Publications

19 Feb 2007
Research & Ideas

Inexperienced Investors and Market Bubbles

"sticky"—funds that perform well attract considerable inflows, but funds that underperform receive only modest outflows. Thus, it's not clear that inexperienced managers were punished for the decisions they made during the... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Financial Services

September 2024
Supplement

National Public Broadcasting (B)

By: Richard S. Ruback and Royce Yudkoff

Pre-abstract: Instructors should consider the timing of making videos available to students, as they may reveal key case details.
Abstract: This (B) case supplement is designed for use by faculty only to support classroom instruction in conjunction with... View Details

Keywords: Financial Strategy; Financial Management; Media; Ownership; Strategy; Advertising; Decision Choices and Conditions; Entrepreneurship; Financing and Loans; Mergers and Acquisitions; Private Equity; Journalism and News Industry; Media and Broadcasting Industry; United States

1972
Chapter

Optimal Utilization of Market Forecasts and the Evaluation of Portfolio Performance

By: Michael Jensen

Keywords: Investment Portfolio; Financial Markets; Forecasting and Prediction; Performance Evaluation

SSRN

March 2013 (Revised March 2014)
Case

Brazos Partners and the Tri-Northern Exit

By: Matthew Rhodes-Kropf and Nathaniel Burbank

Randall Fojtasek, a partner at the Dallas-based Brazos Private Equity Partners, must decide whether now is the time to sell his firm's investment in Tri-Northern Distribution. Brazos, a middle-market leveraged buyout group, created the company two years earlier through... View Details

Keywords: Private Equity Exit; LBO; Leveraged Buyout Transaction; Texas; Security; Brazos; Tri-Northern; Tri-Ed; Northern Video; Private Equity; Partners and Partnerships; Distribution; Leveraged Buyouts; Decision Choices and Conditions; Investment Funds; Financial Services Industry; Distribution Industry; Texas

December 2003 (Revised May 2004)
Case

Grove Street Advisors

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

Grove Street Advisors, a manager of customized private equity investment products, has been very successful in its first five years. To grow, the group must decide whether to target smaller organizations, revive its coinvestment efforts, or enter the highly competitive... View Details

Keywords: Business Organization; Decision Choices and Conditions; Private Equity; Investment; Market Entry and Exit; Competitive Strategy

16 Jul 2020
News

Accounting for Real Change

writes. The global pandemic has created an opportunity to “bring impact to the center of our economic system, to overthrow the tyranny of profit and to shift the basis for our business and investment decisions from risk-return to... View Details

26 May 2015
News

Exploring tax policy and our quality of life

He’s exploring how people feel about making taxation decisions based on personal attributes, which current US tax policy does. Some of his other research, in part for his elective curriculum course at HBS, has examined social security,... View Details

Web

Law, Management and Entrepreneurship - Course Catalog

transactions. The course will also explore legal issues involved in starting, joining or investing in start-ups and decision making from the time an entrepreneur conceives, starts to build and obtains View Details

July 2005 (Revised June 2006)
Case

Ryanair Holdings plc

Examines the valuation of an Irish airline that reported its first decline in net income in 2004 and saw a 30% stock price drop on the news. Ryanair is a low-cost, low-fare airline headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, operating over 200 routes in 20 countries. The company... View Details

Keywords: Strategy; International Accounting; Analysis; Valuation; Air Transportation; Forecasting and Prediction; Finance; Air Transportation Industry; Dublin

17 Oct 2019
News

Venturing Away from Venture Capital

potential to return their entire fund through acquisition or IPO. In the process, she says, VCs can be “forced to make investment decisions that don’t benefit the company, the entrepreneur, or the entrepreneurial landscape.” For example,... View Details

Keywords: Alexander Gelfand

May 2022 (Revised May 2024)
Case

The Freedom Fund (A): Ending Modern Slavery

By: V. Kasturi Rangan and Courtney Han

The Freedom Fund founded in 2013 to end modern slavery had raised more than half its intended target (by 2025) of $200 million. In 2021, impressed by its decentralized-partnering style of operations, philanthropist MacKenzie Scott awarded the Fund a gift of $35 million... View Details

Keywords: Social Issues; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Spending; Decisions; India; Thailand; Ethiopia

04 May 2010
First Look

First Look: May 4

including commercial banks, investment banks, hedge funds, and private equity funds. Representing one of the largest DIP loans in history, this financing was considered critical to the company's survival. One unique and controversial... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

08 May 2017
Blog Post

Learning through the Case Method

driven by your peers. Our cases each feature a protagonist who has to make a critical decision – and range from business problems right out of the headlines to a historical overview of China. It’s a platform to debate, explore, and learn... View Details

24 Jun 2008
First Look

First Look: June 24, 2008

log variance of income per worker. This figure should be compared to the 42% success rate of the usual model. Download the paper from SSRN ($5): http://papers.nber.org/papers/w14060 Bounded Decision Making: From Description to Improvement... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

July 2021
Case

Kevin D. Johnson: To Be a Venture Capitalist or an Operator?

By: Jo Tango and Alys Ferragamo

In May of 2021, Kevin D. Johnson had just graduated from a rigorous Executive MBA program, and he quickly needed to decide on his next career move. Johnson was the founder and CEO of a successful media company, Johnson Media Inc., but his career goals had shifted while... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Business Startups; Goals and Objectives; Race; Wealth; Decisions; Venture Capital; Personal Development and Career; United States

2010
Working Paper

Growth through Heterogeneous Innovations

By: Ufuk Akcigit and William R. Kerr

We study how exploration versus exploitation innovations impact economic growth through a tractable endogenous growth framework that contains multiple innovation sizes, multi-product firms, and entry/exit. Firms invest in exploration R&D to acquire new product lines... View Details

Keywords: Business Ventures; Decision Choices and Conditions; Economic Growth; Investment; Innovation and Invention; Patents; Size; Research and Development; United States

August 1998
Case

HIMSCORP, Inc.

By: William A. Sahlman, Michael J. Roberts and Laurence E. Katz

Himscorp is an industry consolidation of records storage companies providing management and retrieval services of active medical records to healthcare institutions. Kent Dauten, a former general partner at Madison Dearborn Partners with 15 years of venture capital and... View Details

Keywords: Value Creation; Initial Public Offering; Business Exit or Shutdown; Business Growth and Maturation; Decision Choices and Conditions; Consolidation; Information Industry

August 2018 (Revised September 2018)
Supplement

LendingClub (C): Gradient Boosting & Payoff Matrix

By: Srikant M. Datar and Caitlin N. Bowler

This case builds directly on the LendingClub (A) and (B) cases. In this case students follow Emily Figel as she builds an even more sophisticated model using the gradient boosted tree method to predict, with some probability, whether a borrower would repay or default... View Details

Keywords: Data Analytics; Data Science; Investment; Financing and Loans; Analytics and Data Science; Analysis; Forecasting and Prediction