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- October 2023
- Case
Accounting Red Flags or Red Herrings at Catalent?
By: Joseph Pacelli, ZeSean Ali and Tom Quinn
Fund manager Janet Curie asked for a recommendation about the pharmaceutical company Catalent. The company seemed like a solid investment. However, a pair of research reports issued over the previous two months complicated this narrative. GlassHouse Research, a short...
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Keywords:
Accounting Audits;
Budgets and Budgeting;
Business Earnings;
Earnings Management;
Cost Accounting;
Fair Value Accounting;
Financial Reporting;
Revenue Recognition;
Integrated Corporate Reporting;
Fairness;
Moral Sensibility;
Values and Beliefs;
Government Legislation;
Conflict of Interests;
Forms of Communication;
Announcements;
Blogs;
Debates;
Pharmaceutical Industry;
Accounting Industry;
United States
- Article
Update on E-liability Accounting
By: Robert Kaplan, Karthik Ramanna and Piyush Jha
Since publication of the original E-liability carbon accounting paper (HBR, Nov 2021), we created the E-liability Institute to help companies, governments, and nonprofits implement the method. The Institute’s mission is to test and validate the method, and develop...
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- 2023
- Working Paper
Much Ado About Nothing? Overreaction to Random Regulatory Audits
By: Samuel Antill and Joseph Kalmenovitz
Regulators often audit firms to detect non-compliance. Exploiting a natural experiment in the lobbying industry, we show that firms overreact to audits and this response distorts prices and reduces welfare. Each year, federal regulators audit a random sample of...
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- 2023
- Working Paper
Managing Remote Work Quality: Evidence from Management Systems Standards Auditing
By: Ashley Palmarozzo and Michael W. Toffel
Remote work has become more common, providing operational flexibility and productivity benefits, but questions remain about whether and how it affects quality. This study investigates the quality effects of remote work in a diagnostic service context in which remote...
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- 2023
- Working Paper
Second- versus Third-party Audit Quality: Evidence from Global Supply Chain Monitoring
By: Maria R. Ibanez, Ashley Palmarozzo, Jodi L. Short and Michael W. Toffel
To capitalize on the superior credibility and flexibility and lower cost of external assessments, many global buyers are shifting from using their own employee (“second-party”) auditors to relying more heavily (or entirely) on third-party auditors to monitor and...
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- 2023
- Working Paper
Auditing Predictive Models for Intersectional Biases
By: Kate S. Boxer, Edward McFowland III and Daniel B. Neill
Predictive models that satisfy group fairness criteria in aggregate for members of a protected class, but do not guarantee subgroup fairness, could produce biased predictions for individuals at the intersection of two or more protected classes. To address this risk, we...
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- 2023
- Article
Provable Detection of Propagating Sampling Bias in Prediction Models
By: Pavan Ravishankar, Qingyu Mo, Edward McFowland III and Daniel B. Neill
With an increased focus on incorporating fairness in machine learning models, it becomes imperative not only to assess and mitigate bias at each stage of the machine learning pipeline but also to understand the downstream impacts of bias across stages. Here we consider...
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- May–June 2023
- Article
A New Approach to Building Your Personal Brand: How to Communicate Your Value
By: Jill Avery and Rachel Greenwald
For better or worse, in today’s world everyone is a brand. Whether you’re applying for a job, asking for a promotion, or writing a dating profile, your success will depend on getting others to recognize your value. So you need to get comfortable marketing...
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- March 2022
- Article
Revealing Corruption: Firm and Worker Level Evidence from Brazil
By: Emanuele Colonnelli, Spyridon Lagaras, Jacopo Ponticelli, Mounu Prem and Margarita Tsoutsoura
We study how the disclosure of corrupt practices affects the growth of firms involved in illegal interactions with the government using randomized audits of public procurement in Brazil. On average, firms exposed by the anti-corruption program grow larger after the...
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- 2023
- Working Paper
Accounting for Carbon Offsets – Establishing the Foundation for Carbon-Trading Markets
By: Robert S. Kaplan, Karthik Ramanna and Marc Roston
Tackling climate change requires reductions in current and future greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as well as the removal of existing GHG from the atmosphere. Carbon-offset producers purport to provide such removals. But poor measurement practices and inadequate controls...
