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- May 2022
- Case
America's Budget Impasse, 2009-2022
The United States has been a fiscal mess for years…at least since the financial crisis in 2009. This case describes the U.S. economy during the presidencies of Barack Obama, Donald Trump and now, Joe Biden’s first year. The case is composed of excerpts from the...
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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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- February 2022
- Case
Leading The UK Vaccine Task Force
By: Amy C. Edmondson and Claudia Pienica
This case describes the first six months of the UK Vaccine Taskforce, under the leadership of Kate Bingham. With a career spent in the private sector as a biotech investor, Bingham’s appointment within the government was considered unusual. The overarching brief given...
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Keywords:
COVID-19;
Vaccine;
Government;
Health Pandemics;
Health Care and Treatment;
Science;
Innovation and Invention;
Groups and Teams;
Leadership;
Decision Making;
Government and Politics;
Health;
Innovation and Management;
Governance;
Change;
Health Industry;
Financial Services Industry;
Public Administration Industry;
Europe;
United Kingdom
- January 2022
- Article
Pushed into a Crowd: Repositioning Costs, Resources, and Competition in the RTE Cereal Industry
By: Young Hou and Dennis Yao
This paper exploits a natural experiment involving self-regulation in the ready-to-eat (RTE) breakfast cereal industry to evaluate the performance impact of product repositioning. It then examines how a product's brand equity value declines with repositioning distance...
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- Article
How Direct-to-Consumer Brands Can Continue to Grow
By: V. Kasturi Rangan, Daniel Corsten, Matt Higgins and Leonard A. Schlesinger
Direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands such as Allbirds, Casper, Peloton, and Warby Parker have creatively found a weakness in the marketing citadel of incumbent brands. By using data gleaned from daily interactions with customers, these brands have been able to adapt how...
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- November 2021
- Article
Panel Experiments and Dynamic Causal Effects: A Finite Population Perspective
By: Iavor Bojinov, Ashesh Rambachan and Neil Shephard
In panel experiments, we randomly assign units to different interventions, measuring their outcomes, and repeating the procedure in several periods. Using the potential outcomes framework, we define finite population dynamic causal effects that capture the relative...
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- October 2021
- Case
Financial Reporting at Mattel
By: Aiyesha Dey, Trung Nguyen, Marshal Herrmann and Julia Kelley
In September 2020, Diana Ferguson was nearing her first Audit Committee meeting as the newly appointed Audit Committee chair of Mattel, Inc. Mattel was just recovering from an accounting scandal which had revealed the company’s poor internal controls and weak board...
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Keywords:
Accounting;
Accounting Audits;
Financial Reporting;
Financial Statements;
Governance;
Corporate Accountability;
Corporate Disclosure;
Corporate Governance;
Governance Compliance;
Governance Controls;
Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms;
Governing and Advisory Boards;
Lawsuits and Litigation;
Business and Shareholder Relations;
Consumer Products Industry;
Entertainment and Recreation Industry;
Financial Services Industry;
North and Central America;
United States;
California
- October 2021
- Article
Directors' Perceptions of Board Effectiveness and Internal Operations
By: J. Yo-Jud Cheng, Boris Groysberg, Paul M. Healy and Rajesh Vijayaraghavan
We contribute to the growing literature on the effectiveness of corporate boards by examining the effect of two insights that have been largely unexplored in prior studies that use public data. First, since boards’ responsibilities are wide-ranging, more holistic...
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- September 2021
- Supplement
The Boston Beer Company (B): Growth and Uncertainty
By: Christina R. Wing and John Masko
The first three years of CEO Dave Burwick’s tenure were tumultuous for the Boston Beer Company. The company’s hard seltzer products continued to grow unexpectedly quickly, eclipsing the company’s legacy Samuel Adams beer products. Meanwhile, a polarizing political...
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- August 2021
- Technical Note
Brand You: Crafting Your Personal Brand
By: Jill Avery and Rachel Greenwald
Selling oneself is something that we have to do every day in both professional and personal settings. We face it when we apply for a job, advocate for a promotion or a raise, vie for a leadership position, attempt to land a new client, write a dating profile, or meet a...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Multi-location Workers in Multinational Firms? Tradeoffs in Contextual Specialization of Employees and Organizational Outcomes
We study how “contextual specialization,” the act of focusing workers’ organizational tasks within a particular locational context, and “contextual non-specialization,” the practice of diversifying workers’ organizational tasks among multiple locational contexts,...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Treatment and Selection Effects of Formal Workplace Mentorship Programs
By: Jason Sandvik, Richard Saouma, Nathan Seegert and Christopher Stanton
While formal mentorship programs are ubiquitous, less is known about who gains from receiving mentorship. In this paper, we report the outcome of a Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) carried out in a US-based inbound sales call center where one branch of the experiment...
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- July 2021
- Article
Multinationality and Capital Structure Dynamics: A Corporate Governance Explanation
By: Daniel Gyimah, Nana Abena Kwansa, Anthony K. Kyiu and Anywhere Sikochi
This paper examines the impact of corporate governance on capital structure dynamics. Using ordinary least squares regressions on 17,496 firm-year observations for 2,294 U.S. multinational companies (MNCs) over the period 1990–2018, we find that MNCs with strong...
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- Article
Does Observability Amplify Sensitivity to Moral Frames? Evaluating a Reputation-Based Account of Moral Preferences
By: Valerio Capraro, Jillian J. Jordan and Ben Tappin
A growing body of work suggests that people are sensitive to moral framing in economic games involving prosociality, suggesting that people hold moral preferences for doing the “right thing”. What gives rise to these preferences? Here, we evaluate the explanatory power...
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- May–June 2021
- Article
Why Start-ups Fail
If you’re launching a business, the odds are against you: Two-thirds of start-ups never show a positive return. Unnerved by that statistic, a professor of entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School set out to discover why. Based on interviews and surveys with hundreds...
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- April 16, 2021
- Article
A Playbook for Negotiators in the Social Media Era
By: James K. Sebenius, Ben Cook, David Lax, Ron S. Fortgang, Isaac Silberberg and Paul Levy
The disruptive effects of social media have been felt in virtually every corner of the world. Yet the information revolution has been largely ignored in the field of negotiation. Through a series of case studies we explore how savvy practitioners can ethically harness...
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- 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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- Article
What Professional Service Firms Must Do to Thrive
By: Ashish Nanda and Das Narayandas
When the going gets tough, professional service firms (PSFs) often get desperate and chase all kinds of business just to keep the lights on. Consultancies, financial services firms, VC/PE firms, and the like offer services and sign up clients they should never have...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Does Observability Amplify Sensitivity to Moral Frames? Evaluating a Reputation-Based Account of Moral Preferences
By: Valerio Capraro, Jillian J. Jordan and Ben Tappin
A growing body of work suggests that people are sensitive to moral framing in economic games involving prosociality, suggesting that people hold moral preferences for doing the “right thing”. What gives rise to these preferences? Here, we evaluate the explanatory power...
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- January 2021
- Article
ETF Activity and Informational Efficiency of Underlying Securities
By: Lawrence Glosten, Suresh Nallareddy and Yuan Zou
This paper investigates the effect of exchange-traded funds’ (ETFs’) activity on the short-run informational efficiency of their underlying securities. We find that ETF activity increases short-run informational efficiency for stocks with weak information environments....
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