Publications

Find at Harvard

June 2013 (Revised August 2013)
Background Note

Note on Pension Guarantee Funds

By: Robert C. Pozen and Patricia Bissett Higgins

The United States and the United Kingdom both had quasi-government agencies that provided back-up insurance for individuals participating in defined benefit ("DB") pension plans. This note compares and contrasts the United Kingdom's Pension Protection Fund ("PPF") with... View Details

Keywords: Pensions; Pension Guarantee Funds; Pension Protection Fund; Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation; Employee Retirement Income Security Act; PBGC; ERISA; MAP-21; Legislation; Insurance; Saving; Retirement; Labor; Labor and Management Relations; Employees; Insurance Industry; United States; United Kingdom

August 2021
Article

Don't Take Their Word for It: The Misclassification of Bond Mutual Funds

By: Huaizhi Chen, Lauren Cohen and Umit Gurun

We provide evidence that bond fund managers misclassify their holdings, and that these misclassifications have a real and significant impact on investor capital flows. In particular, many funds report more investment grade assets than are actually held in their... View Details

Keywords: Mutual Funds; Economics; Finance; Measurement and Metrics; Risk and Uncertainty; Financial Services Industry

SSRN

Find at Harvard

January 2016 (Revised April 2017)
Case

The Galaxy Dividend Income Growth Fund's Option Investment Strategies

By: W. Carl Kester

This case is designed to provide an elementary introduction to options and option pricing for beginning finance students. Analysis of the case requires students to compare the prices of put and call options with various exercise prices and maturity dates on two... View Details

Keywords: Options; Option Contract; Option Pricing; Derivatives; Mutual Funds; Call Options; Put Options; Stock Options; Risk and Uncertainty; Volatility; Financial Services Industry; United States

04 Jan 2012
What Do You Think?

Income Inequality: What’s the Right Amount?

inequality is measured in terms of opportunity or the actual accumulation of varying levels of income and wealth. Inequality is inevitable and perhaps necessary in a free society, according to one line of thought. As Guy Higgins put it,... View Details

Keywords: by Jim Heskett

15 Apr 2015
Research & Ideas

Why Americans Voted for an Income Tax

that the taxes they endorsed started out small in scope and size but have multiplied by a factor of eight as a share of our economy, have we gone off course? After all, when an income tax was introduced in 1862 to View Details

Keywords: by Matthew C. Weinzierl

December 2013 (Revised June 2014)
Case

Choosing a Charitable Giving Vehicle

By: Robert C. Pozen, Mayur Desai and Maura A. Graul

Elaine White is an accountant advising two couples, the Carsons and the Bradleys, regarding their charitable giving options and related tax strategies. The Carsons are an upper-middle class family with $295,000 in income, a moderate amount of deductions, and... View Details

Keywords: Charitable Giving; Tax Accounting; Tax Strategy; Public Charities; Foundations; Charity; Charitable Remainder Trusts; Charitable Lead Trusts; Donor-Advised Funds; Pooled Income Funds; Taxation; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; United States

December 2013
Teaching Note

Choosing a Charitable Giving Vehicle

By: Robert C. Pozen, Mayur Desai and Maura A. Graul

Elaine White is an accountant advising two couples, the Carsons and Bradleys, regarding their charitable giving options and related tax strategies. The Carsons are an upper-middle class family with $295,000 in income, a moderate amount of deductions, and... View Details

Keywords: Charitable Giving; Tax Accounting; Tax Strategy; Charity; Charitable Lead Trusts; Charitable Remainder Trusts; Public Charities; Foundations; Donor-Advised Funds; Pooled Income Funds; Taxation; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; United States

November 2016 (Revised November 2016)
Supplement

The Galaxy Dividend Income Growth Fund's Option Investment Strategies

By: W. Carl Kester

Keywords: Options; Option Contract; Option Pricing; Derivatives; Mutual Funds; Call Options; Put Options; Stock Options; Risk and Uncertainty; Volatility; Financial Services Industry; United States

December 1995 (Revised March 1998)
Case

FOX Venture Partners: Enriching the Private Equity Investor Pool

By: Josh Lerner

FOX Venture Partners (FVP) is a proposed "Fund-of-Funds" that will enable wealthy individuals to invest in venture capital. While several leading venture capitalists are enthusiastic about the concept, FVP's general partners are finding it difficult to invest... View Details

