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- September 2025
- Article
Public Disclosure of Private Meetings: Does Observing Peers’ Information Acquisition Affect Analysts’ Attention Allocation?
By: Yi Ru, Ronghuo Zheng and Yuan Zou
We investigate the impact of observing peers’ information acquisition on financial analysts’ allocation of attention. Using the timely disclosure mandate by the Shenzhen Stock Exchange as a setting, we find that, shortly after analysts observe that a firm has been... View Details
- July 2025 (Revised July 2025)
- Case
Elon Musk, 2025: The Master of Big Bets?
By: David B. Yoffie
This case explores Elon Musk’s influence across business and politics in 2025, as he navigates the challenges of simultaneously leading multiple companies, such as Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI, while briefly serving in the U.S. government. It examines Musk’s high-stakes bets... View Details
- July 2025
- Case
Toilets for the Underserved: The SURT Commercialization Challenge
By: Maria P. Roche, Anne Marie Knott and Alexander Oettl
In 2021, a breakthrough in sanitation technology developed under the Gates Foundation’s “Reinvent the Toilet” initiative stood ready for commercialization. The Single User Reinvented Toilet (SURT), engineered by Dr. Shannon Yee, offered an off-grid, self-contained... View Details
Keywords: Technological Innovation; Commercialization; Social Issues; Social Enterprise; Public Sector; Private Sector; Market Entry and Exit; Strategic Planning; Engineering; Infrastructure; Innovation Strategy; Utilities Industry; Consumer Products Industry; United States; South Africa; India; France
- July 2025
- Case
SecureID: Digital Disruptions of Smartcards in Africa
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell, Raffaella Sadun, Pippa Tubman Amerding and Namrata Arora
This case explores the strategic inflection point faced by Kofo Akinkugbe, founder and CEO of SecureID, a smartcard manufacturing company in Nigeria. With the rise of fintech and digital payment solutions threatening the dominance of physical cards, SecureID must... View Details
- July 2025
- Case
The New York Liberty: Building the Business of Women’s Basketball
By: Anita Elberse and Mackenzi Curtin
In May 2025, Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) team the New York Liberty raised their 2024 championship banner. The team’s owners, Clara Wu Tsai and her husband Joseph Tsai, had acquired the Liberty in 2019, when the once flourishing team had seemingly hit... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Rethinking Volume
By: Philippe van der Beck, Lorenzo Bretscher and Zhiyu Julie Fu
Gross trading volumes in financial markets are large and far exceed return volatility. In contrast, “net volume”—trading from persistent portfolio reallocations—is substantially lower, as it excludes transitory round-trip trades. This observation reveals a fundamental... View Details
- June 2025
- Case
Zerodha
By: Das Narayandas and Kairavi Dey
Zerodha Broking Pvt. Ltd. (Zerodha) was among India's largest online broking platforms. Nithin and Nikhil Kamath started Zerodha to empower retail investors and remove the hurdles to investing in stocks. The company pioneered tech-first discount broking, charging... View Details
Keywords: Financial Services Industry
- 2025
- Working Paper
Heterogeneous Beliefs and Stock Market Fluctuations
By: Odhrain McCarthy and Sebastian Hillenbrand
This paper examines the role of heterogeneous investor beliefs in explaining stock market puzzles. Using survey data, we show that individual investors and investment professionals, such as equity analysts and strategists, form distinct beliefs. These groups rely on... View Details
- June 2025
- Case
VC Exits in Africa: Knife Capital and Quicket
By: Paul A. Gompers, Emanuele Colonnelli, Maagatha Kalavadakken and Namrata Arora
Keet van Zyl and Eben van Heerden, co-founders of Knife Capital, face a critical decision point with their investment in Quicket, a prominent South African ticketing company. As the global ticketing industry recovers, they are exploring strategic exit options to... View Details
Keywords: Financial Services Industry
- June 2025
- Case
Accounting for OpenAI at Microsoft
By: Jonas Heese, Joseph Pacelli, Nicole Zelazko and Michael Norris
In early 2025, Microsoft was evaluating the impact of its $14 billion investment in OpenAI. As OpenAI’s computing needs expanded, Microsoft positioned Azure as the exclusive provider for training and inference of their large language models. Despite the scale of the... View Details
- June 2025
- Case
TfL Pension Fund and the 2022 Gilt Market Crisis
By: Emil N. Siriwardane, Vincent Dessain, Emer Moloney and Carlota Moniz
On September 27, 2022, Padmesh Shukla, CIO of the Transport for London (TfL) Pension Fund, was keeping a careful eye on the turmoil in the U.K. sovereign bond (or gilt) market. When the new government announced the largest tax cuts the U.K. had seen in half a century,... View Details
Keywords: Financial Crisis; Macroeconomics; Assets; Asset Management; Borrowing and Debt; Corporate Finance; Capital Markets; Equity; Financial Liquidity; Financial Instruments; Financial Strategy; Interest Rates; Governing and Advisory Boards; Crisis Management; Resource Allocation; Investment; Financial Services Industry; United Kingdom; England; London; Europe
