The case explores a new business venture to bring clean water to residents of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, who otherwise cannot afford it. Management has enough money to get their company through August 2010, but needs more capital thereafter. An HBS alumnus is interested in investing in the...

Explores Canadian regulators' decision to adopt International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). The Canadian decision in 2005 to adopt IFRS is particularly interesting because Canada had well-developed domestic accounting standards and because a significant fraction of Canadian industry was...

I study the evolution of Statement of Financial Accounting Standard (SFAS) # 142, which uses unverifiable fair-value estimates to account for acquired goodwill. I find evidence consistent with the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) issuing SFAS 142 in response to political pressure over...

We examine the accrual choices of outsourcing firms with links to US congressional candidates during the 2004 elections, when corporate outsourcing was a major campaign issue. We find that politically-connected firms with more extensive outsourcing activities have more income-decreasing...

I study the evolution of SFAS 142, which uses unverifiable fair-value estimates to account for acquired goodwill. I find evidence consistent with the FASB issuing SFAS 142 in response to political pressure over its proposal to abolish pooling accounting. The result is interesting given this...

Americans of all stripes are losing faith in free markets. To understand why, we can't just look at wealth inequality—the distribution of human capital is even more important. I describe the economic forces that are tearing apart America's liberal consensus, and, arguing that there is no...

2020 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Milton Friedman's influential clarion call to American business – that their “social responsibility” is to increase profits. In the period since, even as corporations internalized this message to a degree perhaps Friedman himself did not conceive, our...

If the differences in accounting standards across countries reflect relatively stable institutional differences, why did several countries rapidly adopt IFRS in the 2003-2008 period? We test the hypothesis that perceived network benefits from the extant worldwide adoption of IFRS can explain...

SEC oversight of publicly listed firms ranges from comment letter (CL) reviews of firms' reporting compliance to pursuing enforcement actions against violators. Prior literature finds that firm political connections (PC) negatively predict enforcement actions, inferring SEC capture. We present...