Publications

2024
Working Paper

How Inflation Expectations De-Anchor: The Role of Selective Memory Cues

By: Nicola Gennaioli, Marta Leva, Raphael Schoenle and Andrei Shleifer

In a model of memory and selective recall, household inflation expectations remain rigid when inflation is anchored but exhibit sharp instability during inflation surges, as similarity prompts retrieval of forgotten high-inflation experiences. Using data from the New... View Details

Keywords: Cognition and Thinking; Inflation and Deflation; Personal Finance

June 2024 (Revised February 2025)
Case

Accounting for Loans at SoFi Technologies

By: Joseph Pacelli and Michael Norris

At the release of its first quarter earnings report on May 1, 2023, digital bank SoFi beat its earnings guidance by 25%. On May 2, Wedbush Securities analyst David Chiaverini issued a report downgrading the stock. A second downgrade followed from Chiaverini on May 15.... View Details

Keywords: Accounting; Banks and Banking; Financing and Loans; Valuation; Stocks; Banking Industry; United States

Educators

June 2024
Article

Real Growth in Space Manufacturing Output Substantially Exceeds Growth in the Overall Space Economy

By: Tina Highfill and Matthew Weinzierl

Accurately measuring real economic output in the space economy is made difficult by the rapid increase in capabilities and decrease in prices of launch and satellite technologies achieved over the past two decades. Nominal measures of output in space will tend to... View Details

Keywords: Technological Innovation; Economic Growth; Price; Production; Aerospace Industry

June 2024
Article

The Monitoring Role of Social Media

By: Jonas Heese and Joseph Pacelli

In this study, we examine whether social media activity can reduce corporate misconduct. We use the staggered introduction of 3G mobile broadband access across the United States to identify exogenous increases in social media activity and test whether access to 3G... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Misconduct; Twitter; Corporate Accountability; Mobile and Wireless Technology; Social and Collaborative Networks

(Revised May 2024)
Teaching Note

Lyric Dinner Theater (A) and (B)

By: Richard G. Hamermesh, Jim Sharpe and Noah Fisher

This teaching note is associated with HBS cases 813-043 and 813-044. View Details

Keywords: Turnarounds; Turnaround; Operations Management; Family Business; Family-owned Business; Hiring; Careers; Sales; Operations; Entrepreneurship; Negotiation; Entertainment and Recreation Industry; Saint Louis

March 2024
Supplement

Miracle Therapeutics (B)

By: Satish Tadikonda, William Marks and Wendi Yajnik

Supplements the (A) case. Following on the negotiations detailed in the Miracle Therapeutics (A) case, Beth Sharp and Jennifer Brilliant from Miracle Therapeutics face new challenges with their company's funding and intellectual property (IP) after several missteps.... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Financing and Loans; Intellectual Property; Problems and Challenges; Business or Company Management

2024
Article

Half the Firms, Double the Profits: Public Firms' Transformation, 1996–2022

By: Mark J. Roe and Charles C.Y. Wang

The number of public firms in the United States has halved since the beginning of the twenty-first century, causing consternation among corporate and securities law regulators. The dominant explanations, often advanced by Securities and Exchange commissioners when... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Law; Securities Regulation; Sarbanes-Oxley Act; Concentration Levels; Antitrust; Initial Public Offering; Public Ownership; Private Equity; Venture Capital; Mergers and Acquisitions; Monopoly; United States

SSRN

2023
Working Paper

Causal Interpretation of Structural IV Estimands

By: Isaiah Andrews, Nano Barahona, Matthew Gentzkow, Ashesh Rambachan and Jesse M. Shapiro

We study the causal interpretation of instrumental variables (IV) estimands of nonlinear, multivariate structural models with respect to rich forms of model misspecification. We focus on guaranteeing that the researcher's estimator is sharp zero consistent, meaning... View Details

Keywords: Mathematical Methods

September 2023
Case

The Meteoric Rise of Skims

By: Ayelet Israeli, Jill Avery and Leonard A. Schlesinger

Since its founding in 2019 by Kim Kardashian and Jens Grede, Skims, a solutions-oriented brand creating the next generation of underwear, loungewear, and shapewear with an eye toward body-type and skin-tone inclusivity, has experienced a meteoric rise. Kardashian, who... View Details

Educators

July 2023 (Revised July 2024)
Case

Miracle Therapeutics: Negotiating an IP License (A)

By: Satish Tadikonda, Michael Singer, William Marks and Wendi Yajnik

(General Experience Case) Beth Sharp and Jennifer Brilliant founded Miracle Therapeutics based on intellectual property developed by Brilliant and her post-doctoral student, John Supreme, in Brilliant’s lab at Elite University (EU). Miracle will have to obtain a... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Entrepreneurship; Patents; Negotiation Process

Educators

2023
Working Paper

The Party and Firm

By: Joris Mueller, Jaya Y. Wen and Cheryl Wu

This project documents the rise of the Chinese Communist Party’s influence on firms in China over the last decade. We propose novel quantitative measures of Party influence and present recent trends in those measures. We corroborate qualitative work and find a sharp... View Details

Keywords: Business and Government Relations; Economic Systems; Power and Influence; Government Administration; Policy; China

2023
Working Paper

Firm Purpose and Problem Wickedness: A Review of the Academic Literature

By: Caroline Adelson, Charlotte Kuller, Cate Tompkins, Ellora Sarkar, Samantha Price and Marco Iansiti

Our understanding of the firm’s role in society has evolved greatly over the past 70 years, with more recent years seeing a sharp rise in interest for how firms can contribute more than profits to society – that is, have a purpose beyond profits. Businesses engaged in... View Details

Keywords: Mission and Purpose; Problems and Challenges

February 2023
Supplement

Performance Management at Afreximbank (B)

By: Robert S. Kaplan, Siko Sikochi, Anna Ngarachu and Namrata Arora

Supplements the (A) case. Founded in October 1993, the Cairo-based African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) was a specialized continental financial institution designed to address the low level of intra-African trade, the decline in financial flows to Africa, the... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19 Pandemic; Performance Evaluation; Organizational Culture; Crisis Management; Banking Industry; Africa

2023
Working Paper

Distributionally Robust Causal Inference with Observational Data

By: Dimitris Bertsimas, Kosuke Imai and Michael Lingzhi Li

We consider the estimation of average treatment effects in observational studies and propose a new framework of robust causal inference with unobserved confounders. Our approach is based on distributionally robust optimization and proceeds in two steps. We first... View Details

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Mathematical Methods

November 2022
Article

The Sharp Spikes of Poverty: Financial Scarcity Is Related to Higher Levels of Distress Intensity in Daily Life

By: Jon M. Jachimowicz, Erin L. Frey, Sandra C. Matz, Bertus F. Jeronimus and Adam D. Galinsky

Although income is an important predictor of life satisfaction, the precise forces that drive this relationship remain unclear. We propose that financial resources afford individuals a path to reducing the distressing impact of everyday hassles, in turn increasing... View Details

Keywords: Distress; Affect; Control; Financial Scarcity; Life Satisfaction; Income; Poverty; Well-being