Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(3,131)
- Faculty Publications (658)
- December 2019 (Revised June 2021)
- Case
Mãe Terra and Unilever (A)
By: Lynn S. Paine, Ruth Costas and Priscilla Zogbi
The case concerns the sale of Mãe Terra, one of Brazil's leading brands for packaged organic foods, to the consumer goods giant Unilever in 2017. Working with Unilever management, Mãe Terra’s CEO Alexandre Borges must determine whether and how to keep Mãe Terra's B... View Details
Keywords: Mergers ＆ Acquisitions; Brand Management; Sustainability; Mergers and Acquisitions; Mission and Purpose; Social Enterprise; Corporate Governance; Governing and Advisory Boards; Environmental Sustainability; Organizational Culture; Food and Beverage Industry; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Brazil; Latin America
- November 9, 2019
- Article
Effect of Revealing Authors' Conflicts of Interests in Peer Review: Randomized Controlled Trial
By: Leslie K. John, George Loewenstein, Andrew Marder and Michael Callaham
Objective: To assess the impact of disclosing authors’ conflict of interest declarations to peer reviewers at a medical journal.
Design: Randomised controlled trial.
Setting: The study was conducted within the manuscript review process at the... View Details
Design: Randomised controlled trial.
Setting: The study was conducted within the manuscript review process at the... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
Undisclosed Debt Sustainability
By: Laura Alfaro and Fabio Kanczuk
Over the past decade, non–Paris Club creditors, notably China, have become an important source of financing for low- and middle-income countries. In contrast with typical sovereign debt, these lending arrangements are not public, and other creditors have no information... View Details
- October 2019
- Article
Limited Investment Capital and Credit Spreads
Using proprietary credit default swap (CDS) data, I investigate how capital shocks at protection sellers impact pricing in the CDS market. Seller capital shocks—measured as CDS portfolio margin payments—account for 12% of the time-series variation in weekly spread... View Details
- September 2019 (Revised December 2022)
- Case
Cooking Down a Storm: Changing Culture at Pasta Serafina (A)
Plant management at Pasta Serafina, a pasta producer in the south of Italy, is struggling to contain employee absenteeism. While the misbehavior is concentrated in a minority of the workers, its effects impact not only the plant’s performance, but also the climate and... View Details
- 2019
- Chapter
Coordination Frictions in Venture Capital Syndicates
By: Ramana Nanda and Matthew Rhodes-Kropf
An extensive literature on venture capital has studied asymmetric information and agency problems between investors and entrepreneurs, examining how separating entrepreneurs from the investor can create frictions that might inhibit the funding of good projects. It has... View Details
- 2019
- White Paper
Impact-Weighted Financial Accounts: The Missing Piece for an Impact Economy
By: George Serafeim, T. Robert Zochowski and Jennifer Downing
Reimagining capitalism is an imperative. We need to create a more inclusive and sustainable form of capitalism that works for every person and the planet. Massive environmental damage, growing income and wealth disparity, stress, and depression within developed... View Details
- July–August 2019
- Article
Coupling Labor Codes of Conduct and Supplier Labor Practices: The Role of Internal Structural Conditions
By: Yanhua Bird, Jodi L. Short and Michael W. Toffel
Exploitive working conditions have spurred companies to pressure their suppliers to adopt labor codes of conduct and to conform their labor practices to the standards set forth in those codes. Yet little is known about whether organizational structures such as codes... View Details
- June 2019
- Article
Brokers vs. Retail Investors: Conflicting Interests and Dominated Products
By: Mark Egan
I study how brokers distort household investment decisions. Using a novel convertible bond dataset, I find that consumers often purchase dominated bonds—cheap and expensive versions of otherwise identical bonds coexist in the market. The empirical evidence suggests... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
Migrant Inventors and the Technological Advantage of Nations
