Paul Healy is the James R. Williston Professor and Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Development at the Harvard Business School. His research covers a broad range of topics, including financial analysis, Wall Street research, corruption, governance, mergers and acquisitions, and business ethics. He joined the HBS faculty in 1998, after fourteen years on the faculty at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management, where he received awards for teaching excellence in 1991, 1992, and 1997. He received accounting and finance degrees from Victoria University in New Zealand (1976 and 1977) and a Ph.D. from the University of Rochester (1981). He has published widely in the leading academic and practitioner journals, has received numerous research rewards, and is the co-author of one of the leading financial analysis textbooks. He has taught MBA and executive courses on accounting, financial analysis, corporate boards, and ethical leadership.
Wall Street Research: Past, Present, and Future provides a timely account of the dramatic evolution of Wall Street research, examining its rise, fall, and reemergence. Despite regulatory, technological, and global forces that have transformed equity research in the last ten years, the industry has proven to be remarkably resilient and consistent. Boris Groysberg and Paul M. Healy get to the heart of Wall Street research—the analysts engaged in the process—and demonstrate how the analysts' roles have evolved, what drives their performance today, and how they stack up against their buy-side counterparts. The book unpacks key trends and describes how different firms have coped with shifting pressures. It concludes with an assessment of where equity research is headed in emerging markets, drawing conclusions about this often overlooked corner of Wall Street and the industry's future challenges.
Corruption is the greatest impediment to conducting business in Russia, according to leaders recently surveyed by the World Economic Forum. Indeed, it's a problem in many emerging markets. The paper on which this article is based argues that businesses have a role to play in combatting it.
The paper focuses on RosPil--an anticorruption entity in Russia set up by Alexey Navalny, a crusader against public and private malfeasance in that country. As of December 2011, RosPil claimed to have prevented the granting of dubious contracts worth US $1 billion. The organization holds corrupt politicians' and bureaucrats' feet to the fire largely through Internet-based crowd-sourcing, whereby people (often anonymous) identify requests for government issued tenders that are designed to generate kickbacks.
Should entities like RosPil be supported? Should companies fashion their own responses to corruption? On the one hand, there are obvious public-relations and political risks; on the other hand, corruption can erode a firm's competitiveness, the trust of customers and employees, and even the very legitimacy of capitalism.
We argue that heads of many multinational companies are well positioned to combat corruption in emerging markets. Those leaders have the power to enforce politicies in their organizations and networks, and they enjoy the ability to organize others in the industray against this pernicious threat.
This book provides a framework for business analysis that can be used in a variety of contexts.
The four analysis steps include:
Strategy analysis: Identifying a firm's strategy and understanding any sources of competitive advantage;
Accounting analysis: Assessing how a firm's financial statements reflect its economics, and determining whether any adjustments are needed;
Financial analysis: Evaluating a firm's performance using ratios and cash flow data; and
Prospective analysis: Forecasting future performance and estimating value.
These steps are then applied to a variety of business contexts, including securities analysis, credit analysis, merger & acquisition decisions, and governance.
Regulators and academics have emphasized the conflicts of interest faced by Wall Street (sell-side) analysts. In contrast, analysts who work for investment firms, known as buy-side analysts, do not face these conflicts and, as a result, presumably make superior investment recommendations. this research focuses on buy- and sell-side analysts' decisions on which stocks to recommend, and the performance of those recommendations. It shows that, in contrast to popular perceptions, Wall Street analysts' recommendations, although more optimistic, are more profitable than those for buy-side peers. This performance difference reflects buy-side analysts' incentives to recommend only large liquid stocks.
Multinationals frequently operate in locations where laws against corruption are not widely enforced. We examine ratings of self-reported anticorruption efforts for 480 multinationals to better understand what factors underlie their efforts and their performance consequences. Not surprisingly, country and industry corruption risks, as well as regulatory enforcement and monitoring, are important drivers of firms' anti-corruption efforts. Performance tests suggest that firms' decisions on how to manage corruption risk are as much ethical as economic. Co-authored by George Serafeim
On November 15, 2006, German prosecutors raided offices and homes of Siemens AG staff as part of an ongoing investigation into bribery. The subsequent investigations covered business representing 60% of Siemens' revenues and spanned operations in Asia, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas. Through interviews with key Siemens executives and supporting internal materials, this multimedia case takes a look at how one of the world's largest companies faced corruption head-on.
