Faculty & Research

• HBS Book

In Build the Life You Want, Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey invite you to begin a journey toward greater happiness no matter how challenging your circumstances. Drawing on cutting-edge science and their years of helping people translate ideas into action, they show you how to improve your life right now instead of waiting for the outside world to change.

• Management Science 69, no. 8 (August 2023): 4864–4887.

We examine whether rating agencies act defensively toward issuers with a higher likelihood of default. We find that agencies' qualitative soft rating adjustments are more accurate as issuers' default risk grows, as evidenced by the adjustments leading to lower Type I and Type II error rates and better prediction of default and default recovery losses. We also find that soft adjustments' relevance increases with issuers' default risk, as evidenced by the adjustments being more predictive of initial offering yields and leading to a greater market reaction to rating changes.

• Business History

In the aftermath of violent conflict, identifying former enemy collaborators versus innocent bystanders forced to flee violence is difficult. In post-conflict settings, internally displaced persons (IDPs) risk becoming stigmatized and face difficulties reintegrating into society. This work considers the role of moral disapproval and future social value in processes of post-conflict reconciliation with stigmatized IDPs. We run two conjoint experiments embedded within a large-N face-to-face survey across three areas of Iraq (n=4,592) experiencing the return of stigmatized IDPs, many of whom are suspected of having collaborated with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

• Featured Case

A new client portfolio manager at a quantitative investment management firm must explain why her firm, Optimalen Capital, has rebalanced a client portfolio with a set of trades that seem unintuitive. In particular, Optimalen has added to its position of Walmart (ticker = WMT) and reduced its position in Tesla (TSLA) despite the latter having a much higher forecast return. She also must compute breakeven returns for two other stocks, Exxon Mobil (XOM) and Duke Energy (DUK).

• Featured Case

Dena Almansoori, the first female and one of the youngest members of the United Arab Emirates-based e&’s leadership team, joined in 2020 just before e& began a strategic transition from being a regional telecommunications company to becoming a global technology company. As the group’s chief HR officer, Almansoori had a key role to play in this transition. Her mandate was to build a culture that was a “magnet” for top global talent, such that e& would compete with the likes of Amazon and Google not only for customers, but employees too. Many deemed this to be a radically ambitious goal.

• HBS Working Paper

The past few years have seen an outpouring of articles and statements heralding the arrival of a new and more inclusive form of capitalism often called stakeholder capitalism. The new capitalism promises to strengthen companies, improve outcomes for their constituencies, produce better returns for long-term shareholders, and ultimately strengthen the economy and society as a whole. In line with the new ideology, corporate boards and business leaders are being urged to replace the shareholder-centered approach to governance that has guided their work for the past several decades and, instead, to adopt a multi-stakeholder approach. In speaking with hundreds of corporate directors, executives, investors, governance professionals, and academics over the years, I’ve found wide differences in how stakeholder capitalism is understood and what it is thought to require of companies and their leaders.

• HBS Working Paper

In this paper, we aim to understand when private households invest in rooftop solar installations and battery storage, and how these investment decisions affect their electricity usage patterns as well as the market structure overall. We answer three main research questions: 1) What drives customers to combine solar power with storage installations; 2) How does privately-owned storage change consumer autonomy and the grid provider business model, and how heterogeneous is this effect across the population; 3) What effects do subsidies have on investments, demands, and carbon emissions. We develop a structural estimation model of residential electricity usage, that allows us to estimate a household's hourly consumption preferences, and a non-financial utility the household has for using self-generated solar power over grid-procured electricity; we call this utility greenness valuation.