- 2025
- Working Paper
Fiscal Externalities of Transaction Taxes: Evidence from the Los Angeles Mansion Tax
By: Daniel Green, Vikram Jambulapati, Jack Liebersohn and Tejaswi Velayudhan
We estimate the fiscal externalities of a property transfer tax, the Los Angeles
“Mansion Tax”, on the revenues from property taxes when assessed values are closely
tied to transactions. In California, as in over half of U.S. states, growth in tax as-
sessments... View Details
- June 2025
- Article
Integral Outside: The Financial Curb Market, the Electric Telegraph, and the Politics of Pricing in Second Empire France
Financial markets in nineteenth-century France were far more complex than an analysis of the official Bourse or its state-authorized brokers would suggest. Most financial transactions occurred on an illegal yet tacitly tolerated curb market called the coulisse, which... View Details
- June 2025
- Article
Passive Ownership and Price Informativeness
By: Marco Sammon
I show that passive ownership negatively affects the degree to which stock prices anticipate earnings announcements. Estimates across several research designs imply that the rise in passive ownership over the last 30 years has caused the amount of information... View Details
Keywords: Passive Ownership; ETFs; Market Efficiency; Price; Investment Funds; Stocks; Communication
- June 2025
- Case
Vail Resorts: Responding to Activist Pressure (A)
By: Benjamin C. Esty and Edward A. Meyer
On January 27, 2025, the head of a relatively small hedge fund named Late Apex Partners sent a highly critical letter to the board of directors of Vail Resorts, the world’s largest ski resort operator. In his letter, and the 88-slide presentation that accompanied his... View Details
Keywords: Corporate Finance; Capital Budgeting; Corporate Governance; Competitive Advantage; Competitive Strategy; Leading Change; Valuation; Investment Activism; Climate Change; Management Succession; Financial Management; Risk Management; Business and Shareholder Relations; Sports Industry; Entertainment and Recreation Industry; Travel Industry; United States; Australia; Canada
- Working Paper
Index Rebalancing and Stock Market Composition: Do Indexes Time the Market?
By: Marco Sammon and John J. Shim
Value-weighted indexes must rebalance in response to stock market composition changes, e.g., issuance, buybacks, and IPOs. In doing so, existing index funds implicitly engage in market timing. Index funds’ long-short rebalancing portfolios have a -3.5% annual return... View Details
- May 2025 (Revised June 2025)
- Background Note
Social Enterprise in Latin America
By: Brian L. Trelstad and Karina Souza
This research note provides an overview of the social enterprise ecosystem in Latin America, exploring current dynamics across key markets, including country-specific insights on Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, and Central America. In a region characterized... View Details
Keywords: Impact Investing; Developing Countries and Economies; Social Entrepreneurship; Emerging Markets; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Mission and Purpose; Ownership; Social Enterprise; Business Strategy; Equality and Inequality; Microfinance; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Banking Industry; Financial Services Industry; Information Technology Industry; Latin America; Brazil; Mexico; Argentina; Colombia; Chile; Guatemala; Central America; Peru; Uruguay
- 2025
- Working Paper
Data-driven Technologies and Local Information Advantages in Small Business Lending
By: Wilbur Chen, Jung Koo Kang and Aditya Mohan
We investigate whether banks' adoption of data-driven technologies influences competitive dynamics in local small business lending by diminishing the information advantages traditionally held by local banks. Using local newspaper closures as an adverse shock to the... View Details
- May 2025
- Case
'Net Zero in Action': Impact Investing at the McKnight Foundation
By: Lauren Cohen, Christina R. Wing and Sophia Pan
Elizabeth McGeveran, Vice President of Investments at the McKnight Foundation, reflected on how to effectively advance the organization’s net-zero strategy. The foundation had committed 10% of its endowment to building a portfolio of impact investments and was among... View Details
Keywords: Foundation; Impact Investing; ESG; Family Business; Forecasting and Prediction; Private Sector; Renewable Energy; Social Entrepreneurship; Climate Change; Environmental Sustainability; Green Technology; Financial Strategy; Investment Funds; Investment Portfolio; Institutional Investing; Corporate Accountability; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Mission and Purpose; Private Ownership; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Social Issues; Sustainable Cities; Financial Services Industry; Minnesota; United States
- 2025
- Working Paper
Corporate Actions as Moral Issues
By: Zwetelina Iliewa, Elisabeth Kempf and Oliver Spalt
We examine nonpecuniary preferences across a broad set of corporate actions using a representative sample of the U.S. population. Our core findings, based on large-scale online surveys, are that (i) self-reported nonpecuniary concerns are large both for stock market... View Details