Publications

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February 2006 (Revised June 2007)
Case

Brazos Partners and Cheddar's Inc.

By: G. Felda Hardymon, Josh Lerner and Ann Leamon

Randall Fojtasek, a partner at Brazos Private Equity Partners, must decide whether to invest more money in Cheddar's restaurant chain, which the firm invested in 10 months earlier. The incremental investment would fund a real estate subsidiary that would own the... View Details

Keywords: Negotiation Deal; Price; Partners and Partnerships; Management; Investment; Leadership; Business Subsidiaries; Stocks

September 2003 (Revised May 2004)
Case

New Partnership for Africa's Development, The

By: Laura Alfaro, Debora L. Spar and Cate Reavis

In a world context of international institutions such as the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund and their interaction with developing countries, this case looks at an African development initiative to address its own problems: The New Economic... View Details

Keywords: Development Economics; Developing Countries and Economies; International Finance; Investment; Poverty; Africa

April 1999 (Revised November 1999)
Case

Adams Capital Management: March 1999

By: G. Felda Hardymon and Bill Wasik

On February 24, 1999, the advisory board of Adams Capital Management convened for its quarterly meeting at the firm's headquarters. One point on the agenda: whether or not to proceed with due diligence on an investment in Three Points, a maker of Internet-based team... View Details

Keywords: Venture Capital; Governing and Advisory Boards; Management Systems; Investment; Goals and Objectives; Financial Services Industry

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09 Feb 2022
News

Why Do Startups Fail And Can We Create An AI Formula To Prevent Failure? An Interview With Harvard Business School Professor Tom Eisenmann

Initial Coin Offering (ICO) Success and Post-ICO Performance

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... View Details

26 Sep 2019
Research & Ideas

What Can the World’s Largest Refugee Camp Teach Us About the Meaning of Work?

Two years have passed since more than 700,000 Rohingya people fled a bloody ethnic cleansing campaign in Myanmar and created the world’s largest refugee camp in Bangladesh. But not much has changed since then. At the Kutupalong camp, feelings View Details

Keywords: by Danielle Kost

November 2003 (Revised December 2003)
Background Note

Note on School Choice in U.S. Public Education

This note surveys school choice in the United States. School choice characterizes the school assignment of approximately 56% of U.S. school-aged children and, in order of popularity, can be categorized into seven types: residential choice, private schools, intra- and... View Details

Keywords: Education; United States

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September 2010 (Revised July 2013)
Case

Alnylam Pharmaceuticals: Building Value from the IP Estate

By: Willy C. Shih and Sen Chai

The learning objective of this case is to help students recognize the interplay between intellectual property (IP) rights and corporate strategy. We do this by examining what is a fairly atypical circumstance today in which a single firm is able to secure what it... View Details

Keywords: Patents; Lawsuits and Litigation; Rights; Competitive Strategy; Corporate Strategy; Biotechnology Industry; Pharmaceutical Industry; United States

18 Oct 2010
Lessons from the Classroom

Venture Capital’s Disconnect with Clean Tech

without massive follow-on funding. This creates a catch-22 situation. A clean-tech company can't prove its ability to scale without actually scaling. And venture capitalists are wary of funding a company... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Energy; Utilities; Financial Services

July 2009 (Revised May 2010)
Case

The Millennium Challenge Corporation and Ghana

By: Alnoor Ebrahim and V. Kasturi Rangan

A U.S. government agency, the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), provides aid to developing countries, focusing on poverty reduction through economic growth. It measures results through an economic rate of return based on increases in farmer incomes anticipated... View Details

Keywords: Developing Countries and Economies; Economic Growth; Investment Return; Measurement and Metrics; Welfare; Ghana; United States

Research Summary

Overview

By: Brian L. Trelstad

The focus of my research is on the systems of social innovation. How small groups of individuals come up with new products and services targeting important problems; how they finance these initial efforts, and convert prototypes into viable organizational strategies;... View Details

Forthcoming
Article

Weak Credit Covenants

By: Victoria Ivashina and Boris Vallée

Using novel data on 1,240 credit agreements, we investigate sources of contractual complexity in the leveraged loan market. While negative covenants are widespread, carve-out and deductible clauses that qualify them are as frequent. We propose simple and comprehensive... View Details

Keywords: Leveraged Loans; Loan Contracts; Debt Covenants; Carve-out; Creditor Governance; LBO; Credit; Agreements and Arrangements; Leveraged Buyouts

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2003
Chapter

Short-Term America Revisited? Boom and Bust in the Venture Capital Industry and the Impact on Innovation

By: Josh Lerner and Paul A. Gompers

This chapter seeks to understand the implications of the recent decline in venture activity for innovation. It argues that the situation may not be as grim as it initially appears. While there are many reasons for believing that on average venture capital has a... View Details

Keywords: Venture Capital; Innovation and Invention; Business Cycles; Financial Services Industry; United States

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Article

Coarse Thinking and Persuasion

By: Sendhil Mullainathan, Joshua Schwartzstein and Andrei Shleifer

We present a model of uninformative persuasion in which individuals "think coarsely": they group situations into categories and apply the same model of inference to all situations within a category. Coarse thinking exhibits two features that persuaders take advantage... View Details

Keywords: Cognition and Thinking; Brands and Branding

Research Summary

Cross-ownership, returns and voting in mergers

We show that institutional shareholders of acquiring companies on average do not lose money around public merger announcements, because they also hold substantial stakes in the targets and make up for the losses from the former with the gains from the latter. Depending... View Details

November 2021 (Revised December 2021)
Case

Praava Health: A New Model for Bangladesh

By: Michael Chu

Launched in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 2018, Praava Health (‘Praava’) delivered high-quality in-clinic primary and specialist care, backed by its own high quality diagnostic laboratories, imaging and pharmacy. Praava was founder Sylvana Sinha’s response to what she saw as a... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Health Care and Treatment; Investment Return; Mobile and Wireless Technology; Business Model; Growth and Development Strategy; Health Industry; Bangladesh; Asia