Publications

2020
Book

Capitalism at Risk: How Business Can Lead

By: Joseph L. Bower, Dutch Leonard and Lynn S. Paine

Who should take the lead in fixing market capitalism? Business—not government alone. The spread of capitalism worldwide has made people wealthier than ever before. But capitalism's future is far from assured. Pandemics, income inequality, resource depletion, mass... View Details

Keywords: Capitalism; Business And Society; Economic Systems; Economic Growth; Policy; Leading Change; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Business and Community Relations; Corporate Strategy

September 2019 (Revised May 2020)
Supplement

Keroche (F): Future Growth Plans

By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Pippa Tubman Armerding

This case describes Keroche co-founder Tabitha Karanja’s 2012 decision to invest in additional production capacity. In November 2012, with a loan from Barclay’s bank, Keroche began constructing a new state-of-the-art beer brewery using German technology. The new plant,... View Details

April 2000 (Revised August 2002)
Case

The Holland House

By: William J. Poorvu and Michael A. Everett-Lane

In November 1993, Edward Geffner, executive director of Project Renewal, Inc. (PRI), is proposing that his not-for-profit firm develop Holland House at 351 West 42nd Street in New York City into a single- room occupancy hotel for homeless people. He has put together a... View Details

Keywords: Buildings and Facilities; Nonprofit Organizations; Social Entrepreneurship; Welfare; Construction; Poverty; Property; Construction Industry; Construction Industry; New York (city, NY)

January 2025 (Revised January 2025)
Case

Colbún’s Angostura Dam Project (A)

By: James K. Sebenius and Nicolas Andrade

The A case describes Colbún Chile’s plans for the Angostura dam in the Bío Bío River, a hydroelectric construction venture with major challenges given the region’s history of indigenous resistance. This context was especially unfavorable given the highly contentious... View Details

Keywords: Bargaining; Conflict Resolution; Dam; Stakeholder Analysis; Environmental Negotiation; Negotiation; Energy Generation; Construction; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Conflict and Resolution; Energy Industry; Chile

Educators

28 Jan 2014
Working Paper Summaries

Digital Discrimination: The Case of Airbnb.com

Keywords: by Benjamin G. Edelman & Michael Luca; Construction; Construction

November 2024 (Revised January 2025)
Case

Balancing Impact: Modeling the Future at British International Investment

By: Shawn Cole and Jonah Zahnd

In 2022, British International Investment (BII), the £8.1 billion development finance arm of the British government, implemented a new impact measurement system called the Impact Score to align its financial and impact objectives systematically. The tool was designed... View Details

Keywords: Investment Portfolio; Measurement and Metrics; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Alignment; United Kingdom

Educators

2025
Working Paper

Partisan Corporate Speech

By: William Cassidy and Elisabeth Kempf

We construct a novel measure of partisan corporate speech using natural language processing techniques and use it to establish three stylized facts. First, the volume of partisan corporate speech has risen sharply between 2012 and 2022. Second, this increase has... View Details

Keywords: Natural Language Processing; Perspective; Communication; Public Opinion; Business and Shareholder Relations; Trends

SSRN

03 Mar 2003
Research & Ideas

The Ingredients of a Deal Disaster

inadvertently omitted from social contract negotiations. For example, in 1988, Komatsu, Japan's leader in earth-moving construction equipment, and U.S. conglomerate Dresser Industries combined their North... View Details

Keywords: by Ron S. Fortgang, David A. Lax & James K. Sebenius

Capitalism at Risk: How Companies Can Lead

Q. Who should take the lead in fixing market capitalism? A. Business, not government alone. The spread of capitalism worldwide has made people wealthier than ever before. But capitalism's future is far from assured. Pandemics, income inequality, resource depletion,... View Details

2018
Working Paper

Zig-Zagging Your Way to Transformative Impact

By: V. Kasturi Rangan and Tricia Gregg

Achieving transformative impact has been much discussed by social entrepreneurs, funders, and consultants. These discussions have focused on issues of increasing impact and scale, but often with no clear distinction between the two terms. In order to provide clarity,... View Details

Keywords: Social Entrepreneurship; Performance Efficiency; Growth and Development; Outcome or Result; Strategy

02 Sep 2002
Research & Ideas

The Role of Government When All Else Fails

because of a workplace accident, illness, unemployment, or old age. Government policymakers responded to this rapidly expanding problem of worker insecurity by constructing an elaborate social insurance... View Details

Keywords: by Laura Linard

2025
Working Paper

Threat and Assimilation: Evidence from Refugees in Germany

By: Philipp Jaschke, Sulin Sardoschau and Marco Tabellini

This paper studies the effects of local threat on the cultural assimilation and economic integration of refugees, exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in their allocation across German regions between 2013 and 2016. We use representative survey data and... View Details

Keywords: Assimilation; Threat Hypothesis; Migration; Cultural Change; Refugees; Culture; Identity; Germany

January 1987
Article

Posterior Implementability in a Two-person Decision Problem

By: Jerry R. Green and Jean-Jacques Laffont

When a decision rule is implemented using a Bayesian incentive compatible mechanism in which the messages are publicly observable, the players' information is augmented by their observation of each others' strategies. In this paper we study the set of Bayesian... View Details

Keywords: Incentives; Commitment; Mechanism Design; Decision Making; Information

2017
Working Paper

Business and Sustainability: New Business History Perspectives

By: Ann-Kristin Bergquist

This working paper provides a long-term business history perspective on environmental sustainability. For a long time, the central issues addressed in the discipline of business history concerned how business enterprises innovated and created wealth, as well as... View Details

Keywords: Environmental Sustainability; Business History; Perspective

SSRN

November 2017
Article

Overcoming Institutional Voids: A Reputation-Based View of Long Run Survival

By: Cheng Gao, Tiona Zuzul, Geoffrey Jones and Tarun Khanna

Emerging markets are characterized by underdeveloped institutions and frequent environmental shifts. Yet they also contain many firms that have survived over generations. How are firms in weak institutional environments able to persist over time? Motivated by 69... View Details

Keywords: Institutional Voids; Intangible Resources; Emerging Markets; Reputation; Business History

June 2009 (Revised April 2019)
Case

Crosley

By: Tom Nicholas and David Chen

In October 1941, a top secret envoy from the U.S. military was sent to Crosley Corporation in Cincinnati, Ohio to request their assistance to construct a weapon that would drastically strengthen the defenses of U.S. troops: the proximity fuze. Such a fuze would allow... View Details

Keywords: Information Technology; History; Production; National Security; Organizational Structure; Corporate Strategy; Research and Development; Product Development; Business and Government Relations; Creativity; Innovation and Invention; Ohio

Educators

2016
Working Paper

Overcoming Institutional Voids: A Reputation-Based View of Long Run Survival

By: Cheng Gao, Tiona Zuzul, Geoffrey Jones and Tarun Khanna

Emerging markets are characterized by underdeveloped institutions and frequent environmental shifts. Yet they also contain many firms that have survived over generations. How are firms in weak institutional environments able to persist over time? Motivated by 69... View Details

Keywords: Institutional Voids; Intangible Resources; Business Ventures; Business or Company Management; Business History; Reputation; Emerging Markets

SSRN