Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,810)
- Faculty Publications (290)
- April 2014
- Article
Golden Parachutes and the Wealth of Shareholders
By: Lucian A. Bebchuk, Alma Cohen and Charles C.Y. Wang
Golden parachutes (GPs) have attracted substantial attention from investors and public officials for more than two decades. We find that GPs are associated with higher expected acquisition premiums and that this association is at least partly due to the effect of GPs... View Details
- March 2014
- Case
LGBT Issues at Exxon Mobil Corporation
By: Joseph L. Badaracco and Matthew Preble
In late September 2013, Exxon Mobil Corporation announced that it would begin offering benefits to the spouses of its employees in same-sex marriages. This short supplement touches upon what led Exxon Mobil to this decision, some insights into its previous relationship... View Details
- March 2014 (Revised September 2019)
- Teaching Note
Say on Pay: Qualcomm, Inc. Shareholders Vote 'Maybe'
By: Suraj Srinivasan and Charles C.Y. Wang
This case centers around Qualcomm shareholders' 2012 Say-on-Pay vote and the dispute between the Institutional Shareholder Services and management regarding the appropriateness of the CEO's compensation plan. Was ISS right that Qualcomm CEO's pay was inflated and... View Details
- 2014
- Working Paper
Opting Out of Good Governance
By: C. Fritz Foley, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, Jonathan Greenstein and Eric Zwick
Cross-listing on a U.S. exchange does not bond foreign firms to follow the corporate governance rules of that exchange. Hand-collected data show that 80% of cross-listed firms opt out of at least one exchange governance rule, instead committing to observe the rules of... View Details
- January 2014
- Case
CleanSpritz
By: John A. Quelch and Alisa Zalosh
Sales of CleanSpritz all-purpose cleaning spray have been steadily declining for the past five years, and management believes the decline correlates to a growing environmental concern among U.S. consumers. CleanSpritz's management is considering several options to... View Details
- November 2013 (Revised January 2015)
- Case
Restructuring JAL
By: Malcolm Baker, Adi Sunderam, Nobuo Sato and Akiko Kanno
Hideo Seto, the recently appointed chairman of the investment committee of the Enterprise Turnaround Initiative Corporation, must decide whether to push JAL group, Japan's largest airline, into bankruptcy or to act as a sponsor in an out-of-court restructuring. The... View Details
- November 2013
- Article
Which U.S. Market Interactions Affect CEO Pay? Evidence from UK Companies
By: Joseph Gerakos, Joseph Piotroski and Suraj Srinivasan
This paper examines how different types of interactions with U.S. markets by non-U.S. firms are associated with higher level of CEO pay, greater emphasis on incentive-based compensation, and smaller pay gap with U.S. firms. Using a sample of CEOs of UK firms and using... View Details
- September–October 2013
- Article
The Role of Organizational Scope and Governance in Strengthening Private Monitoring
By: Lamar Pierce and Michael W. Toffel
Governments and other organizations often outsource activities to achieve cost savings from market competition. Yet such benefits are often accompanied by poor quality resulting from moral hazard, which can be particularly onerous when outsourcing the monitoring and... View Details
Keywords: Crime and Corruption; Decision Choices and Conditions; Corporate Accountability; Governance Compliance; Policy; Management Practices and Processes; Demand and Consumers; Market Design; Market Entry and Exit; Market Transactions; Service Delivery; Service Operations; Business Processes; Organizational Structure; Performance Effectiveness; Performance Expectations; Practice; Transportation; Transportation Industry; Service Industry; United States; New York (state, US)
- July 2013 (Revised September 2019)
- Case
Say on Pay: Qualcomm, Inc. Shareholders Vote 'Maybe'
By: Suraj Srinivasan, Charles C.Y. Wang and Kelly Baker
This case centers around Qualcomm shareholders' 2012 Say-on-Pay vote and the dispute between the Institutional Shareholder Services and management regarding the appropriateness of the CEO's compensation plan. Was ISS right that Qualcomm's CEO's pay was inflated and... View Details
Keywords: ISS; Proxy Advisor; Investor Communication; Investor Relations; Peers; Say-on-Pay; Benchmarking; Peer Group; Compensation Committees; Board Of Directors; Governing and Advisory Boards; Executive Compensation; Corporate Governance; Business and Shareholder Relations; Telecommunications Industry
- 2013
- Chapter
The Most Successful CEOs Come from Within
By: Joseph L. Bower
The financial crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession caused a crisis of public confidence in business and American-style capitalism, with its focus on maximizing shareholder value. Corporate leaders understood that reform was needed and that they needed to commit... View Details
- February 2013 (Revised March 2015)
- Case
The LEGO Group: Publish or Protect?
