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• Case | HBS Case Collection | 2013 (Revised from original 2013 version)

  Greylock Partners

  Felda Hardymon, Tom Nicholas and David Lane

  Citation:

  Hardymon, Felda, Tom Nicholas, and David Lane. "Greylock Partners." Harvard Business School Case 813-002, April 2013. (Revised from original January 2013 version.)

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• Working Paper | 2013

  How Elastic Are Preferences for Redistribution? Evidence from Randomized Survey Experiments

  Ilyana Kuziemko, Michael I. Norton, Emmanuel Saez and Stefanie Stantcheva

  This paper analyzes the effects of information about inequality and taxes on preferences for redistribution using randomized online surveys on Amazon Mechanical Turk (mTurk). About 5,000 respondents were randomized into treatments providing interactive information on U.S. income inequality, the link between top income tax rates and economic growth, and the estate tax. We find that the informational treatment has very large effects on whether respondents view inequality as an important problem. By contrast, we find quantitatively small effects of the treatment on views about policy and redistribution: support for taxing the rich increases slightly, support for transfers to the poor does not, especially among those with lower incomes and education. An exception is the estate tax — we find that informing respondents that it affects only the very richest families has an extremely large positive effect on estate tax support, even increasing respondents' willingness to write to their U.S. senator about the issue. We also find that the treatment substantially decreases trust in government, potentially mitigating respondents' willingness to translate concerns about inequality into government action. Methodologically, we explore different strategies to lower attrition in online survey platforms and show our main results are robust across methods. A small follow-up survey one month later reveals that our results persist over time. Finally, we compare mTurk with other survey vendors and provide suggestions to future researchers considering this platform.

  Citation:

  Kuziemko, Ilyana, Michael I. Norton, Emmanuel Saez, and Stefanie Stantcheva. "How Elastic Are Preferences for Redistribution? Evidence from Randomized Survey Experiments." NBER Working Paper Series, No. 18865, March 2013.

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• Case | HBS Case Collection | 2013

  Brazos Partners and the Tri-Northern Exit

  Matthew Rhodes-Kropf and Nathaniel Burbank

  Randall Fojtasek, a partner at the Dallas-based Brazos Private Equity Partners, must decide whether now is the time to sell his firm's investment in Tri-Northern Distribution. Brazos, a middle-market leveraged buyout group, created the company two years earlier through the acquisition of two electronic security distribution companies: Tri-Ed Distribution and Northern Video Systems. Twenty-four months after successfully integrating the two companies, Brazos has received two attractive offers for the combined distributor. With the company's management projecting double-digit growth for 2012, however, it is far from clear that now is the optimal time to exit from the firm's third fund.

  Keywords: Private Equity Exit; LBO; Leveraged Buyout Transaction; Texas; Distribution; Security; Brazos; Tri-Northern; Tri-Ed; Northern Video; private equity;

  Citation:

  Rhodes-Kropf, Matthew, and Nathaniel Burbank. "Brazos Partners and the Tri-Northern Exit." Harvard Business School Case 813-157, March 2013.

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