Faculty & Research - Business & Environment

February 2021 (Revised February 2021)
Teaching Material

Project Helios: Harvesting the Sun

Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 219-009.

February 2021
Case

AptDeco: Circular Economy Furniture Marketplace

By: Ayelet Israeli and Jamie Merkrebs

AptDeco, a used furniture marketplace was growing rapidly in the tri-state area. The Co-Founders were confident that the business model, financial position, and unit economics positioned AptDeco for scaling in the massive $120 billion furniture market, despite its...

February 03, 2021
Harvard Business Review Digital Articles

Reimagining the Balanced Scorecard for the ESG Era

By: Robert S. Kaplan and David McMillan

Companies are increasingly aware that their customers and society in general expect businesses to adopt and work towards social and environmental objectives as well as the traditional financial ones. This involves not only re-evaluating firms’ models but re-imagining...

January 2021
Teaching Material

Bespoken Spirits: Disrupting Distilling

By: Benjamin C. Esty and Daniel Fisher

On October 7, 2020, Bespoken Spirits publicly announced it had received $2.6 million of seed funding for its “sustainable maturation process,” a process that could produce award-winning whiskey’s in just days rather than years using a novel technology and data science....

January 2021
Case

Bespoken Spirits: Disrupting Distilling

By: Benjamin C. Esty and Daniel Fisher

On October 7, 2020, Bespoken Spirits publicly announced it had received $2.6 million of seed funding for its “sustainable maturation process,” a process that could produce award-winning whiskey’s in just days rather than years using a novel technology and data science....

2021
Working Paper

Stock Price Reactions to ESG News: The Role of ESG Ratings and Disagreement

By: George Serafeim and Aaron Yoon

We investigate whether ESG ratings predict future ESG news and the associated market reactions. We find that the consensus rating predicts future news, but its predictive ability diminishes for firms with large disagreement between raters. Relation between news and...

Institutional Investor

Why ESG Funds Fail to Scale

By: Gabriel Karageorgiou and George Serafeim

You’ve seen the headlines about the growth in environmental, social, and governance funds. Many investment professionals might read these and believe that launching a new ESG investment firm or ESG offering will be an automatic success. Our analysis of the data shows...

11 Jan 2021
Working Paper Summaries

Accounting for Product Impact in the Airlines Industry

by George Serafeim and Katie Trinh

                                       A systematic methodology for measuring product impact can be applied across a range of industries. Examining two competitor companies in the airlines industry, this study finds that analyzing each dimension of product impact allows for deeper understanding of each...

January 2021
Case

Rio Tinto Aluminum: Can Purpose Lead to Profit?

By: David Fubini and Agastya Muthanna

This case describes the tradeoffs Rio Tinto faces as it considers investments to ensure environmentally friendly, sustainability produced aluminum with the potential risks of competitive pricing and profit loses.

05 Jan 2021
Working Paper Summaries

The ESG-Innovation Disconnect: Evidence from Green Patenting

by Lauren Cohen, Umit G. Gurun, and Quoc H. Nguyen

                                       Energy-producing firms are more likely to produce “blockbuster” green patents than other firms. Yet energy firms are excluded from many environmental, social, and governance (ESG) funds, and are the targets of divestiture campaigns whose stated aims often include green...

2021
Working Paper

Pricing of Climate Risk Insurance: Regulatory Frictions and Cross-Subsidies

By: Ishita Sen and Ana-Maria Tenekedjieva

Homeowners’ insurance provides households financial protection from climate losses. To improve access and affordability, state regulators impose price controls on insurance companies. Using novel data, we construct a new measure of rate setting frictions for individual...

December 2020 (Revised December 2020)
Case

Kerry Group: Inspiring Food, Nourishing Life

By: Forest L. Reinhardt, Jose B. Alvarez, Damien McLoughlin, Tonia Labruyere and Tonia Junker

The Irish company Kerry Group, one of the leading global players in the taste and nutrition industry, wants to ensure its future growth in developing and developed markets. Founded in 1972 as a dairy cooperative, it had grown into a provider of taste and nutrition...