Bad Debt Expense - Publications - Faculty & Research

07 Jun 2007
News

The bad dream of options expensing lingers

June 2017 (Revised January 2019)
Case

Signet Jewelers: Assessing Customer Financing Risk

By: Gerardo Pérez Cavazos, Suraj Srinivasan and Monica Baraldi

Marc Cohodes, a renowned short seller, has identified weaknesses in Signet's business strategy, which he argues is heavily reliant on providing loans to customers with subprime credit scores. He believes that the company accounts for its receivables portfolio using... View Details

Keywords: Short Selling; Bad Debt Expense; Accounting; Financial Reporting; Financial Statements; Finance; Financing and Loans; Valuation; Retail Industry; Financial Services Industry; United States

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Bad-debts provisioning at banks

By: V.G. Narayanan

I am very interested in studying loan-loss reserves and the provisioning for bad-debts at banks. View Details

Keywords: Loan Evaluation; Bad Debt Expense; Banking Industry

October 2014
Article

Good Cop, Bad Cop: Complementarities Between Debt and Equity in Disciplining Management

By: Alexander Guembel and Lucy White

In this paper we examine how the quantity of information generated about firm prospects can be improved by splitting a firm's cash flow into a "safe" claim (debt) and a "risky" claim (equity). The former, being relatively insensitive to upside risk, provides a... View Details

Keywords: Information; Borrowing and Debt; Equity; Corporate Finance

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Good cop, Bad Cop: Complementarities between Debt and Equity in Disciplining Management

Joint work with Alexander Gümbel, Saïd Business School and Lincoln College Oxford

In this paper we examine how the quantity of information generated about firm... View Details

August 1996
Case

Appliance Company: Accounting for Bad Debt and Warranty Service Costs

By: David F. Hawkins

Keywords: Accounting

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10 Aug 2011
Research & Ideas

HBS Faculty Views on Debt Crisis

negotiated settlement of the debt crisis was so lame, Standard & Poor's has downgraded the country. Instead of asking whether we are in greater danger of long-term financial difficulties, everyone is blaming the bearer of View Details

Keywords: by Staff

01 Dec 2002
News

Bad Times for Business

Perhaps we're in the midst of a larger technological and information- driven transformation, a rare inflection point in industrial capitalism, in which there's been widespread exuberance and some bad bets made to this point, but in which... View Details

Keywords: Garry Emmons

December 2020
Article

Sovereign Debt Portfolios, Bond Risks, and the Credibility of Monetary Policy

By: Wenxin Du, Carolin Pflueger and Jesse Schreger

We document that governments whose local currency debt provides them with greater hedging benefits actually borrow more in foreign currency. We introduce two features into a government's debt portfolio choice problem to explain this finding: risk-averse lenders and... View Details

Keywords: Investment Portfolio; Currency; Policy; Risk and Uncertainty

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18 May 2016
Research & Ideas

Unethical Amnesia: Why We Tend to Forget Our Own Bad Behavior

questions about past misdeeds. But a recent set of studies indicates that people genuinely do tend to forget the details of their own transgressions. In the paper Leaving Our Immoral Deeds in the Past, researchers show that engaging in View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

27 Jul 2015
Research & Ideas

The ‘Promotion’ That Makes You Feel Bad

Companies change strategy, operational processes, and policies all the time, each shift creating a new group of winners and losers. When Steve Jobs became CEO of Apple for the second time, the culture shifted, with designers enjoying elevated status, perhaps at the... View Details

Keywords: by Roberta Holland

13 Jan 2020
Research & Ideas

Do Private Equity Buyouts Get a Bad Rap?

benefit society: asset stripping, short-term profit at the expense of workers, and long-term stability. “There are certainly a lot of concerns around whether these kind of transactions are indeed fomenting inequality by getting rid of... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Financial Services; Banking

04 Sep 2001
Research & Ideas

Is Government Just Stupid? How Bad Decisions Are Made

medical care, defense, education and so on guarantees that fewer taxpayer dollars and government resources will be available for other initiatives. It may also mean that the national debt will increase, imposing a heavy burden on future... View Details

Keywords: by Max H. Bazerman, Jonathan Baron & Katherine Shonk

January 2021 (Revised February 2021)
Case

Carnival Corporation: Cruising Through COVID-19

By: Stuart C. Gilson and Sarah Abbott

In March 2020, in response to the global pandemic, the cruise industry ceased operations. Carnival was the largest cruise line operator in the world, and CEO Arnold Donald and his management team worked to position the company to survive. They slashed operating... View Details

Keywords: Debt Issuance; Equity Issuances; Convertible Debt; Cruise Lines; Restructuring; Capital; Crisis Management; Cash Flow; Health Pandemics; Borrowing and Debt; Travel Industry; United States

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21 Dec 2009
Research & Ideas

Good Banks, Bad Banks, and Government’s Role as Fixer

banks by the federal government, it can divide them into good banks and bad banks. The good banks would return to the normal business of taking deposits and making loans; the bad banks would work out and... View Details

Keywords: by Roger Thompson; Banking; Financial Services

15 Sep 2021
Research & Ideas

Don't Bring Me Down: Probing Why People Tune Out Bad News

find that, yes, people appear to purposely avoid information about how their decisions affect others. Specifically, they avoid information when it may help them to feel better about making selfish decisions, or decisions that benefit themselves at the View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz

15 Nov 2022
Book

Stop Ignoring Bad Behavior: 6 Tips for Better Ethics at Work

understand,” says Bazerman. The problem is, if we choose to overlook bad behavior, we fail to acknowledge our own complicity, and we miss an opportunity to make the world a better place, Bazerman says. Avoiding complicity While it may... View Details

Keywords: by Pamela Reynolds

23 Mar 2015
Research & Ideas

It’s Called ‘Price Coherence,’ and It’s Surprisingly Bad for Consumers

higher merchant fees than Visa's regular cards. It's not accidental that they're adding to the higher end of their product line. That's where they're under the most pressure from American Express. And as they compete, they're producing more and more View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Retail; Air Transportation; Food & Beverage; Entertainment & Recreation

03 Oct 2023
HBS Case

Layoffs Can Be Bad Business: 5 Strategies to Consider Before Cutting Staff

consider cutting operational costs without cutting staff, through measures such as reducing inventories, payables, and supply chain costs. Labor expenses can be contained with hiring freezes, wage freezes, furloughs, and early retirement... View Details

Keywords: by Ben Rand; Telecommunications; Technology; Financial Services; Manufacturing

April 2017 (Revised August 2020)
Case

The U-Turns of National Truck Stops

By: Nori Gerardo Lietz and Alexander W. Schultz

Raj Makam had spent months trying to restructure a 2006 investment he had made in National Truck Stops, Inc. (NTS) as a senior member of Oaktree Capital Management’s (Oaktree) Mezzanine finance business within their Corporate Debt platform. It was the first time they... View Details