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- August 2022
- Case
Boston Impact Initiative: Investing in Local Change
By: Emily R. McComb, Amy Klopfenstein and Mel Martin
In fall 2021, Aliana Piñeiro, impact director at Boston Impact Initiative (BII) discovered that an entrepreneur the organization was considering for an investment had failed to disclose pre-existing debt with another lender. Although the business scored highly on BII’s...
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Keywords:
Entrepreneurship;
Social Entrepreneurship;
Finance;
Investment;
Investment Funds;
Investment Portfolio;
Relationships;
Business and Community Relations;
Society;
Social Issues;
Wealth and Poverty;
Wealth;
Poverty;
Risk Management;
Financial Services Industry;
North and Central America;
United States;
Massachusetts;
Boston
- 2022
- Working Paper
Buy Now, Pay Later Credit: User Characteristics and Effects on Spending Patterns
Firms offering "buy now, pay later" (BNPL) point-of-sale installment loans with minimal underwriting and low interest have captured a growing fraction of the market for short-term unsecured consumer credit. We provide a detailed look into the US BNPL market by...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
Automating Short-Term Payroll Savings: Initial Evidence from a Large U.K. Experiment
By: Sarah Holmes Berk, John Beshears, James J. Choi and David Laibson
Automatic enrollment is often used to increase retirement plan participation. Can it be used to increase short-term savings as well? We evaluate preliminary data from an experiment at a large U.K. employer. After years of offering opt-in short-term payroll savings via...
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- June 29, 2022
- Other Article
Strategic Complexity? Using Experiments to Understand and Overcome Obfuscation
By: Michael Luca, Ginger Zhe Jin and Daniel Martin
Credit card companies must decide what product features to disclose to consumers, such as payment schedules, penalties, and fees--and also whether to present them clearly or bury them in the fine print. Firms face similar choices in settings ranging from privacy...
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- 2022
- Article
Regulatory Treatment of Changes in Fair Value and the Composition of Banks' Investment Portfolios
By: Michael Iselin, Jung Koo Kang and Joshua Madsen
In their implementation of Basel III, U.S. bank regulators are again including changes in the fair value of available-for-sale (AFS) debt securities in Tier 1 capital, but only for the largest U.S. banks. This paper investigates a potential impact of expanding this...
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- May 2022 (Revised August 2022)
- Case
LOOP: Driving Change in Auto Insurance Pricing
By: Elie Ofek and Alicia Dadlani
John Henry and Carey Anne Nadeau, co-founders and co-CEOs of LOOP, an insurtech startup based in Austin, Texas, were on a mission to modernize the archaic $250 billion automobile insurance market. They sought to create equitably priced insurance by eliminating pricing...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
Distributional Consequences of Monetary Policy Across Races: Evidence from the U.S. Credit Register
By: Laura Alfaro, Ester Faia and Camelia Minoiu
We examine the consequences of monetary policy on racial disparities, focusing on the role of bank lending to firms through collateral and selection channels. Leveraging comprehensive loan-level data from the U.S. credit register (Y-14Q) of the Federal Reserve, we show...
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- Article
Weak Corporate Insolvency Rules: The Missing Driver of Zombie Lending
By: Bo Becker and Victoria Ivashina
"Zombie lending"—lending to less-productive firms at subsidized rates—can help banks with misaligned incentives in the short run, but it prolongs economic downturns. We propose that inefficient resolution of insolvency is a significant contributor to this problem. We...
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- April 2022
- Case
Mastercard: Creating a World Beyond Cash
In late 2021, Mastercard CEO Michael Miebach and Chairman and former CEO Ajaypal “Ajay” Banga considered how Mastercard could best position itself for continued success in the years to come. Since Mastercard’s initial public offering in 2006, the company had grown and...
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Keywords:
Technological Innovation;
Leadership;
Leading Change;
Organizational Culture;
Business Strategy;
Change;
Change Management;
Money;
Cash;
Credit;
Financial Institutions;
Banks and Banking;
Central Banking;
Financial Instruments;
Credit Cards;
Financial Markets;
Globalization;
Innovation and Invention;
Innovation and Management;
Innovation Strategy;
Leadership Style;
Competitive Advantage;
Corporate Strategy;
Diversification;
Information Technology;
Banking Industry;
Financial Services Industry;
North and Central America;
United States;
New York (state, US)
- April 2022 (Revised May 2022)
- Case
Mastercard Labs (A)
When Ajaypal (Ajay) Banga became the CEO of Mastercard in 2010, he shifted the company’s competitive focus from card networks to cash itself. Mastercard’s new vision of a “World Beyond Cash” distilled into a three-pronged framework: Grow the core business, Diversify...
