Publications

SSRN

01 Sep 2018
HBS Seminar

In 1776 the United States government started out on a shoestring and quickly went bankrupt fighting its War of Independence against Britain. At the war’s end, the national government owed tremendous sums to foreign creditors and its own citizens. But lacking... View Details

Teaching Interest

Executive Education: Finance for Senior Executives

By: Malcolm P. Baker

Finance for Senior Executives provides the frameworks to strategically use financial resources and position your company for future success. By examining corporate finance from both internal and external perspectives, this HBS Executive Education View Details

April 2006
Case

Finance Leadership in Novartis Consumer Health Businesses

By: Boris Groysberg and Ingrid Vargas

Describes and contrasts the roles and challenges of three high-performing finance heads at Novartis Consumer Health businesses in Australia, Japan, and Venezuela. All three faced tremendous pressures in terms of managing time and limited resources, but the particular... View Details

Keywords: Finance; Financial Management; Multinational Firms and Management; Leadership Style; Health Industry; Japan; Australia; Venezuela

January 2025
Case

Untapped Global: Financing Africa's Missing Middle

By: Raymond Kluender and Emanuele Colonnelli

In November 2024, Jim Chu, founder and CEO of Untapped Global, faced mounting internal tensions over the company’s strategic direction. Untapped had developed a data-driven revenue-based financing (RBF) model to address the “missing middle” problem—the $5.2 trillion... View Details

20 Jan 2009
Research & Ideas

Risky Business with Structured Finance

In the wake of the financial crisis, many once-esoteric investment terms have become a familiar part of our vocabulary. The role of structured finance securities such as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), for example, and the part... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna; Banking; Financial Services

Finance - Faculty & Research

Finance Overview Faculty Curriculum Seminars & Conferences Awards & Honors Doctoral Students September 2025 Article Using Satellites and Phones to Evaluate and Promote Agricultural Technology Adoption: Evidence from Smallholder Farms in... View Details

September 2013
Case

Homestrings, Inc.: Diaspora-Based Financing and the Crowd Funding of Development

By: William R. Kerr and Alexis Brownell

Homestrings is an online investment platform for overseas diasporas to link financially with their home countries. The founder believes crowd-funding can become a pillar for development, but U.S. regulatory hurdles and resources constraints are substantial. The company... View Details

Keywords: Diasporas; Investments; Regulations; Africa; Crowd-funding; Development Finance; Entrepreneurship; Business Growth and Maturation; Financial Services Industry; Africa; United States

15 Dec 2017
News

Mihir Desai explains the Wisdom of Finance

Spring 2013
Article

The Growth of Finance

By: Robin Greenwood and David S. Scharfstein

The U.S. financial services industry grew from 4.9% of GDP in 1980 to 7.9% of GDP in 2007. A sizeable portion of the growth can be explained by rising asset management fees, which in turn were driven by increases in the valuation of tradable assets, particularly... View Details

Keywords: Finance; Asset Management; Research; Mortgages; Financial Services Industry

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December 1993
Article

Risk Management: Coordinating Corporate Investment and Financing Policies

By: K. A. Froot, David S. Scharfstein and J. Stein

Keywords: Catastrophe Risk; Corporate Finance; Banking And Insurance; Hedging; Banking; Decision Choice And Uncertainty; Financial Markets; Insurance; Policy; Risk Management; Natural Disasters; Cost of Capital; Asset Pricing; Insurance Industry

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2024
Working Paper

Finance Without Exotic Risk

By: Pedro Bordalo, Nicola Gennaioli, Rafael La Porta and Andrei Shleifer

We address the joint hypothesis problem in cross-sectional asset pricing by using measured analyst expectations of earnings growth. We construct a firm-level measure of Expectations Based Returns (EBRs) that uses analyst forecast errors and revisions and shuts down any... View Details

Keywords: Investment Return; Financial Markets; Behavioral Finance; Risk and Uncertainty

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1992
Book

Case Problems in Finance

By: W. E. Fruhan Jr., W. C. Kester, S. P. Mason, T. R. Piper and R. S. Ruback

Keywords: Finance

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December 1999 (Revised January 2002)
Background Note

Overview of the Project Finance Market, An

By: Benjamin C. Esty, Suzanne I. Harris and Kathleen G. Krueger

This case introduces the field of project finance and supplies a statistical overview of the project finance market as of the mid=to late 1990s. It consists of four sections. The first section defines project finance and contrasts it with other well-known forms of... View Details

Keywords: Markets; Investment; Projects; Project Finance

2017
Working Paper

Investment Timing with Costly Search for Financing

By: Samuel Antill

I develop a dynamic model of investment timing in which firms must first choose when to search for external financing. Search is costly and the arrival of investors is uncertain, leading to delay in financing and investment. Depending on parameters, my model can... View Details

Keywords: Real Options; Search And Bargaining; Time-varying Financial Conditions; Investment; Venture Capital; Mathematical Methods