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How "sleepy" or "awake" are you when it comes to your stock portfolio? If you're like most people, you probably don't spend a...
- January 2021
- Case
Value-Based Insurance Design at Onex
By: Joshua Schwartzstein, Amitabh Chandra and Amram Migdal
The operating executives of Health and Benefits for Onex Partners, Megan Jackson Frye and Sam Camens, faced a challenge: Healthcare costs for employees of Onex’s portfolio companies were continuing to rise above the consumer price index, reflecting broader trends...
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Keywords:
Decision Making;
Cost vs Benefits;
Decision Choices and Conditions;
Decisions;
Finance;
Behavioral Finance;
Insurance;
Health;
Health Care and Treatment;
Human Resources;
Compensation and Benefits;
Markets;
Demand and Consumers;
Consumer Behavior;
Social Psychology;
Behavior;
Interests;
Motivation and Incentives;
Perception;
Health Industry;
Insurance Industry;
North America;
United States
- 2020
- Working Paper
Income Volatility Increases Financial Impatience
By: Colin West, A.V. Whillans and Sanford DeVoe
Using a multi-method approach, we investigate whether income volatility is associated with financial impatience—the preference to receive a small sum of money immediately over a larger sum of money later. We find that experiencing more income volatility—including a...
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Keywords:
Income Volatility;
Compensation;
Impatience;
Time Preferences;
Income;
Personal Finance;
Behavior;
Demographics;
Policy
- 2020
- Working Paper
What Can Economics Say About Alzheimer's Disease?
By: Amitabh Chandra, Courtney Coile and Corina Mommaerts
Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) affects one in ten people aged 65 or older and is the most expensive disease in the United States. We describe the central economic questions raised by AD. While there is overlap with the economics of aging, the defining features of the...
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- July 2020
- Case
Amanda and Kristen: Mented Cosmetics
By: Steven Rogers, Jeffrey J. Bussgang and Alterrell Mills
The co-founders (Black HBS alumnae) of an e-commerce beauty startup explore the unmet needs within the beauty industry. This case study examines the entrepreneurial opportunities that come from identifying an underserved market, specifically within the Black community...
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Keywords:
Brands and Branding;
Competition;
Customers;
Disruption;
Disruptive Innovation;
Distribution Channels;
Entrepreneurship;
Finance;
Macroeconomics;
Marketing;
Marketing Channels;
Marketing Communications;
Marketing Strategy;
Mission and Purpose;
Organizational Culture;
Product Design;
Product Development;
Product Positioning;
Sales;
Social Issues;
Social Marketing;
Business Startups;
Strategic Planning;
Strategy;
Supply Chain Management;
Venture Capital;
Beauty and Cosmetics Industry;
Advertising Industry;
Public Relations Industry;
Chemical Industry;
Manufacturing Industry;
Retail Industry;
North and Central America;
United States;
New York (city, NY);
New York (state, US)
- June 2020
- Article
Lazy Prices
By: Lauren Cohen, Christopher J. Malloy and Quoc Nguyen
We explore the implications of a subtle "default" choice that firms make in their regular reporting practices, namely that firms typically repeat what they most recently reported. Using the complete history of regular quarterly and annual filings by U.S. corporations...
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- September 2019 (Revised May 2020)
- Supplement
Keroche (E): Considering Additional Capacity
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Pippa Tubman Armerding
This case describes Keroche’s growth after entering the beer business in 2008. Although the company was operating at full capacity and not able to fulfill all of its orders, Tabitha Karanja had set a goal of growing Keroche’s share of the Kenyan beer market from...
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Keywords:
Keroche;
Alcohol;
Alcoholic Beverages;
Beer;
Beer Market;
Premium Beer;
Manufacturing;
Production;
Production Capacity;
Capacity;
Business Ventures;
Business Exit or Shutdown;
Business Growth and Maturation;
Business Startups;
Small Business;
Family Business;
Crime and Corruption;
Customer Focus and Relationships;
Decisions;
Income;
Demographics;
Geographic Scope;
Geographic Location;
Goods and Commodities;
Government Legislation;
Growth and Development;
Business History;
Lawsuits and Litigation;
Laws and Statutes;
Lawfulness;
Goals and Objectives;
Consumer Behavior;
Market Entry and Exit;
Problems and Challenges;
Safety;
Social Issues;
Poverty;
Strategy;
Competition;
Entrepreneurship;
Investment;
Financing and Loans;
Manufacturing Industry;
Food and Beverage Industry
- June 2019
- Article
Debt Traps? Market Vendors and Moneylender Debt in India and the Philippines
By: Dean Karlan, Sendhil Mullainathan and Benjamin Roth
A debt trap occurs when someone takes on a high-interest rate loan and is barely able to pay back the interest, and thus perpetually finds themselves in debt (often by refinancing). Studying such practices is important for understanding financial decision-making of...
