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This note presents two related measures for assessing the financial value of a customer to the firm. The first is the well-known measure of Customer...
There is growing interest in impact investing, the idea of deploying capital to obtain both financial and social or environmental returns....
- June 2021
- Case
Modern Endowment Management: Paula Volent and the Bowdoin Endowment
By: Luis M. Viceira, Emily R. McComb and Dean Xu
This case examines modern endowment investment management through the lens of a leadership transition between Chief Investment Officers (CIOs). In March 2021, Paula Volent is about to step down as the CIO of the endowment of Bowdoin College after twenty-one years, and...
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- June 23, 2021
- Article
Research: When A/B Testing Doesn't Tell You the Whole Story
By: Eva Ascarza
When it comes to churn prevention, marketers traditionally start by identifying which customers are most likely to churn, and then running A/B tests to determine whether a proposed retention intervention will be effective at retaining those high-risk customers. While...
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Keywords:
Customer Retention;
Churn;
Targeting;
Market Research;
Marketing;
Investment Return;
Customers;
Retention;
Research
- 2021
- Working Paper
Studying the U.S.-Based Portfolio Companies of U.S. Impact Investors
By: M. Diane Burton, Gurveen Chadha, Shawn A. Cole, Abhishek Dev, Christina Jarymowycz, Leslie Jeng, Laura Kelley, Josh Lerner, Jaime R. Diaz Palacios, Yue (Cynthia) Xu and T. Robert Zochowski
Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in the reliance on market-based solutions to social and environmental problems around the world (Barman 2016; Horvath and Powell 2020). The growth of impact investing is a vivid example of this trend and, although there have...
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- July–August 2021
- Article
Why You Aren't Getting More from Your Marketing AI
By: Eva Ascarza, Michael Ross and Bruce G.S. Hardie
Fewer than 40% of companies that invest in AI see gains from it, usually because of one or more of these errors: (1) They don’t ask the right question, and end up directing AI to solve the wrong problem. (2) They don’t recognize the differences between the value of...
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- May 2021
- Teaching Plan
Gera Developments: Leadership at a Crossroads
By: Christina R. Wing and John Masko
Teaching Plan for HBS Case No. 621-018. For decades, Gera Developments (Gera) was a boutique family-owned real estate development firm in Pune, India. But since 2000, managing director Rohit Gera had turned the company into a dynamic innovator in housing solutions for...
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Keywords:
Buildings and Facilities;
Business Growth and Maturation;
Construction;
Geographic Location;
Global Strategy;
Globalized Firms and Management;
Housing;
Leadership Style;
Management Succession;
Organizational Change and Adaptation;
Organizational Culture;
Family Ownership;
Family and Family Relationships;
Urban Development;
Customization and Personalization;
Real Estate Industry;
Maharashtra;
India;
San Francisco
- 2021
- Working Paper
Going by the Book: Valuation Ratios and Stock Returns
By: Ki-Soon Choi, Eric So and Charles C.Y. Wang
We study the use of firms’ book-to-market ratios (B/M) in value investing and its implications for comovements in firms’ stock returns and trading volumes. We show B/M has become increasingly detached from common alternative valuation ratios over time while also...
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- May 2021
- Article
Private and Social Returns to R&D: Drug Development and Demographics
By: Efraim Benmelech, Janice Eberly, Dimitris Papanikolaou and Joshua Krieger
Investment in intangible capital such as R&D has increased dramatically since the 1990s. However, productivity growth remains sluggish in recent years. One potential reason is that a significant share of the increase in intangible investment is geared toward consumer...
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- April 2021
- Article
Evaluating Firm-Level Expected-Return Proxies: Implications for Estimating Treatment Effects
By: Charles M.C. Lee, Eric C. So and Charles C.Y. Wang
We introduce a parsimonious framework for choosing among alternative expected-return proxies (ERPs) when estimating treatment effects. By comparing ERPs’ measurement-error variances in the cross section and in time series, we provide new evidence on the relative...
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- April 2021 (Revised July 2021)
- Case
Public Equities Impact Investing at BlackRock
By: Shawn A. Cole, Vikram S. Gandhi, Michael Norris and John Masko
In early 2021, BlackRock—the world’s largest asset manager with $9 trillion in assets under management (AUM)—sought to become a leader in promoting environmental and social sustainability. Over the previous ten years, CEO Larry Fink had written an annual open letter to...
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Keywords:
Impact Investing;
Renewable Energy;
Climate Change;
Environmental Sustainability;
Equity;
Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact;
Financial Management;
Investment Funds;
Investment Return;
Mission and Purpose;
Organizational Change and Adaptation;
Financial Services Industry;
United States
- March 2021
- Case
P.F. Chang's
By: Ashish Nanda, Nitin Nohria and Margaret Cross
Excited yet apprehensive after being named CEO of P.F. Chang’s beginning July 1st, 2020, Damola Adamolekun was well aware of the extraordinary challenges facing the firm. The closure of businesses deemed “nonessential” owing to the COVID-19 pandemic had devastated the...
