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    • HBS Book

    Private Equity

    By: Paul A. Gompers and Steven N. Kaplan

    This Advanced Introduction provides an illustrative guide to private equity, integrating insights from academic research with examples to derive practical recommendations. Paul Gompers and Steven Kaplan begin by reviewing the history of private equity then exploring the evidence on performance of private equity investments at both the portfolio company level and fund level, documenting the creation of economic value. The book then presents a set of actionable frameworks for driving value creation in private equity investments. It concludes by examining how private equity investors raise funds and how they successfully manage their private equity firms.

    • HBS Book

    Private Equity

    By: Paul A. Gompers and Steven N. Kaplan

    This Advanced Introduction provides an illustrative guide to private equity, integrating insights from academic research with examples to derive practical recommendations. Paul Gompers and Steven Kaplan begin by reviewing the history of private equity then exploring the evidence on performance of private equity investments at both the portfolio...

    • Journal of Financial Economics 148, no. 2 (May 2023): 150-173.

    Political Ideology and International Capital Allocation

    By: Elisabeth Kempf, Mancy Luo, Larissa Schäfer and Margarita Tsoutsoura

    Does investors' political ideology shape international capital allocation? We provide evidence from two settings—syndicated corporate loans and equity mutual funds—to show ideological alignment with foreign governments affects the cross-border capital allocation by U.S. institutional investors. Ideological alignment on both economic and social issues plays a role. Our empirical strategy ensures direct economic effects of foreign elections or government ties between countries are not driving the result. Ideological distance between countries also explains variation in bilateral investment. Combined, our findings imply ideological alignment is an important, omitted factor in models of international capital allocation.

    • Journal of Financial Economics 148, no. 2 (May 2023): 150-173.

    Political Ideology and International Capital Allocation

    By: Elisabeth Kempf, Mancy Luo, Larissa Schäfer and Margarita Tsoutsoura

    Does investors' political ideology shape international capital allocation? We provide evidence from two settings—syndicated corporate loans and equity mutual funds—to show ideological alignment with foreign governments affects the cross-border capital allocation by U.S. institutional investors. Ideological alignment on both economic and social...

    • Business & Environment Initiative

    Patagonia: 'Earth Is Now Our Only Shareholder'

    By: Brian Trelstad, Nien-hê Hsieh, Michael Norris and Susan Pinckney

    Patagonia’s change of ownership from a privately held company to a perpetual purpose trust and 501(c)(4) nonprofit in order to use the company’s profit to fight the environmental crisis and be a model for future businesses.

    • Business & Environment Initiative

    Patagonia: 'Earth Is Now Our Only Shareholder'

    By: Brian Trelstad, Nien-hê Hsieh, Michael Norris and Susan Pinckney

    Patagonia’s change of ownership from a privately held company to a perpetual purpose trust and 501(c)(4) nonprofit in order to use the company’s profit to fight the environmental crisis and be a model for future businesses.

    • Featured Case

    Inclusion and Diversity at Mars Petcare

    By: Katherine Coffman and Tom Quinn

    In 2020, the Mars Petcare Leadership Team found themselves dealing with critically important inclusion and diversity issues. Social unrest, including unprecedented protests for racial justice in the U.S. and across the globe, generated an urgency for substantive action. Mars Petcare's 100,000 employees were ready for visible signs of progress. How could they build on their existing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion efforts and effectively capitalize on the energy for change?

    • Featured Case

    Inclusion and Diversity at Mars Petcare

    By: Katherine Coffman and Tom Quinn

    In 2020, the Mars Petcare Leadership Team found themselves dealing with critically important inclusion and diversity issues. Social unrest, including unprecedented protests for racial justice in the U.S. and across the globe, generated an urgency for substantive action. Mars Petcare's 100,000 employees were ready for visible signs of progress. How...

    • Featured Case

    Walmart’s Live Better U

    By: Boris Groysberg, Annelena Lobb and Kerry Herman

    Walmart’s Live Better U (LBU) program, which allowed its frontline employees and managers to attend college at Walmart’s expense, had expanded and changed over the course of five years. How could Walmart better develop the program for its associates and use it to meet the company’s own talent needs?