We investigate the relationship between the presence of migrant inventors and the dynamics of innovation in the migrants’ receiving countries. We find that countries are 25% to 50% more likely to gain advantage in patenting in certain technologies given a twofold... View Details
- Article
Four Things No One Will Tell You About ESG Data
By: Sakis Kotsantonis and George Serafeim
As the ESG finance field and the use of ESG data in investment decision-making continue to grow, the authors seek to shed light on several important aspects of ESG measurement and data. This article is intended to provide a useful guide for the rapidly rising number of... View Details
Keywords: ESG; ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) Performance; ESG Reporting; Data Analytics; Sustainability; Sustainability Reporting; CSR; Transparency; Investment Management; Socially Responsible Investing; Sustainable Finance; Sustainable Development; Inclusion; Inclusive Growth; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Corporate Accountability; Investment; Management; Climate Change; Corporate Governance; Diversity; Integrated Corporate Reporting
- March 2019
- Case
The Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (Abridged)
By: Julie Battilana and Michael Norris
In 2014, as the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) has just brought former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg on as chairman of the board, Jean Rogers, founder and CEO, struggles with how best to ensure the nonprofit’s financial sustainability while... View Details
- March 2019
- Technical Note
Control or Flexibility? Structured Empowerment Offers Both—Lessons from Retail & Service Chains (Abridged)
By: Tatiana Sandino
This note explains how several retail and service organizations use a practice described here as “structured empowerment” to balance control and flexibility as they grow. I define structured empowerment as a practice that grants employees both (a) the power to make... View Details
- 2019
- Editorial
Yes, Sustainability Can Be a Strategy
By: Ioannis Ioannou and George Serafeim
- February 2019
- Article
Bounded Ethicality and Ethical Fading in Negotiations: Understanding Unintended Unethical Behavior
By: McKenzie Rees, Ann E. Tenbrunsel and Max Bazerman
The business scandals in the past several decades led to the rising importance of ethics as a topic central to management scholarship. Behavioral scientists in particular were attracted to the topic in far greater numbers, and the study of ethical decision-making... View Details
- Article
Sales Managers Must Manage
A common complaint from C-level executives about their sales colleagues concerns the latter’s ability to manage, not sell. Nearly every firm has examples of successful salespeople who are poor managers because they persist in their behaviors as reps rather than... View Details
- Article
Accuracy First: Selecting a Differential Privacy Level for Accuracy-Constrained ERM
By: Katrina Ligett, Seth Neel, Aaron Leon Roth, Bo Waggoner and Steven Wu
Traditional approaches to differential privacy assume a fixed privacy requirement ϵ for a computation, and attempt to maximize the accuracy of the computation subject to the privacy constraint. As differential privacy is increasingly deployed in practical settings, it... View Details
- Article
Decreases In Readmissions Credited to Medicare's Program to Reduce Hospital Readmissions Have Been Overstated
By: Christopher Ody, Lucy Msall, Leemore S. Dafny, David Grabowski and David Cutler
Medicare’s Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP) has been credited with lowering risk-adjusted readmission rates for targeted conditions at general acute care hospitals. However, these reductions appear to be illusory or overstated. This is because a... View Details
- December 2018 (Revised August 2022)
- Teaching Note
Revenue Recognition at HBP
By: Siko Sikochi and Paul Healy
In early 2014, Corporate Learning, one of three business units at Harvard Business Publishing (HBP), was in the process of revamping its flagship product, Harvard Manage-Mentor (HMM) from version 11.0 (HMM11) to version 12.0 (HMM12). The revamped software would be... View Details
- 2018
- Working Paper
Diagnostic Bubbles
By: Pedro Bordalo, Nicola Gennaioli, Spencer Yongwook Kwon and Andrei Shleifer
We introduce diagnostic expectations into a standard setting of price formation in which investors learn about the fundamental value of an asset and trade it. We study the interaction of diagnostic expectations with two well-known mechanisms: learning from prices and... View Details