- 05 Dec 2018
- Research & Ideas
Why Managers Should Reveal Their Failures
If you want to get your messages through to employees, be ready to confess your own management shortcomings, counsels Alison Wood Brooks. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.
- 10 Jan 2018
- Research & Ideas
Working for a Shamed Company Can Hurt Your Future Compensation
People who work for a company guilty of malfeasance may see their future compensation curtailed, even if they are guilty of nothing, according to research by Boris Groysberg, Eric Lin, and George Serafeim. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.
- 06 Dec 2017
- Working Paper Summaries
Does Financial Misconduct Affect the Future Compensation of Alumni Managers?
Analyzing data from an executive search firm, this paper explains how former employees who are free from wrongdoing still pay a price in stigma after incidents of corporate financial misconduct. The finding is potentially disquieting for all managers, because it suggests that one’s human capital can be impaired even long after one moves on and suggests the need for developing a human capital strategy for reacting to misconduct of past employers.
- 13 Jul 2017
- Working Paper Summaries
Catering Through Disclosure: Evidence from Shanghai-Hong Kong Connect
The researcher studies firms’ use of disclosure to build investor confidence when they operate in a market where the institutions that support the supply of credible information are weak.
- 27 Feb 2017
- Research & Ideas
Reputation is Vital to Survival in Turbulent Markets
Reputation and resilience are key ingredients that determine whether companies will survive tumultuous markets, according to a new paper by Geoffrey Jones, Tarun Khanna, Cheng Gao, and Tiona Zuzul. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.
- 14 Feb 2017
- Working Paper Summaries
Capturing Value from IP in a Global Environment
Challenges to capturing value from know-how and reputation through the use of different IP tools is an increasingly important matter of strategy for global enterprises. They will need to combine different institutional, market, and non-market mechanisms, but the precise combination of tools will depend on local and regional institutional and market conditions.
- 23 Jan 2017
- Working Paper Summaries
Overcoming Institutional Voids: A Reputation-Based View of Long Run Survival
Why are some firms able to persistently survive challenging, uncertain, and underdeveloped business environments? To address this question, the authors utilize the HBS Creating Emerging Markets project―a novel collection of in-depth, publicly available video interviews conducted by HBS researchers with leaders of emerging market firms that have survived over decades and even centuries. Analyzing these interviews for the first time, the authors theorize that firm reputation is a key strategic driver, and outline how a favorable reputation allows a firm to more fully utilize its existing resources by decreasing uncertainty. They also show that reputation has offensive and defensive properties that make it valuable during both positive and negative economic cycles. Finally, the authors propose new ideas about how reputation facilitates survival and discuss why a reputation-based source of competitive advantage is hard to imitate.
- 10 Nov 2016
- Working Paper Summaries
Managing Reputation: Evidence from Biographies of Corporate Directors
A biography is part of a proxy statement summarizing a director’s past experience. For this study the authors analyzed almost 160,000 biographies of 12,895 directors to see how directors appear to make strategic disclosure choices about their past and current experience in biographies. Directors are less likely to disclose past and current directorships at firms that experienced adverse events such as accounting restatements, securities litigation, or bankruptcy. Directors who withhold information about adverse-event directorships experience a more favorable stock price reactions at appointment and lose fewer current directorships in the two years after the filing relative to the directors who disclose. However, there is no evidence that non-disclosure leads to different shareholder voting outcomes.
- 05 Jul 2016
- Working Paper Summaries
The Impact of Campus Scandals on College Applications
This paper explores the prevalence and impact of negative incidents at top United States colleges covered in the media, looking at data from 2001 through 2013. During this period, the authors identified 124 widely covered scandals. Scandals lead to large reductions in applications; a scandal covered in a long-form article has roughly the same impact on applications as a 10-ranking drop in the influential US News and World Report College Rankings.
- 03 Nov 2014
- Research & Ideas
Brand Lessons From the Nobel Prize
What makes the Nobel Prize so coveted? Stephen Greyser and Mats Urde discuss the first field-based study exploring the prize from a brand and reputation perspective. Open for comment; 4 Comment(s) posted.
Why Does Business Invest in Education in Emerging Markets? Why Does It Matter?
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.