    • Featured Case

    Walmart’s Live Better U

    By: Boris Groysberg, Annelena Lobb and Kerry Herman

    Walmart’s Live Better U (LBU) program, which allowed its frontline employees and managers to attend college at Walmart’s expense, had expanded and changed over the course of five years. How could Walmart better develop the program for its associates and use it to meet the company’s own talent needs?

    • HBS Working Paper

    Using GPT for Market Research

    By: James Brand, Ayelet Israeli and Donald Ngwe

    Large language models (LLMs) have quickly become popular as labor-augmenting tools for programming, writing, and many other processes that benefit from quick text generation. In this paper we explore the uses and benefits of LLMs for researchers and practitioners who aim to understand consumer preferences. In contrast to prior work, we focus on the distributional nature of LLM responses, and query GPT to generate hundreds of survey responses to each prompt. We offer two sets of results to illustrate our approach and assess it. First, we show that the Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) model, a widely-used LLM, responds to sets of survey questions in ways that are consistent with economic theory and well-documented patterns of consumer behavior, including downward-sloping demand curves and state dependence. Second, we show that estimates of willingness-to-pay for products and features generated by GPT-3 are of realistic magnitudes and match estimates from a recent study that elicited preferences from human consumers.

    • HBS Working Paper

    Using GPT for Market Research

    By: James Brand, Ayelet Israeli and Donald Ngwe

    Large language models (LLMs) have quickly become popular as labor-augmenting tools for programming, writing, and many other processes that benefit from quick text generation. In this paper we explore the uses and benefits of LLMs for researchers and practitioners who aim to understand consumer preferences. In contrast to prior work, we focus on...

    • HBS Working Paper

    Complexity and Time

    By: Maya Balakrishnan, Jimin Nam and Ryan W. Buell

    Companies are facing increased pressure to “walk the talk” on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in their operations. One specific call-to-action from stakeholders is the public disclosure of EEO-1s. Companies with 100+ employees are federally mandated to annually report the intersectional diversity data of their workforce in the EEO-1. We examine how consumers perceive the strategic decision companies make regarding whether to disclose workforce diversity information. We find no evidence that a company’s disclosure of its workforce diversity data negatively affects attitudes or perceived company commitment to diversity, even when it reveals racial disparities across job categories. Instead, we find that consumers perceive firms that disclose their workforce data more positively and to be more committed to DEI initiatives, relative to firms that choose not to disclose, particularly when these disclosures reveal diversity within the workforce.

    • HBS Working Paper

    Complexity and Time

    By: Maya Balakrishnan, Jimin Nam and Ryan W. Buell

    Companies are facing increased pressure to “walk the talk” on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in their operations. One specific call-to-action from stakeholders is the public disclosure of EEO-1s. Companies with 100+ employees are federally mandated to annually report the intersectional diversity data of their workforce in the EEO-1. We...

Initiatives & Projects

Private Capital Project

The Private Capital Project facilitates deeper interaction between academia and practitioners in the Venture Capital and Private Equity industries, to understand the big challenges facing constituents and to work on potential solutions.
→All Initiatives & Projects

Seminars & Conferences

Jul 18
  • 18 Jul 2023

Early-Career Behavioral Economics Conference

Jul 31
  • 31 Jul 2023

Future of AI and Economics

→More Seminars & Conferences

Recent Publications

Leading with Trust: Sarah Al-Suhaimi Video Supplement

By: Sandra J. Sucher, Sarah Livick-Moses and Dave Habeeb
  • June 2023 |
  • Supplement |
  • Faculty Research
This supplement features video interviews with Sarah Al Suhaimi, CEO of NCB Capital, the investment arm of Saudi's largest bank.
Citation
Purchase
Related
Sucher, Sandra J., Sarah Livick-Moses, and Dave Habeeb. "Leading with Trust: Sarah Al-Suhaimi Video Supplement." Harvard Business School Multimedia/Video Supplement 323-701, June 2023.