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Keywords:
Borrowing and Debt;
Household;
Personal Finance;
Decision Making;
Behavior;
India;
Philippines
- January 2019
- Article
The ABCs of Financial Education: Experimental Evidence on Attitudes, Behavior, and Cognitive Biases
By: Fenella Carpena, Shawn A. Cole, Jeremy Shapiro and Bilal Zia
This paper uses a large-scale field experiment in India to study attitudinal, behavioral, and cognitive constraints that can stymie the link between financial education and financial outcomes. The study complements financial education with (1) financial incentives on a...
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- 2018
- Chapter
Behavioral Household Finance
By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson and Brigitte C. Madrian
This chapter provides an overview of household finance. The first part summarizes key facts regarding household financial behavior, emphasizing empirical regularities that are inconsistent with the standard classical economic model and discussing extensions of the...
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- March 2016
- Article
The Role of Investor Gut Feel in Managing Complexity and Extreme Risk
By: Laura Huang
Securing financial resources from investors is a key challenge for many early stage entrepreneurial ventures. Given the inherent uncertainty surrounding a decision to invest in these ventures, prior research has found that experienced investors rely heavily on their...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Can Security Design Foster Household Risk-Taking?
By: Laurent Calvet, Claire Celerier, Paolo Sodini and Boris Vallée
This paper shows that securities with a non-linear payoff design can foster household risk-taking. We demonstrate this effect empirically by exploiting the introduction of capital guarantee products in Sweden from 2002 to 2007. The fast and broad adoption of these...
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- 2017
- Working Paper
Investment Timing with Costly Search for Financing
By: Samuel Antill
I develop a dynamic model of investment timing in which firms must first choose when to search for external financing. Search is costly and the arrival of investors is uncertain, leading to delay in financing and investment. Depending on parameters, my model can...
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- 2017
- Report
The American Angel: The First In-Depth Report on the Demographics and Investing Activity of Individual American Angel Investors
By: Laura Huang, Andy Wu, Min Ju Lee, Jiayi Bao, Marianne Hudson and Elaine Bolle
Early-stage financing from angel investors is critical to the success of high-growth startups. Recent estimates suggest that annual US angel investment activity may total as much as $24 billion each year, contributing to the growth and success of more than 64,000...
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- Article
High School Curriculum and Financial Outcomes: The Impact of Mandated Personal Finance and Mathematics Courses
By: Shawn Cole, Anna Paulson and Gauri Kartini Shastry
Financial literacy and cognitive capabilities are convincingly linked to the quality of financial decision-making. Yet, there is little evidence that education intended to improve financial decision-making is successful. Using plausibly exogenous variation in exposure...
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- 2016
- Working Paper
Liquidity Transformation in Asset Management: Evidence from the Cash Holdings of Mutual Funds
By: Sergey Chernenko and Aditya Vikram Sunderam
We study liquidity transformation in mutual funds using a novel dataset on their cash holdings. To provide investors with claims that are more liquid than the underlying assets, funds engage in substantial liquidity management. Specifically, they hold substantial...
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- Spring 2016
- Article
Risk Neglect in Equity Markets
By: Malcolm Baker
The link between measures of risk and return within the equity market has been very weak over the past 47 years: in the United States, returns on high-risk stocks have cumulatively fallen short of the returns on low-risk stocks, during a period when the equity market...
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- Article
Collection, Exploration and Analysis of Crowdfunding Social Networks
By: Miao Cheng, Anand Sriramulu, Sudarshan Muralidhar, Boon Thau Loo, Laura Huang and Po-Ling Loh
Crowdfunding is a recent financing phenomenon that is gaining wide popularity as a means for startups to raise seed funding for their companies. This paper presents our initial results at understanding this phenomenon using an exploratory data driven approach. We have...
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- Article
Well Said: Why Articulating Your Strategy Can Set You Apart
Senior finance managers now operate in an altered c-suite landscape. The executives reporting to the CEO have doubled in the past 30 years, mostly an increase in functional specialists, not general managers responsible for cross-functional integration. Three decades...
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- July 2014
- Article
Smart Money? The Effect of Education on Financial Outcomes
By: Shawn A. Cole, Anna Paulson and Gauri Kartini Shastry
Household financial decisions are important for household welfare, economic growth and financial stability. Yet, our understanding of the determinants of financial decision-making is limited. Exploiting exogenous variation in state compulsory schooling laws in both...
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- January 2014
- Article
The Consequences of Entrepreneurial Finance: Evidence from Angel Financings
By: William R. Kerr, Josh Lerner and Antoinette Schoar
This paper documents that ventures that are funded by two successful angel groups experience superior outcomes to rejected ventures: they have improved survival, exits, employment, patenting, web traffic, and financing. We use strong discontinuities in angel funding...
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