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Shareholder Activism and Firms’ Voluntary Disclosure of Climate Change Risks

by Caroline Flammer, Michael W. Toffel, and Kala Viswanathan

Shareholder resolutions typically fail, and often by a wide margin. So why do active investors bother? It turns out that resolutions nonetheless can influence corporate transparency. Specifically, after being targeted with shareholder resolutions on environmental topics, this research shows that companies are more likely to publicly disclose their climate change risks—and that such disclosure increases these companies’ valuation.

The Gender Gap in Self-Promotion

by Christine L. Exley and Judd B. Kessler

Many organizations and job applications require individuals to assess their own ability and performance. When women communicate to potential employers, however, they systematically give less favorable assessments of their own past performance and potential future ability than equally performing men. The study rules out potential explanations for the gap and discusses implications.

Tariff Passthrough at the Border and at the Store: Evidence from US Trade Policy

by Alberto Cavallo, Gita Gopinath, Brent Neiman, and Jenny Tang

Collecting and analyzing microdata on prices and the reaction of importers, retailers, and exporters to US trade policy since 2018, this study finds most of the tariffs’ incidence rests with the US firms.

Why Does Business Invest in Education in Emerging Markets? Why Does It Matter?

by Valeria Giacomin, Geoffrey Jones, and Erica Salvaj

Drawing on 110 interviews with business leaders as part of the Creating Emerging Markets project at Harvard Business School, this paper represents the first systematic attempt to identify and compare investment in education across emerging economies, specifically in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Turkey, and the Persian Gulf between the 1960s and the present day.

The Economic Effects of Private Equity Buyouts

by Steven J. Davis, John Haltiwanger, Kyle Handley, Ben Lipsius, Josh Lerner, and Javier Miranda

Private equity buyouts are a major financial enterprise that critics see as dominated by rent-seeking activities with little in the way of societal benefits. This study of 6,000 US buyouts between 1980 and 2013 finds that the real side effects of buyouts on target firms and their workers vary greatly by deal type and market conditions.

Crowdsourcing Memories: Mixed Methods Research by Cultural Insiders-Epistemological Outsiders

by Tarun Khanna, Karim R. Lakhani, Shubhangi Bhadada, Nabil Khan, Saba Kohli Davé, Rasim Alam, and Meena Hewett

Research on the traumatic 1947 partition of British India has most often been carried out by scholars in the humanities and qualitative social sciences. This article presents mixed methods research and analysis to explore tensions within current scholarship and to inspire new understandings of the Partition, and more generally, mass migrations and displacement.

Decarbonization Factors

by Alex Cheema-Fox, Bridget LaPerla, George Serafeim, David Turkington, and Hui (Stacie) Wang

This paper contributes to a growing knowledge base about how climate change impacts investor expectations, capital allocations and thereby pricing and returns. It provides actionable insights into how to decarbonize portfolios and evaluate the likely performance and carbon exposure differences across strategies.

Persuasion by Populist Propaganda: Evidence from the 2015 Argentine Ballotage

by Rafael Di Tella, Sebastian Galiani, and Ernesto Schargrodsky

This paper studies data generated prior to the 2015 Argentine presidential ballotage, when a government propaganda campaign was used to attack the opposition candidate and influence voter preferences. Results show the propaganda was persuasive.

Core Earnings? New Data and Evidence

by Ethan Rouen, Eric So, and Charles C.Y. Wang

Using a novel dataset of earnings-related disclosures embedded in the 10-Ks, this paper shows how detailed financial statement analysis can produce a measure of core earnings that is more persistent than traditional earnings measures and forecasts future performance. Analysts and market participants are slow to appreciate the importance of transitory earnings.

Vote Choice Formation and the Minimal Effects of TV Debates: Evidence from 61 Elections in 9 OECD Countries

by Caroline Le Pennec-Caldichoury and Vincent Pons

This study of 61 elections around the world finds that vote choices aggregate a lot of information obtained during the electoral season, but the contribution of TV debates to this process is negligible.

Undisclosed Debt Sustainability

by Laura Alfaro and Fabio Kanczuk

Presenting a scenario in which non-Paris Club lending and borrowing is fully disclosed, this study illustrates that transparency has potential effects of decreased debt sustainability for investors such as China, and significant welfare gains for recipient countries. Effects are particularly strong if the debt is large.

Birds of a Feather ... Enforce Social Norms? Interactions Among Culture, Norms, and Strategy

by Hongyi Li and Eric J. Van den Steen

Does culture eat strategy for breakfast? By analyzing the role of a company's social norms—how they develop and why people reinforce them, despite their personal beliefs—this paper offers new insights about the power of culture.

Soul and Machine (Learning)

by Davide Proserpio, John R. Hauser, Xiao Liu, Tomomichi Amano et al.

This paper argues with examples and predictions that while marketing science theory, engineering, and machine learning capabilities are changing the way we think about marketing, true advances will come when marketing managers know when to trust the machine and when to trust their instincts.

The Value Potential of New Business Models

by David J. Collis

A business model determines the opportunity’s value creation potential and suggests how the resulting value might be distributed among participants pursuing that model. Strategists need to understand the interaction of elements of the job to be done and asset configuration in order to create differing strategic prescriptions.

The Limitations of Dynamic Capabilities

by David J. Collis and Bharat Anand

This paper explains the role dynamic capabilities play in competitive advantage, identifies the conditions that make them valuable by establishing their relationship to resources and market positioning, and describes two types and various levels of the phenomenon. Developing such capabilities is desirable, but there are limitations to their effectiveness.

Comments on Macri's Macro by Federico Sturzenegger

by Rafael Di Tella

Rafael Di Tella analyzes a paper by Federico Sturzenegger, the Governor of the Central Bank of Argentina under President Mauricio Macri, detailing the country’s efforts to stabilize the economy following 12 years of a populist administration.

Corporate Purpose and Firm Ownership

by Claudine Gartenberg and George Serafeim

This study shows that corporate purpose varies greatly according to the nature of firm ownership, and these differences can be least partly explained by the choices and compensation of the CEOs. The greater the pay gap between CEOs and employees, the lower the sense of corporate purpose within the organization.

The Impact of Regulation on Strategic Positioning: Self-Regulation in the RTE Cereal Industry

by Young Hou and Dennis Yao

Regulations often change the competitive environment firms operate in by inducing product repositioning. This study examines the responses and performance impacts resulting from industry self-regulation to improve the nutritional content of children’s cereals. Dynamic links between product positioning and product brand equity resources are explored.

Using Models to Persuade

by Joshua Schwartzstein and Adi Sunderam

“Model persuasion” happens when would-be persuaders offer receivers a streamlined way of understanding data they already know, especially when the data is open to interpretation. Using examples from finance, politics, and law, the authors find that truthtellers do not eliminate the impact of misleading persuasion because wrong models may better fit the past than correct models.

Female Inventors and Inventions

by Rembrand Koning, Sampsa Samila, and John-Paul Ferguson

Does the gender of inventors make a difference for who benefits from their inventions? Analysis of all U.S. biomedical patents issued between 1976 and 2010 shows that research teams with women were more likely to produce patents addressing women’s health conditions, especially when female researchers led the teams. This link suggests that the dearth of women inventors might also result in fewer female-focused inventions.