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- 2023
- Working Paper
ESG: From Process to Product
By: George Serafeim
ESG measurement, analysis, management, and communication is a process that the financial industry has turned into a product, resulting in many investment funds using the ESG label. This has caused confusion, generating demand for a framework that defines the objectives...
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- 2023
- Working Paper
Life After Death: A Field Experiment with Small Businesses on Information Frictions, Stigma, and Bankruptcy
By: Shai Benjamin Bernstein, Emanuele Colonnelli, Mitchell Hoffman and Benjamin Iverson
In a randomized control trial (RCT) with U.S. small businesses, we document that a large share of firms are not well-informed about bankruptcy. Many assume that bankruptcy necessarily entails the death of a business and do not know about Chapter 11 bankruptcy, where...
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- February 2023
- Article
The Effect of Systems of Management Controls on Honesty in Managerial Reporting
By: Aishwarrya Deore, Susanna Gallani and Ranjani Krishnan
While budgetary controls with capital rationing are optimal in theory and widespread in practice, empirical research documents their association with higher employee dishonesty compared to budgetary controls without rationing. In this study, we examine whether...
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- December 2022
- Article
Does Industry Employment of Active Regulators Weaken Oversight?
By: Jonas Heese
I study whether industry employment of active regulators weakens oversight. To examine this question, I exploit that the Financial Reporting Enforcement Panel (FREP), the German capital-market regulator responsible for enforcing public firms’ compliance with accounting...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
How Do Investors Value ESG?
By: Malcolm Baker, Mark Egan and Suproteem K. Sarkar
Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) objectives have risen to near the top of the agenda for corporate executives and boards, driven in large part by their perceptions of shareholder interest. We quantify the value that shareholders place on ESG using a revealed...
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- August 2022
- Case
Sweet Teez Bakery: Projecting the Dough’s Rise
By: Emily R. McComb, Mel Martin and Amy Klopfenstein
In 2021, the HBS Impact Investment Fund student team met with entrepreneur Teresa Maynard, who had applied for a $25,000 impact investment loan. The students thought the former Harvard Data Scientist’s bakery business, Sweet Teez Bakery, showed promise. Maynard had...
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- August 2022
- Supplement
Sweet Teez Bakery: Projecting the Dough’s Rise Financial Supplement
By: Emily R. McComb, Mel Martin and Amy Klopfenstein
Abstract: In 2021, the HBS Impact Investment Fund student team met with entrepreneur Teresa Maynard, who had applied for a $25,000 impact investment loan. The students thought the former Harvard Data Scientist’s bakery business, Sweet Teez Bakery, showed promise....
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- 2022
- Working Paper
Private Equity Fund Valuation Management during Fundraising
By: Brian K. Baik
I investigate whether and how private equity fund managers (GPs) inflate their interim fund valuations (net asset values, or NAVs) during fundraising periods. Specifically, I study the extent to which the GPs inflate NAVs by managing valuation assumptions (e.g.,...
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- July 2022
- Article
Countercyclical Prudential Buffers and Bank Risk-taking
By: Manuel Illueca, Lars Norden, Joseph Pacelli and Gregory F. Udell
We investigate the effects of countercyclical prudential buffers on bank risk-taking. We exploit the introduction of dynamic loan loss provisioning in Spain, mandating that banks use historical average loss rates in their estimation of loan loss provisions. We find...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
Machine Learning Models for Prediction of Scope 3 Carbon Emissions
By: George Serafeim and Gladys Vélez Caicedo
For most organizations, the vast amount of carbon emissions occur in their supply chain and in the post-sale processing, usage, and end of life treatment of a product, collectively labelled scope 3 emissions. In this paper, we train machine learning algorithms on 15...
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- April 2022
- Teaching Note
Banorte Móvil: Data-Driven Mobile Growth
By: Ayelet Israeli and Carla Larangeira
In mid-2019, Carlos Hank was deliberating over the results for Banorte Móvil—the mobile application for Banorte, Mexico’s most profitable and second-largest financial institution. Hank, who had been appointed as Banorte´s Chairman of the Board in January 2015, had...
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- April 2022 (Revised August 2022)
- Case
Conflicts of Interest at Uptown Bank
By: Jonas Heese
In 2013, two employees debated whether to blow the whistle on their employer, Bell Bank, after completing an internal review that revealed undisclosed conflicts of interest. Bell Bank’s Asset Management business disproportionately invested clients’ money in Bell Bank’s...
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Keywords:
Whistleblower;
Whistleblowing;
Mutual Funds;
Conflicts Of Interest;
Decision Making;
Decisions;
Judgments;
Ethics;
Moral Sensibility;
Values and Beliefs;
Finance;
Financial Institutions;
Banks and Banking;
Financial Management;
Investment;
Investment Funds;
Governance;
Corporate Accountability;
Corporate Disclosure;
Corporate Governance;
Governance Compliance;
Governance Controls;
Policy;
Law;
Legal Liability;
Social Psychology;
Motivation and Incentives;
Perception;
Perspective;
Trust;
Financial Services Industry;
North and Central America;
United States
- March 2022
- Teaching Note
Supreme: Remaining Cool While Pursuing Growth
By: Jill Avery and Sandrine Crener
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 522-006. Following VF Corporation’s acquisition of cult streetwear brand Supreme, consumers and industry pundits were nervous that becoming part of a large, public corporation would put an end to Supreme’s slow and careful growth...
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- 2022
- Chapter
Key Success Factors in Environmental Entrepreneurship: The Case of Wilderness Safaris
By: James E. Austin, Megan Epler Woods and Herman B. Leonard
This chapter analyzes the entrepreneurial conception and evolution of the Wilderness Safaris (WS) ecotourism enterprise operating in eight African countries. It illuminates a series of factors that contribute to positive environmental impact as well as financial...
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- January 2022 (Revised March 2022)
- Module Note
Analysis of Financial and Non-Financial Information for Forecasting Performance
This note describes the main themes and cases of a teaching module on the analysis of information from, and outside of, financial statements for forecasting firms’ future financial performance. The module’s pedagogical goal is to deepen students’ understanding of the...
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- January 2022 (Revised March 2022)
- Teaching Note
Financial Reporting at Mattel
By: Aiyesha Dey, Trung Nguyen and Marshal Herrmann
- Article
Core Earnings: New Data and Evidence
By: Ethan Rouen, Eric C. So and Charles C.Y. Wang
Using a novel dataset, we show that components of firms' GAAP earnings stemming from ancillary business activities or transitory shocks are significant in frequency and magnitude. These components have grown over time and are dispersed across various sections of the...
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- Article
Complementarity between Audited Financial Reporting and Voluntary Disclosure: The Case of Former Andersen Clients
By: Richard Frankel, Alon Kalay, Gil Sadka and Yuan Zou
Prior literature presents various perspectives on the role of financial reporting. One view is that mandatory periodic reporting disciplines managers and encourages timely voluntary disclosure. We examine this "confirmation hypothesis" using the shock to financial...
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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;
Financial Services Industry;
Financial Services Industry;
Financial Services Industry;
North and Central America;
United States;
California
- August 2021
- Article
Don't Take Their Word for It: The Misclassification of Bond Mutual Funds
By: Huaizhi Chen, Lauren Cohen and Umit Gurun
We provide evidence that bond fund managers misclassify their holdings, and that these misclassifications have a real and significant impact on investor capital flows. In particular, many funds report more investment grade assets than are actually held in their...
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