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- April 2025
- Article
Serving with a Smile on Airbnb: Analyzing the Economic Returns and Behavioral Underpinnings of the Host’s Smile
By: Shunyuan Zhang, Elizabeth Friedman, Kannan Srinivasan, Ravi Dhar and Xupin Zhang
Non-informational cues, such as facial expressions, can significantly influence judgments and interpersonal impressions. While past research has explored how smiling affects business outcomes in offline or in-store contexts, relatively less is known about how smiling... View Details
- March 2025
- Case
Hurtigruten: Sea Zero
By: Christian Kaps and Michael W. Toffel
Hurtigruten was deciding whether the next ship they built should be fully electric. But such a vessels's battery, the size of electric cars, needed to be charged on the ship's multi-day voyage along the Norwegian coast. Before making such a $250 million investment, the... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Transferability MATTRs: Towards Understanding Antecedents of Strategic Licensing
By: Dafna F. Bearson and Maria P. Roche
This paper examines the antecedents of firms’ decisions to license intellectual property
(IP). We propose a conceptual framework emphasizing two critical factors: (1) transferability,
which we define as the ease of moving knowledge embodied in inventions across
firm... View Details
- February 2025
- Tutorial
Preparing Business Leaders for an Era of Climate Instability: Understanding and Managing Physical Climate Risk
By: Michael W. Toffel and Spencer Glendon
In this compelling video, Spencer Glendon, founder of Probable Futures and Executive Fellow at Harvard Business School, describes the profound implications of climate change for businesses, the economy, and societies around the world. Drawing from his background in... View Details
Keywords: Risk; Uncertainty; Modeling; Climate Change; Adaptation; Risk and Uncertainty; Risk Management
- January 2025
- Supplement
Hippo: Weathering the Storm of the Home Insurance Crisis (B)
By: Lauren Cohen, Grace Headinger and Sophia Pan
Rick McCathron, CEO of Hippo, was optimistic about the InsurTech's path to profitability after navigating the financial uncertainties of 2022. By bundling their home insurance services with third-parties and established insurance incumbents, Hippo was adopting a... View Details
Keywords: Fintech; Underwriters; Big Data; Homeowners' Insurance; Catastrophe Risk; Global Warming; Environment; Business Economics; Vertical Specialization; Bundling; Economies Of Scale; Business Model; Forecasting and Prediction; Climate Change; Environmental Sustainability; Green Technology; Technological Innovation; Natural Environment; Natural Disasters; Weather; Business Strategy; Competitive Advantage; Business Earnings; Insurance; Social Issues; Insurance Industry; California; United States
- January 2025
- Supplement
Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Young Minister Confronts the Challenges of Montgomery (B)
By: Nien-hê Hsieh and Derek C. M. van Bever
Recounts a pivotal moment in Martin Luther King Jr.'s life during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, where a profound prayer amidst threats to his life renewed his faith and resolve to lead the movement. This transformative experience marked the beginning of his lifelong... View Details
- January 2025
- Article
Communication Within Firms: Evidence from CEO Turnovers
By: Stephen Michael Impink, Andrea Prat and Raffaella Sadun
This paper uses novel, firm-level communication measures derived from communications metadata several months before and after a CEO transition for 102 firms to study whether and how this organizational event is reflected in employees’ communication flows. We find that... View Details
- 2025
- Article
Statistical Inference for Heterogeneous Treatment Effects Discovered by Generic Machine Learning in Randomized Experiments
By: Kosuke Imai and Michael Lingzhi Li
Researchers are increasingly turning to machine learning (ML) algorithms to investigate causal heterogeneity in randomized experiments. Despite their promise, ML algorithms may fail to accurately ascertain heterogeneous treatment effects under practical settings with... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Hidden Risk
By: Daniel Barth, Phillip Monin, Emil Siriwardane and Adi Sunderam
Since 2013, large U.S. hedge fund advisers have been required to report risk exposures in their regulatory filings. Using these data, we first establish that managers’ perceptions of risk contain useful information that is not embedded in fund returns. Investor flows... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
How Do Global Portfolio Investors Hedge Currency Risk?
