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- Article
A Better Way to Assess Managerial Performance
Total shareholder return (TSR) has become the definitive metric for gauging performance. Unlike accounting measures such as revenue growth or earnings per share that reflect the past, TSR is based on share price and thus captures investor expectations of what will...
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- January 2022 (Revised February 2022)
- Case
Introducing EVA at ISS: A Better Way to Evaluate CEO Performance and Compensation?
By: Jonas Heese, Charles C.Y. Wang and James Weber
In early 2019, Anthony Campagna, the global director of fundamental research at ISS EVA, a unit of the proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), was preparing to release ISS's analyses of public company performance and CEO compensation ahead of Say...
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- Article
Megastudies Improve the Impact of Applied Behavioural Science
By: Katherine L. Milkman, Dena Gromet, Hung Ho, Joseph S. Kay, Timothy W. Lee, Pepi Pandiloski, Yeji Park, Aneesh Rai, Max Bazerman, John Beshears, Lauri Bonacorsi, Colin Camerer, Edward Chang, Gretchen Chapman, Robert Cialdini, Hengchen Dai, Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, Ayelet Fishbach, James J. Gross, Samantha Horn, Alexa Hubbard, Steven J. Jones, Dean Karlan, Tim Kautz, Erika Kirgios, Joowon Klusowski, Ariella Kristal, Rahul Ladhania, Jens Ludwig, George Loewenstein, Barbara Mellers, Sendhil Mullainathan, Silvia Saccardo, Jann Spiess, Gaurav Suri, Joachim H. Talloen, Jamie Taxer, Yaacov Trope, Lyle Ungar, Kevin G. Volpp, Ashley Whillans, Jonathan Zinman and Angela L. Duckworth
Policy-makers are increasingly turning to behavioural science for insights about how to improve citizens’ decisions and outcomes. Typically, different scientists test different intervention ideas in different samples using different outcomes over different time...
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- December 2021 (Revised February 2022)
- Case
Bed Bath & Beyond: The New Strategy to Drive Shareholder Value
By: Benjamin C. Esty and Daniel W. Fisher
At one time, Bed Bath & Beyond was one of the most successful specialty retailers in the United States—its growth and profit margins far exceeded both peer retailers in the home goods market as well as many other discount retailers. But in 2014, its stock price peaked,...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Stock Investors' Returns Are Exaggerated
By: Jesse M. Fried, Paul Ma and Charles C.Y. Wang
The stock market generates less wealth than it appears. We show that total shareholder return (TSR), the standard measure of stock investor performance, substantially exaggerates returns earned by these investors in aggregate, and thus by most investors. The main...
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- June 2021
- Article
Short-Termism, Shareholder Payouts, and Investment in the EU
By: Jesse M. Fried and Charles C.Y. Wang
Investor-driven "short-termism" is said to harm EU public firms' ability to invest for the long term, prompting calls for the EU to better insulate managers from shareholder pressure. But the evidence offered—rising levels of repurchases and dividends—is incomplete and...
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- 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 (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
- January 2021 (Revised May 2021)
- Case
'GEnron'? Markopolos versus General Electric (A)
By: Jonas Heese and David Lane
In August 2019, Harry Markopolos—the forensic accountant known for uncovering Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme—alleged that General Electric had committed accounting fraud totaling $38 billion, coining the term “GEnron” for perceived similarities with the 2001 accounting...
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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
- 2020
- Working Paper
Short-Termism, Shareholder Payouts, and Investment in the EU
By: Jesse M. Fried and Charles C.Y. Wang
Investor-driven “short-termism” is said to harm EU public firms' ability to invest for the long term, prompting calls for the EU to better insulate managers from shareholder pressure. But the evidence offered—in the form of rising levels of repurchases and dividends—is...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
The Stock Market Value of Human Capital Creation
By: Matthias Regier and Ethan Rouen
We develop a measure of firm-year-specific human capital investment from publicly disclosed personnel expenses (PE) and examine the stock market valuation of this investment. Measuring the future value of PE (PEFV) based on the relation between lagged...
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- December 2019 (Revised May 2021)
- Case
The Dutch East India Company in 1612 (A)
By: Lynn S. Paine and Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci
The Dutch East India Company’s board of directors must decide what to do about an impending legal requirement to liquidate the company’s assets and return to shareholders their capital and any profits earned during a ten-year lock-up period. The charter granted to the...
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- November 2019
- Case
Apple, Einhorn, and iPrefs (Abridged)
By: Carliss Y. Baldwin and W. Carl Kester
In March 2013, Apple Computer has a very large cash balance, and is under pressure to return cash to shareholders. Hedge fund manager David Einhorn thinks Apple can "unlock value" by issuing perpetual preferred stock, dubbed iPrefs. Henry Blodget, CEO of Business...
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- November 2019
- Article
The Relevance of Broker Networks for Information Diffusion in the Stock Market
By: Marco Di Maggio, Francesco Franzoni, Amir Kermani and Carlo Sommavilla
This paper shows that the network of relationships between brokers and institutional investors shapes information diffusion in the stock market. We exploit trade-level data to show that central brokers gather information by executing informed trades, which is then...
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- 2019
- Working Paper
Intelligent Design of Inclusive Growth Strategies
By: Robert S. Kaplan, George Serafeim and Eduardo Tugendhat
Improving corporate engagement with society, as advocated in the Business Roundtable’s 2019 statement, should not be viewed as a zero-sum proposition where attention to new stakeholders detracts from delivering shareholder value. Corporate programs for sustainable and...
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- Fall 2019
- Article
Endogenous Productivity of Demand-Induced R&D: Evidence from Pharmaceuticals
By: Kyle Myers and Mark Pauly
We examine trends in the productivity of the pharmaceutical sector over the past three decades. Motivated by Ricardo’s insight that productivity and rents are endogenous to demand when inputs are scarce, we examine the industry’s aggregate R&D production function....
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- August 2019 (Revised April 2021)
- Case
Zillow Offers: Winning Online Real Estate 2.0
By: Luis Viceira, Marco Di Maggio and Allison Ciechanover
Founded in 2005, Zillow had become the leading online real estate and home-related marketplace. The brand was recognized as a trusted resource for players in the real estate market, providing information and transparency on home prices. Revenue, which was historically...
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- August 22, 2019
- Article
CEOs Say Their Aim Is Inclusive Prosperity. Do They Mean It?
By: Lynn S. Paine
Earlier this week, the Business Roundtable issued a statement on corporate purpose. It is noteworthy both for its endorsement of inclusive prosperity as an ideal and for its rejection of maximizing shareholder returns as the sole corporate objective. However, the real...
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