Design-Based Confidence Sequences: A General Approach to Risk Mitigation in Online Experimentation

By: Dae Woong Ham, Michael Lindon, Martin Tingley and Iavor I Bojinov
  • 2023 |
  • Working Paper |
  • Faculty Research
Randomized experiments have become the standard method for companies to evaluate the performance of new products or services. In addition to augmenting managers’ decision-making, experimentation mitigates risk by limiting the proportion of customers exposed to innovation. Since many experiments are on customers arriving sequentially, a potential solution is to allow managers to “peek” at the results when new data becomes available and stop the test if the results are statistically significant. Unfortunately, peeking invalidates the statistical guarantees for standard statistical analysis and leads to uncontrolled type-1 error. Our paper provides valid design-based confidence sequences, sequences of confidence intervals with uniform type-1 error guarantees over time for various sequential experiments in an assumption-light manner. In particular, we focus on finite-sample estimands defined on the study participants as a direct measure of the incurred risks by companies. Our proposed confidence sequences are valid for a large class of experiments, including multi-armbandits, time series, and panel experiments. We further provide a variance reduction technique incorporating modeling assumptions and covariates. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach through a simulation study and three real-world applications from Netflix. Our results show that by using our confidence sequence, harmful experiments could be stopped after only observing a handful of units; for instance, an experiment that Netflix ran on its sign-up page on 30,000 potential customers would have been stopped by our method on the first day before 100 observations.
Citation
Related
Ham, Dae Woong, Michael Lindon, Martin Tingley, and Iavor I Bojinov. "Design-Based Confidence Sequences: A General Approach to Risk Mitigation in Online Experimentation." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 23-070, May 2023.

Location-Specificity and Geographic Competition for Remote Workers

By: Thomaz Teodorovicz, Prithwiraj Choudhury and Evan Starr
  • 2023 |
  • Working Paper |
  • Faculty Research
The precipitous growth of remote work has given rise to a new phenomenon: geographic competition between localities for the physical presence of remote workers. Remote workers with high general human capital may create value for their new destinations and reverse net talent outflow from smaller cities in middle America and globally. However, localities seeking to attract, retain, and create value from so-called “digital nomads” face significant challenges because such workers may have a low attachment to their new destination. Analogizing these challenges to the problem of creating and capturing value from workers with general human capital, we argue that localities can compete for remote workers by leveraging location-specific attributes which create value for the individual and the locality. We examined these ideas in the context of Tulsa Remote, a program that provides relocation incentives and a bundle of services to increase engagement and embeddedness in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We found that Tulsa Remote increased community engagement, real income, and entrepreneurship of remote workers, benefiting both the community and the individual. Tulsa Remote increased worker’s willingness to stay, and local community engagement is a key driver of this relationship. This work thus suggests that location-specificity enables localities to both create and capture value from remote workers.
Citation
Related
Teodorovicz, Thomaz, Prithwiraj Choudhury, and Evan Starr. "Location-Specificity and Geographic Competition for Remote Workers." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 23-071, May 2023.

How to Build a Life: Don’t Avoid Romance

By: Arthur C. Brooks
  • June 1, 2023 |
  • Article |
  • The Atlantic
Citation
Related
Brooks, Arthur C. "How to Build a Life: Don’t Avoid Romance." The Atlantic (June 1, 2023).

The High Cost of Neglecting Low-Wage Workers

By: Joseph B. Fuller and Manjari Raman
  • May–June 2023 |
  • Article |
  • Harvard Business Review
Citation
Related
Fuller, Joseph B., and Manjari Raman. "The High Cost of Neglecting Low-Wage Workers." Harvard Business Review (May–June 2023).

