What does it take for success in the media business? Creativity, innovation, and performance, of course. Plus experience and good judgment. However, it also requires an understanding of the principles and tools of management. This book summarizes the major dimensions of a business school curriculum and applies them to the entire media, media-tech, and digital sectors. Its chapters cover—in a jargonless, non-technical way—the major management functions.
When carefully planned, language can be a strategic tool for managing a brand’s communication to target customers and for building brand equity. This paper explains how and why managers should conduct a brand language audit -- a comprehensive inventory of the many and varied linguistic devices used by brands in the category -- and then use the findings from the audit to develop a brand language brief. The brand language brief is a blueprint for crafting a distinctive language for a brand.
Shadow bank market share in residential mortgage origination nearly doubled from 2007 to 2015, with particularly dramatic growth among online "fintech" lenders. We study how two forces, regulatory differences and technological advantages, contributed to this growth.
The problem of optimally designing information for multiple agents who interact in a game can be formulated as a linear program. We explore its dual representation and show that it provides a novel perspective and new economic insights into the information-design problem. Through the lens of the dual, we identify general properties that hold for all information-design problems. Duality also offers a portable, general, method for computing solutions. We illustrate this approach in the context of simple investment games.
We use a very accurate panel of all individual spending, income, balances, and credit limits from a financial aggregation app and document significant payday responses of spending to the arrival of both regular and irregular income. These payday responses are clean, robust, and homogeneous for all income and spending categories throughout the income distribution. Spending responses to income are typically explained by households' capital structures: households that hold little or no liquid wealth have to consume hand-to-mouth.
This paper studies how hedge fund activism impacts corporate innovation. Firms targeted by activists improve their innovation efficiency over the five-year period following hedge fund intervention. Despite a tightening in research and development (R&D) expenditures, target firms increase innovation output, as measured by both patent counts and citations, with stronger effects among firms with more diversified innovation portfolios. Reallocation of innovative resources, redeployment of human capital, and change to board-level expertise all contribute to improve target firms' innovation.
The case is built around video clips from top business leaders in emerging markets who were interviewed for Harvard Business School’s innovative Creating Emerging Markets oral history project. Corruption is a widespread problem in emerging markets, and this case is focused on the agency of business in this issue. It uses the interview material to explore definitions of corruption; how it impacts business in emerging markets; how it can be addressed, by both the private and the public sectors; and the responsibility of both business and policy-makers to address corruption.
We develop a theory of banking that explains why banks started out as commodities warehouses. We show that warehouses become banks because their superior storage technology allows them to enforce the repayment of loans most effectively. Further, interbank markets emerge endogenously to support this enforcement mechanism. Even though warehouses store deposits of real goods, they make loans by writing new "fake" warehouse receipts, rather than by taking deposits out of storage.
The paper draws on Mohanty and Sundaresan (2018) to explore the effects of bankruptcy laws on the ex ante incentive for firms to hedge FX exposures. We use a simple model in which the bankruptcy code may result in deadweight losses, and may allow equity holders a share of residual value of the firm's assets in the bankruptcy proceedings. The paper predicts that, while value-maximising firms promise to hedge a higher fraction of the value of their FX exposure when the debt is issued, they may renege subsequently and take on some FX exposures at the expense of foreign creditors.