Keywords: Private Equity; Investment Funds

October 2018 (Revised February 2018)
Case

Masayoshi Son and the Vision Fund

By: Tom Nicholas, Ramana Nanda and Benjamin N. Roth

In October 2016, SoftBank Group Corp., the Japanese conglomerate giant caused a significant shock to the worldwide market for venture capital and private equity by announcing the Vision Fund, the largest tech investment fund in the world at close to $100 billion. The... View Details

Keywords: Strategy; Venture Capital; Private Equity; Entrepreneurship; Competitive Strategy

May 2025
Case

RTX's Lifetime Income Strategy: Shaping the Future of Retirement

By: Daniel Green, Luis M. Viceira and Sarah Mehta

Set in 2024, this case explores the Lifetime Income Strategy (LIS), a novel retirement product launched by aerospace and defense company RTX in 2012. Aiming to embed the security of a traditional pension within a 401(k) plan, the LIS allowed participants to secure a... View Details

Keywords: Asset Management; Compensation and Benefits; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Jobs and Positions; Labor; Retirement; Society; Adoption; Aerospace Industry; Financial Services Industry; Insurance Industry; United States; Virginia

05 Jun 2020
Research & Ideas

How Anchor Investors Help Impact Funds Succeed

so-called impact funds, or funds that hope to create positive social or environmental impact. In Anchors Aweigh: Analysis of Anchor Limited Partner Investors in Impact Investment Funds, the authors describe anchors as “generally the first... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Financial Services

December 2008 (Revised March 2009)
Case

Rosetree Mortgage Opportunity Fund

By: Victoria Ivashina and Andre F. Perold

In December 2008, in the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, Rosetree Capital Management was evaluating the purchase of a pool of U.S. residential mortgages. The firm had formed an investment vehicle to acquire troubled residential mortgages... View Details

Keywords: Financial Crisis; Borrowing and Debt; Mortgages; Investment; Housing; Valuation; United States

18 Apr 2013
Working Paper Summaries

The Impact of Pooling on Throughput Time in Discretionary Work Settings: An Empirical Investigation of Emergency Department Length of Stay

Keywords: by Hummy Song, Anita L. Tucker & Karen L. Murrell; Health

2019
Working Paper

Optimal Interventions for Increasing Healthy Food Consumption Among Low Income Households

By: Retsef Levi, Elisabeth Paulson and Georgia Perakis

The federal government currently spends over $100 billion per year on policies aimed to increase fruit and vegetable (FV) consumption among low income households. These include price-, nutrition education-, and access-related interventions. Currently, the government... View Details

Keywords: Bi-level Optimization; Optimal Subsidies; Public Policy; Food Policy; Central Planner; Government Administration; Poverty; Food; Nutrition

SSRN

Read Now

September 2017 (Revised July 2021)
Case

Asset Allocation at the Cook County Pension Fund

By: Emil Siriwardane, Juliane Begenau and Yuval Gonczarowski

Nickol Hackett, chief investment officer of the Cook County Pension Fund, is responsible for investing the fund’s $9 billion worth of assets on behalf of the employees of Cook County, Illinois. Like many other defined-benefit pensions at the time, the Cook County... View Details

Keywords: Asset Management; Investment Funds; Financial Strategy; Decision Choices and Conditions

March 2013
Article

The Client Is King: Do Mutual Fund Relationships Bias Analyst Recommendations?

By: Michael Firth, Chen Lin, Ping Liu and Yuhai Xuan

This paper investigates whether the business relations between mutual funds and brokerage firms influence sell-side analyst recommendations. Using a unique data set that discloses brokerage firms' commission income derived from each mutual fund client as well as the... View Details

Keywords: Prejudice and Bias; Decision Choices and Conditions; Investment Funds

Read Now

2001
Chapter

Publicly Funded Science and the Productivity of the Pharmaceutical Industry

By: Rebecca Henderson and Ian Cockburn

U.S. taxpayers funded $14.8 billion of health related research last year, four times the amount that was spent in 1970 in real terms. In this paper we evaluate the impact of these huge expenditures on the technological performance of the pharmaceutical industry. While... View Details

Keywords: Public Sector; Science-Based Business; Research and Development; Sovereign Finance; Pharmaceutical Industry

Find at Harvard

Read Now

June 2020 (Revised May 2022)
Case

Vanguard Retail Operations (A)

By: Willy C. Shih and Antonio Moreno

The first two cases in this series are set in the financial services industry, and explore whether it is better for back-office workers to be generalists who provide the flexibility of being able to handle the complete range of transactions that the company faces or... View Details

Keywords: Pooling; Generalist Model; Specialist Model; Operations; Service Operations; Management; Job Design and Levels; Financial Services Industry; United States