Faculty & Research

• HBS Book

This handbook provides a comprehensive overview of infrastructure financing from a global perspective. It offers an extensive examination of infrastructure financing worldwide. It encompasses a wide range of subjects concerning infrastructure finance, including different project types, financing options, and the functions performed by public and private sector entities in financing and overseeing infrastructure initiatives. Given that infrastructure investment is crucial to socio-economic growth and development, it has become a critical policy priority for governments, investors, and other stakeholders around the world. It is intended for a wide range of readers interested in infrastructure finance, including academics, researchers, students, policymakers, and practitioners.

• Journal of Finance 80, no. 5 (October 2025): 2591–2638.

We show that the role of unsecured, short-term wholesale funding for global banks has changed significantly in the post-financial-crisis regulatory environment. Global banks mainly use such funding to finance liquid, near risk-free arbitrage positions—in particular, the interest on excess reserves arbitrage and the covered interest rate parity arbitrage. In this environment, we examine the response of global banks to a large negative wholesale funding shock as a result of the U.S. money market mutual fund reform implemented in 2016. In contrast to past episodes of wholesale funding dry-ups, we find that the primary response of global banks to the reform was a cutback in arbitrage positions that relied on unsecured funding, rather than a reduction in loan provision.

• Organization Science 36, no. 5 (September-October 2025): 1643–1675.

Entrepreneurs often skillfully leverage symbolic actions to manage impressions and gain acceptance for their innovations. Impression management can generate interest, but also heighten expectations beyond an innovation’s capabilities, creating a gap between entrepreneurs’ symbolic presentations and an innovation’s performance. To convince critical audiences, entrepreneurs need to not just manage impressions, but also show how their innovations will integrate and work in situ. Yet, little research explains what happens when symbolic actions meet their limits. How do entrepreneurs respond when critical audiences challenge their symbolic actions? We examined how 28 digital health startups were challenged by a critical audience, buyers, revealing a gap between entrepreneurs’ symbolic presentations and the performance of their innovations.

• Featured Case

In May 2018, Samsonite appeared to be doing well—it was the world’s largest luggage maker, it had just acquired a well-regarded luxury brand, and its stock traded at record highs. However, short seller Blue Orca Capital saw warning signs, including flawed accounting, hidden conflicts, and shaky governance. This case explores Samsonite’s history, business and operations, and accounting policies. The story continues in Samsonite: The Short Seller’s Case (B) (126-006), which explores Blue Orca’s investigation, and Samsonite: The Rebuttal (C) (126-007), which explores Samsonite’s response.

• Featured Case

In 2025, Mostafa Terrab, Chairman of Morocco mining and fertilizer giant OCP, is assessing his senior leadership team’s progress on collaboration and synergies across his recently decentralized organization and his ambitious decarbonization goals. Terrab committed OCP to 100% carbon neutrality across scopes 1 and 2 by 2030, and scope 3 by 2040. One piece of this puzzle is cracking the code for producing green ammonia, a key input in OCP’s phosphate-based fertilizers. Terrab felt that synergies across OCP were at risk as was his green ammonia effort. Terrab is concerned the managing directors continue to focus on their own SBU’s goals rather than working together across their units to unleash their (and OCP’s) full potential. Further, Terrab’s aspiration for decarbonization across OCP is expensive. His green ammonia effort, a way to potentially revolutionize agriculture, is being resisted because of cost issues and technology questions.

• HBS Working Paper

This working paper argues that the use of bribery and corruption has historically been a well-established multinational strategy. It examines multiple cases of grand corruption by blue chip corporations in different time periods and geographies, although there is no means of confirming whether these prominent case studies were tips of an iceberg or outliers. The level of engagement in petty corruption cannot be established. The industrial distribution of multinational corruption has been especially skewed towards armaments and commodities. Its use was particularly prevalent in Africa, where it was frequently condoned by the home governments of the multinationals involved. Grand corruption was especially prominent when business involved large contracts with governments. Bribery was fueled by the pervasiveness of corruption in the host economies in which the multinationals operated, but the multinationals were active agents in facilitating further corruption. Although bribery and corruption are often associated in the public mind with rogue individuals, it has historically been more often the product of miscreant corporate cultures.

• Working Paper

Can credit hurt small businesses during times of uncertainty? We employ a re-gression discontinuity analysis that exploits a microfinance institution’s surprise credit freeze at the onset of Chile’s 2020 Covid shutdown. We document large and persistent harm to businesses that renewed their loan just before the freeze. Survey evidence suggests the harm was a consequence of making illiquid investments with the loan proceeds, shortly after disbursement. As a measure of external validity, we examine 21 randomized evaluations of microcredit and find treatment effects are negatively correlated with the World Uncertainty Index of Ahir et al. (2022).