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Keywords:
Organizational Behavior;
Culture;
Organizational Culture;
Culture Change;
Organizational Adaptation;
Organizational Effectiveness;
Alignment;
Leadership;
Leadership Development;
Innovation;
Innovation Ecosystems;
Ecosystem;
Diversity;
Collaboration;
Co-creation;
Learning Organizations;
Empowerment;
Globalization;
Agility;
Prototype;
Experiment;
Partnerships;
Operating Model;
Risk Management;
Metrics;
Payments;
Financial Inclusion;
Financial Industry;
Ambidexterity;
Corporate Innovation;
Innovation Lab;
Digital Transformation;
Digital Strategy;
Credit Cards;
Innovation Leadership
- April 2022
- Article
Predictable Financial Crises
Using historical data on post-war financial crises around the world, we show that crises are substantially predictable. The combination of rapid credit and asset price growth over the prior three years, whether in the nonfinancial business or the household sector, is...
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- March 2022 (Revised June 2022)
- Case
El Salvador: Launching Bitcoin as Legal Tender
By: Laura Alfaro, Carla Larangeira and Ruth Costas
In June 2021, Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s president, surprised the world with the announcement that the country would adopt bitcoin as legal tender, becoming the first nation to do so. Bitcoin was mostly used for trading and had one of the most volatile track records...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
The Credit Rating Agency Market in Africa
By: Saveshen Pillay and Anywhere Sikochi
In this paper, we present the credit rating agency market on the continent of Africa as a potential research setting for accounting-related research. Largely unexplored in prior literature, Africa-based rating agencies provide access to information about a broad range...
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Keywords:
Credit Rating;
Credit Rating Agencies;
Regulation;
Conflict Of Interest;
Credit;
Capital;
Africa
- March 2022
- Article
Contractual Restrictions and Debt Traps
By: Ernest Liu and Benjamin N. Roth
Microcredit and other forms of small-scale finance have failed to catalyze entrepreneurship in developing countries. In these credit markets, borrowers and lenders often bargain over not only the interest rate but also implicit restrictions on types of investment. We...
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- March 2022
- Article
Loan Types and the Bank Lending Channel
By: Victoria Ivashina, Luc Laeven and Enrique Moral-Benito
Using credit-registry data for Spain and Peru, we document that four main types of commercial credit—asset-based loans, cash flow loans, trade finance and leasing—are easily identifiable and represent the bulk of corporate credit. We show that credit growth dynamics...
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- February 2022
- Article
Borrowing to Save? The Impact of Automatic Enrollment on Debt
By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson, Brigitte C. Madrian and William L. Skimmyhorn
Does automatic enrollment into a retirement plan increase financial distress due to increased borrowing outside the plan? We study a natural experiment created when the U.S. Army began automatically enrolling newly hired civilian employees into the Thrift Savings Plan....
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- February 2022
- Article
Taxation and Innovation in the 20th Century
By: Ufuk Akcigit, John Grigsby, Tom Nicholas and Stefanie Stantcheva
This paper studies the effect of corporate and personal taxes on innovation in the United States over the twentieth century. We build a panel of the universe of inventors who patent since 1920, and a historical state-level corporate tax database with corporate tax...
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- December 2021
- Article
Partisan Professionals: Evidence from Credit Rating Analysts
By: Elisabeth Kempf and Margarita Tsoutsoura
Partisan perception affects the actions of professionals in the financial sector. Using a novel dataset linking credit rating analysts to party affiliations from voter records, we show that analysts who are not affiliated with the U.S. president’s party downward-adjust...
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- November 2021
- Article
Borrower Leakage from Costly Screening: Evidence from SME Lending in Peru
By: Irani Arraiz, Miriam Bruhn, Benjamin N. Roth, Claudia Ruiz-Ortega and Rodolfo Stucchi
We provide evidence that commercial lenders in Peru suffer leakages in their loan approval process. Leveraging a discontinuity in the loan approval process of a large bank, we find that receiving a loan approval from the bank causes loan applicants to receive offers...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
Transitory and Permanent Cash Flow Shocks in Debt Contract Design
By: Le Ma, Anywhere Sikochi and Yajun Xiao
We examine how lenders design contracts when borrowers are exposed to volatile transitory or permanent cash flow shocks. We find that volatile transitory shocks are associated with fewer liquidity covenants, indicating financial flexibility that can enable firms to...
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