By: Willy C. Shih and Sen Chai
Senior managers at the LEGO Group are faced with a quandary: Should they patent inventions coming out of their manufacturing process development work, should they keep them as trade secrets, or should they publish them so that they would go into the public domain and... View Details
Keywords: Plastics; Injection Molding; Toys; LEGO; LEGO Group; Tools; Additive Manufacturing; 3D Manufacturing; Toolmaking; Patenting; Spillovers; Knowledge Spillovers; Change; Trends; Engineering; Machinery and Machining; Intellectual Property; Patents; Operations; Production; Strategy; Corporate Strategy; Technology Adoption; Consumer Products Industry; Manufacturing Industry; Technology Industry; Europe; Denmark
- November 2012
- Case
Teaming at GE Aviation
Describes the challenges and successes encountered by GE's Aviation business in implementing a teaming work structure and culture in plants across its supply chain. GE Aviation leadership had seen dramatic gains in productivity, quality, and worker satisfaction in... View Details
Keywords: Organizational Behavior; Aviation And Aerospace; Capacity Management; Competitiveness; Corporate Culture; Corporate Structure; Labor Relations; Manufacturing; Production Planning; General Electric; Teaming; Managing Change; Transformation; Labor Unions; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Culture; Organizational Structure; Performance Productivity; Leading Change; Management Style; Job Design and Levels; Aerospace Industry; Manufacturing Industry; United States
- 2013
- Working Paper
FIN Around the World: The Contribution of Financing Activity to Profitability
By: Russell Lundholm, George Serafeim and Gwen Yu
We study how the availability of domestic credit influences the contribution that financing activities make to a firm's return on equity (ROE). Using a sample of 51,866 firms from 69 countries, we find that financing activities contribute more to a firm's ROE in... View Details
- July–August 2012
- Article
What Good Are Shareholders?
By: Justin Fox and Jay W. Lorsch
The article looks at the role outside shareholders play in corporate governance in the U.S., and the relationship between companies' shareholders and managers, as of 2012. It recounts the shift beginning in the 1970s toward shareholders claiming an increasing amount of... View Details
- 2012
- Article
Hiring Cheerleaders: Board Appointments of 'Independent' Directors
By: Lauren Cohen, Andrea Frazzini and Christopher Malloy
We provide evidence that firms appoint independent directors who are overly sympathetic to management, while still technically independent according to regulatory definitions. We explore a subset of independent directors for whom we have detailed, micro-level data on... View Details
- April 2012
- Article
Broadening Focus: Spillovers, Complementarities and Specialization in the Hospital Industry
By: Jonathan R. Clark and Robert S. Huckman
The long-standing argument that focused operations outperform others stands in contrast to claims about the benefits of broader operational scope. The performance benefits of focus are typically attributed to reduced complexity, lower uncertainty, and the development... View Details
- 2012
- Working Paper
No News Is Good News: CSR Strategy and Newspaper Coverage of Negative Firm Events
By: Jiao Luo, Stephan Meier and Felix Oberholzer-Gee
One of the benefits of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs, it has been argued, is that they build up a reservoir of public good will, shielding companies in times of trouble. In this paper, we test the view that CSR provides protection from public ire by... View Details
- March 2012
- Article
The Incentive Bubble
By: Mihir Desai
The past three decades have seen American capitalism quietly transformed by a single, powerful idea—that financial markets are a suitable tool for measuring performance and structuring compensation. Stock instruments for managers, high-powered incentive contracts for... View Details
- February 2012
- Case
Henkel: Building a Winning Culture
By: Robert Simons and Natalie Kindred
This case illustrates a CEO-led organizational transformation driven by stretch goals, performance measurement, and accountability. When Kasper Rorsted became CEO of Henkel, a Germany-based producer of personal care, laundry, and adhesives products, in 2008, he was... View Details
- December 2011
- Article
Economics Education and Greed
By: Long Wang, Deepak Malhotra and J. Keith Murnighan
The recent financial crisis, and repeated corporate scandals, raise serious questions about whether a business school education contributes to what some have described as a culture of greed. The dominance of economic-related courses in MBA curricula led us to assess... View Details