... View Details
- May 2011
- Article
Consequences and Institutional Determinants of Unregulated Corporate Financial Statements: Evidence from Embedded Value Reporting
By: George Serafeim
I analyze Embedded Value (EV) reporting by firms with life insurance operations to assess the impact of unregulated financial reporting on transparency and to examine the institutional characteristics that promote unregulated reporting. Under EV accounting the present... View Details
- May 2011
- Article
Overconfidence by Bayesian Rational Agents
This paper derives two mechanisms through which Bayesian-rational individuals with differing priors will tend to be relatively overconfident about their estimates and predictions, in the sense of overestimating the precision of these estimates. The intuition behind one... View Details
- May 2011
- Article
The Hollow Science
By: Robert S. Kaplan
The financial meltdown made clear that the executives of many major financial institutions were operating with inadequate or distorted information about the values and risks of their firms' assets. It's fair to say that business scholars bear some... View Details
- April 2011 (Revised June 2011)
- Case
Internet Securities, Inc.: Path to Sustainability
By: Lynda M. Applegate, William R. Kerr and Ryan Johnson
Founded in 1994 when the Internet was still a "toy for techies," the case is set in 1998 when Internet IPOs were red-hot. Internet Securities provides hard-to-find financial, business, economic, and political information on emerging markets. Information from over 600... View Details
- April 2011 (Revised January 2019)
- Case
Talismark
By: Richard S. Ruback and Royce Yudkoff
Talismark, which helped its customers manage their waste, was considering re-engineering its business fundamentals to dramatically increase profitability by changing its sales and information processes. Implementing the changes would be expensive and would interrupt... View Details
- April 2011 (Revised May 2011)
- Case
EMC2: Delivering Customer Centricity
By: Thomas Steenburgh and Jill Avery
This case introduces the concept of customer centricity and traces its development at EMC, the world's leading data storage hardware and information management software company. EMC's customers had historically relied on EMC salespeople to guide them through the... View Details
- February 2011 (Revised June 2013)
- Case
Businesses for Sale by Briggs Capital, 2010
By: Richard S. Ruback and Royce Yudkoff
Briggs Capital was a regional mergers and acquisitions advisory firm that helped owners to sell their small firms. The case presents a company that was for sale in the fall of 2010—a troubled manufacturer of post and beam style homes and log homes. Using the actual... View Details
- February 2011 (Revised November 2011)
- Supplement
Berkshire Partners: Bidding for Carter's (CW)
By: Malcolm P. Baker and David Lane
Supplemental data on comparable companies to Burger King including both public companies and similar transactions. View Details
- February 2011 (Revised May 2012)
- Teaching Note
Stanley Black & Decker, Inc. (TN)
Teaching Note for 211-067. View Details
- November 2010
- Article
A New Era for Raiders
The article presents information on corporate methods of preventing hostile takeovers by corporate raiders, such as the poison pill strategy. It is noted that some of these techniques have become less popular and effective. An argument is presented that Section 203 of... View Details
- October 2010
- Teaching Note
From Imitation to Innovation: Zongshen Industrial Group (TN)
By: Willy C. Shih
Teaching Note for 610057. View Details
- October 2010
- Article
Culture Clash: The Costs and Benefits of Homogeneity
This paper develops an economic theory of the costs and benefits of corporate culture-in the sense of shared beliefs and values in order to study the effects of "culture clash" in mergers and acquisitions. I first use a simple analytical framework to show that shared... View Details
- August 2010
- Article
Sell-Side School Ties
By: Lauren H. Cohen, Christopher J. Malloy and Andrea Frazzini
We study the impact of social networks on agents' ability to gather superior information about firms. Exploiting novel data on the educational backgrounds of sell-side equity analysts and senior officers of firms, we test the hypothesis that analysts' school ties to... View Details
- June 2010
- Case
The Shaw Group Inc.: Entrepreneurial Innovation
By: Lynda M. Applegate and Edward Watson
The case describes the founding and evolution of the Shaw Group through acquisition. The case is set at the time that the company is redesigning its business processes, organization, and information technology infrastructure to support aggressive growth and increased... View Details
- 2010
- Working Paper
When Do Analysts Add Value? Evidence from Corporate Spinoffs
By: Emilie Rose Feldman, Stuart Gilson and Belen Villalonga
We investigate the information content and forecast accuracy of 1,793 analyst reports written around 62 spinoffs—a setting in which analysts' ability to inform investors is potentially very high. We find that analysts pay little attention to subsidiaries about to be... View Details
- Article
The Cost Structure, Customer Profitability, and Retention Implications of Self-Service Distribution Channels: Evidence from Customer Behavior in an Online Banking Channel
By: Dennis Campbell and Frances X. Frei
This paper uses the context of online banking to investigate the consequences of employing self-service distribution channels to alter customer interactions with the firm. Using a sample of retail banking customers observed over a 30-month period at a large U.S. bank,... View Details
- October 2009 (Revised February 2010)
- Case
Merger of Equals: The Integration of Mellon Financial and The Bank of New York (A)
By: Ryan D. Taliaferro, Clayton S. Rose and David Lane
Less than a month after the close of the merger between The Bank of New York and Mellon Financial, managers at the two firms realized that plans for combining their asset servicing businesses—and realizing the $180 million of annual cost savings that they had promised... View Details
- October 2009 (Revised June 2011)
- Case
Zappos.com 2009: Clothing, Customer Service, and Company Culture
By: Frances X. Frei, Robin J. Ely and Laura Winig
On July 17, 2009, Zappos.com, a privately held online retailer of shoes, clothing, and other soft line retail categories, learned that Amazon.com, a $19 billion multinational online retailer, had won its board of directors' approval to offer to merge the two companies.... View Details
- August 2009 (Revised December 2012)
- Background Note
Researching a Company
By: Willy Shih and Meghan Dolan
This note was written to help students at the Harvard Business School do a more thorough job of researching a company, utilizing the extensive resources of the Baker Library, as well as other widely available databases. Exhibits provide detailed information on key... View Details