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- March 2021 (Revised March 2021)
- Case
Aligning Mission and Margin at Southern Bancorp
By: Rebecca M. Henderson, Brian Trelstad and Eren Kuzucu
In October 2020, after spending almost a decade to turnaround Southern Bancorp, an Arkansan bank founded with the mission to provide financial services to rural, underserved communities, CEO Darrin Williams is wondering how Southern Bancorp should continue to grow....
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- March 2021
- Technical Note
Competitive Strategy in International Construction
By: John D. Macomber and Emrah Ergelen
Construction of buildings and infrastructure is one of the largest industries in the world in terms of volume. It is also one of the most physically risky, financially uncertain, and politically impacted. The industry is highly fragmented since there are few economies...
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- February 2021 (Revised June 2021)
- Case
Barbarians at the Gate or Turnaround Gurus? Private Equity and the Rise of the LBO
By: Tom Nicholas and John Masko
During the 1980s, leveraged buyouts (LBOs) and the private equity (PE) firms responsible for carrying them out revolutionized both investment and management in the U.S. Between 1980 and 1989, buyout activity in the U.S. surged from $1 billion per year to $60 billion....
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Keywords:
Leveraged Buyouts;
Mergers and Acquisitions;
Business Conglomerates;
Restructuring;
Borrowing and Debt;
Private Equity;
Bonds;
Investment Return;
Institutional Investing;
Profit Sharing;
Business History;
Management Style;
Private Ownership;
Performance Effectiveness;
Value Creation;
Financial Services Industry;
United States
- January–February 2021
- Article
Cross‐firm Return Predictability and Accounting Quality
By: Wen Chen, Mozaffar Khan, Leonid Kogan and George Serafeim
We test the hypothesis that if poor accounting quality (AQ) is associated with poor investor understanding of firms’ revenue and cost structures, then poor AQ stocks likely respond more slowly than good AQ stocks to new non‐idiosyncratic information that affects both...
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- Article
The EU's Unsustainable Approach to Stakeholder Capitalism
By: Jesse M. Fried and Charles C.Y. Wang
A recent report by the EU claims that investor-driven short-termism is encouraging firms to return cash rather than invest it, which reduces capital available for investment in growth. The authors show that the data behind the report do not support its claims and...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Connecting Expected Stock Returns to Accounting Valuation Multiples: A Primer
By: Akash Chattopadhyay, Matthew R. Lyle and Charles C.Y. Wang
We outline a framework in which accounting “valuation anchors" could be connected to expected stock returns. Under two general conditions, expected log returns is a log-linear function of a valuation (market value-to-accounting) multiple and the expected growth in the...
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Keywords:
Expected Returns;
Present Value;
Investment Return;
Accounting;
Valuation;
Information;
Framework
- January 2021
- Case
The FIRE Savings Calculator
By: Michael Parzen and Paul J. Hamilton
This case follows Carol Muñoz, a member of the Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE) lifestyle movement. At the age of 45, Carol is considering retiring and living off the $1 million she has accumulated. Using Monte Carlo simulation, Carol forecasts the...
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- December 2020
- Article
Stock Market Returns and Consumption
By: Marco Di Maggio, Amir Kermani and Kaveh Majlesi
This paper employs Swedish data containing security level information on households' stock holdings to investigate how consumption responds to changes in stock market returns. We exploit households’ portfolio weights in previous years as an instrument for actual...
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- November 2020 (Revised April 2021)
- Case
Roll-Ups and Surprise Billing: Collisions at the Intersection of Private Equity and Patient Care
By: Trevor Fetter and Kira Seiger
This case describes the increasing investment by private equity (PE) firms in patient care and other healthcare services. The case focuses on investments in physician staffing firms and roll-up strategy investments in physician practice management (PPM). Included in...
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Keywords:
Business Ventures;
Acquisition;
Mergers and Acquisitions;
Business Model;
Change;
Disruption;
Fluctuation;
Trends;
Customers;
Customer Value and Value Chain;
Ethics;
Fairness;
Finance;
Equity;
Insurance;
Private Equity;
Geography;
Geographic Scope;
Health;
Health Care and Treatment;
Markets;
Demand and Consumers;
Supply and Industry;
Industry Structures;
Ownership;
Ownership Type;
Private Ownership;
Relationships;
Agency Theory;
Business and Community Relations;
Business and Shareholder Relations;
Business and Stakeholder Relations;
Networks;
Strategy;
Competition;
Consolidation;
Expansion;
Integration;
Horizontal Integration;
Vertical Integration;
Value;
Value Creation;
Health Industry;
Insurance Industry;
United States
- October 2020
- Case
TowerBrook: ESG in Action (A)
By: Victoria Ivashina, Brian Trelstad and Meaghan Conway
This case is the first of a two-part series that follows Ramez Sousou and his team at TowerBrook Capital Partners as they face a challenging investment decision in February of 2013. Since its founding, TowerBrook has prided itself on its purpose-driven investing...
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Keywords:
ESG;
Finance;
Private Equity;
Corporate Governance;
Value Creation;
Investment;
Decision Making