Should Your Start-up Be For-profit or Nonprofit?: A Guide for Social Entrepreneurs

By: Cait Brumme and Brian Trelstad
  • May–June 2023 |
  • Article |
  • Harvard Business Review
Years ago the line between nonprofit and for-profit enterprises was clear, but that has changed. Nonprofits now offer products that compete with those of the best for-profits, and for-profits can deliver as much social value as charities. Despite the blurred distinction, all mission-driven start-ups will eventually face a stark choice about which legal structure to adopt, and they need to make it carefully, because it’s hard to undo, say the authors, the CEO of a nonprofit accelerator and a partner in an impact investing fund. To guide their decision, social entrepreneurs should examine several questions: Is the market ready for a for-profit solution? Where is the available capital? And which structure would help the organization attract the talent and resources that it requires?
Citation
Related
Brumme, Cait, and Brian Trelstad. "Should Your Start-up Be For-profit or Nonprofit? A Guide for Social Entrepreneurs." Harvard Business Review 101, no. 3 (May–June 2023): 136–145.

Analytics for Marketers: When to Rely on Algorithms and When to Trust Your Gut

By: Fabrizio Fantini and Das Narayandas
  • May–June 2023 |
  • Article |
  • Harvard Business Review
Advanced analytics can help companies solve a host of management problems, including those related to marketing, sales, and supply-chain operations, which can lead to a sustainable competitive advantage. But as more data becomes available and advanced analytics are further refined, managers may struggle with when, where, and how much to incorporate machines into their business analytics, and to what extent they should bring their own judgment to bear when making data-driven decisions. In general, humans are better at decisions involving intuition and ambiguity resolution. Machines are far superior at decisions requiring deduction, granularity, and scalability. How can you find the right balance? There are three common approaches to analytics: descriptive, where decisions are made mainly by humans; predictive, which combines aspects of the other two; and prescriptive, which usually means autonomous management by machines. This article describes when and how to use each approach and examines the trade-offs and limitations. Although the focus is on marketing and sales, the principles may be applied more broadly.
Citation
Related
Fantini, Fabrizio, and Das Narayandas. "Analytics for Marketers: When to Rely on Algorithms and When to Trust Your Gut." Harvard Business Review 101, no. 3 (May–June 2023): 82–91.

The High Cost of Neglecting Low-Wage Workers: Six Mistakes That Companies Make—and How They Can Do Better

By: Joseph Fuller and Manjari Raman
  • May–June 2023 |
  • Article |
  • Harvard Business Review
Many companies blame outside factors for the trouble they’ve been having in finding and retaining frontline workers: the pandemic, the government’s stimulus checks, the intrinsic nature of low-wage work. The authors argue that in fact the real problem lies in six big mistakes companies themselves have long been making, in such basic areas as hiring, career development, and mentoring. They offer some practical suggestions for how leaders can do better, for their workers and their organizations.
Citation
Related
Fuller, Joseph, and Manjari Raman. "The High Cost of Neglecting Low-Wage Workers: Six Mistakes That Companies Make—and How They Can Do Better." Harvard Business Review 101, no. 3 (May–June 2023): 40–48.
More Publications

In The News

    • 06 Jun 2023
    • Cold Call

    The Opioid Crisis, CEO Pay, and Shareholder Activism

    Re: Suraj Srinivasan
    • 02 Jun 2023
    • MarketWatch: Best New Ideas in Money

    Podcast: Would $10,000 convince you to move to a new city?

    Re: Prithwiraj Choudhury
    • 01 Jun 2023
    • The University of Sydney Business School

    Banking on Australia's SMEs: the birth of a challenger

    Re: David Yoffie
    • 31 May 2023
    • HBS Working Knowledge

    With Predictive Analytics, Companies Can Tap the Ultimate Opportunity: Customers’ Routines

    Re: Eva Ascarza
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The Case Method

Introduced by HBS faculty to business education in 1925, the case method is a powerful interactive learning process that puts students in the shoes of a leader faced with a real-world management issue and challenges them to propose and justify a resolution.
Today, HBS remains an authority on teaching by the case method. The School is also the world’s leading case-writing institution, with HBS faculty members contributing hundreds of new cases to the management curriculum a year via the School’s unique case development and writing process.
→Browse HBS Case Collection
→Purchase Cases

Faculty Positions

Harvard Business School seeks candidates in all fields for full time positions. Candidates with outstanding records in PhD or DBA programs are encouraged to apply.
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