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- February 2023
- Supplement
Astyanax Kanakakis at norbloc: A Founder's Experience with the DIFC Fintech Hive
By: Linda A. Hill and Lydia Begag
norbloc was founded in 2016 in Stockholm, Sweden, by Astyanax Kanakakis and his co-founders, Vitalii Demianets and Sam Saatchi. Kanakakis and Demianets got to work to address a key gap in the industry: Know Your Customer (KYC) data sharing. As the first distributed KYC...
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Keywords:
Organizational Change and Adaptation;
Organizational Design;
Organizational Culture;
Organizational Structure;
Organizations;
Leadership;
Leadership Development;
Leadership Style;
Collaborative Innovation and Invention;
Digital Transformation;
Digital Strategy;
Digital Platforms;
Technology Adoption;
Technological Innovation;
Corporate Entrepreneurship;
Business and Government Relations;
Business Startups;
Financial Services Industry;
Technology Industry;
Banking Industry;
Information Technology Industry;
Sweden;
Europe;
Singapore;
London;
United Arab Emirates;
Dubai;
Middle East;
Athens;
Greece
- December 2022
- Article
Does Industry Employment of Active Regulators Weaken Oversight?
By: Jonas Heese
I study whether industry employment of active regulators weakens oversight. To examine this question, I exploit that the Financial Reporting Enforcement Panel (FREP), the German capital-market regulator responsible for enforcing public firms’ compliance with accounting...
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- November–December 2022
- Article
To See the Way Forward, Look Back
By: Ranjay Gulati
Most business leaders focus on the future much more than on the past, believing that their job is to embrace disruption and innovation, transform their organizations, and explore new frontiers. But decades of research on companies worldwide shows that most successful...
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- October 2022 (Revised May 2023)
- Case
Ginkgo Bioworks vs. Scorpion Capital: The Debate Over Related-Party Revenues
Ginkgo Bioworks, a synthetic biology company based in Boston, Massachusetts, faced divergent views on its revenue possibilities and accounting practices. After a report emerged accusing it of fraudulent accounting and lack of innovation, its share price plunged. But...
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- Article
Why Build in Web3
By: Jad Esber and Scott Duke Kominers
A major change is coming to the internet. While today’s dominant platforms have guarded their troves of user data and maintained an advantage through network effects, new companies—working in what they're calling a “Web3” model—are proposing a new value proposition to...
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- May 2022
- Case
What to Propose?
By: David G. Fubini
Two audit and financial services firms, one of which your consulting firm has supported extensively, have merged to create one of the largest audit firms in the world. The audit firm's Executive Team has requested proposals aimed at re-evaluating their internal...
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- Article
Corruption and Firms
By: Emanuele Colonnelli and Mounu Prem
We estimate the causal real economic effects of a randomized anti-corruption crackdown on local governments in Brazil using rich micro-data on corruption and firms. After anti-corruption audits, municipalities experience an increase in the number of firms concentrated...
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- Article
When Seeking Help, Women and Racial/Ethnic Minorities Benefit from Explicitly Stating Their Identity
By: Erika L. Kirgios, Aneesh Rai, Edward H. Chang and Katherine L. Milkman
Receiving help can make or break a career, but women and racial/ethnic minorities do not always receive the support they seek. Across two audit experiments—one with politicians and another with students—as well as an online experiment (total n = 5,145), we test whether...
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- February 2022
- Article
Client Concerns about Information Spillovers from Sharing Audit Partners
By: Jung Koo Kang, Clive Lennox and Vivek Pandey
We hypothesize that companies in the same product market avoid sharing the same audit partner when they are concerned about possible information spillovers. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find that product market rivals are less likely to share the same partner...
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- Article
Counterfactual Explanations Can Be Manipulated
By: Dylan Slack, Sophie Hilgard, Himabindu Lakkaraju and Sameer Singh
Counterfactual explanations are useful for both generating recourse and auditing fairness between groups. We seek to understand whether adversaries can manipulate counterfactual explanations in an algorithmic recourse setting: if counterfactual explanations indicate...
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