By: Robin Greenwood and Alex Cheema-Fox
We use monthly portfolio data from one of the world’s largest custodian banks, with over $40 trillion assets under custody, to study how global portfolio investors hedge foreign exchange risk in their equity and fixed income portfolios over the past 25 years. The data... View Details
- October 2024
- Article
On Why Women-owned Businesses Take More Time to Secure Microloans
By: Goran Calic, Moren Lévesque and Anton Shevchenko
Examining gender differences in business financing reveals important dimensions on which women- and men-owned businesses differ. Although considerable progress has been made in understanding gender differences in mobilizing resources, the role of time in business... View Details
- October 2024
- Case
Southern California Industrial: Freezer Drive
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, a Boston based real estate private equity firm was seeking to make their very first West Coast investments in hopes of establishing their presence in the strategic region. An exciting property suddenly became available on the... View Details
- September 2024
- Case
Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners: Leading the Energy Transition
By: John Macomber and Maxwell Nii Laryea
A leading global infrastructure fund debates whether and when to become engaged in the electrolysis and distribution of hydrogen, as part of the hydrogen economy and the global transtion to a net zero energy world. The proposed billion dollar project consists of ... View Details
Keywords: Energy; Infrastructure; Energy Generation; Renewable Energy; Project Finance; Energy Industry; Spain
- September 2024
- Case
InfraCredit and the Project Inception Facility
By: John Macomber, Namrata Arora and Maagatha Kalavadakken
Around the world, large infrastructure projects are frequently stymied by the high cost and high uncertainty of the project inception phase: the research and engineering and planning prior to financial close and start of construction. Could there be a new kind of... View Details
Keywords: Infrastructure; Financial Institutions; Financial Instruments; Cost; Cash Flow; Capital; Assets; Financial Markets; Financial Strategy; Insurance; Energy; Product Development; Risk and Uncertainty; Business Strategy; Credit; Financial Services Industry; Energy Industry; Banking Industry; Africa; Nigeria
- September 2024
- Supplement
Red Hen Baking Company (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 "Red... View Details
Abstract: This (B) case supplement is designed for use by faculty only to support classroom instruction in conjunction with "Red... View Details
- September 2024 (Revised December 2024)
- Case
Sona Comstar and Blackstone: Unlocking Value Through Business Transformation
By: Ranjay Gulati and Kanika Jain
Private equity firm Blackstone’s majority investment in automotive systems manufacturer Sona Comstar had culminated in the largest IPO in the Indian auto components industry in 2021, with stellar returns for all involved. This EV supplier was the result of a 2019... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Finance Without Exotic Risk
By: Pedro Bordalo, Nicola Gennaioli, Rafael La Porta and Andrei Shleifer
We address the joint hypothesis problem in cross-sectional asset pricing by using measured analyst expectations of earnings growth. We construct a firm-level measure of Expectations Based Returns (EBRs) that uses analyst forecast errors and revisions and shuts down any... View Details
- August 2024
- Case
Circle: Reinventing the Future of Money
By: Shikhar Ghosh and Shweta Bagai
In early 2024, Circle Internet Financial's leadership team gathered to discuss the company's strategic path as it prepared for an IPO. Founded in 2013 by Jeremy Allaire, Circle had emerged as a pioneer in digital finance through its USD Coin (USDC), a regulated... View Details
- 2024
- Article
Neyman Meets Causal Machine Learning: Experimental Evaluation of Individualized Treatment Rules
By: Michael Lingzhi Li and Kosuke Imai
A century ago, Neyman showed how to evaluate the efficacy of treatment using a randomized experiment under a minimal set of assumptions. This classical repeated sampling framework serves as a basis of routine experimental analyses conducted by today’s scientists across... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
The Rise of Alternatives
By: Juliane Begenau, Pauline Liang and Emil Siriwardane
Since the 2000s, U.S. public pensions have shifted their risky investments towards alternative assets like private equity and hedge funds, some more aggressively than others. We explore several explanations for these cross-sectional trends, focusing on those implied by... View Details