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Sustainable Investment Funds Can Encourage Worse Behavior

The Horizons Tracker

Subsequently, leveraging historical data, the researchers evaluated the responses of the highest and lowest polluting groups to fluctuations in their capital costs, an impact similar to the objectives of the sustainable investing movement.

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Entrepreneurship Suffers When Well-Paid Jobs Are Plentiful

The Horizons Tracker

A few years ago I wrote about innovation and entrepreneurship in Norway and Qatar. They believe that their findings add additional nuance to the current narrative that suggests that the decline in entrepreneurship is largely a consequence of higher startup costs, labor constraints, or even the aging population. Opportunity costs.

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4 Ways Leaders Can Get More from Their Company’s Innovation Efforts

Harvard Business Review

A recent McKinsey report found that while 84% of corporate executives think innovation is key to achieving growth objectives, only 6% are satisfied with the innovation performance of their firm. Even if executives try to prioritize it, innovation often gets crowded out by more “urgent” short-term pressures.

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Should Companies Retain "Strategic" Cash?

Harvard Business Review

This raises the question of whether retaining strategic cash makes economic sense and should be viewed as a legitimate corporate finance tool in today's environment. Strategic cash also can be used to finance long-term reinvestment programs in the business—which is especially valuable to companies in capital-intensive industries (e.g.,

Company 13
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What’s Driving Superstar Companies, Industries, and Cities

Harvard Business Review

To analyze the superstar dynamics of firms, our metric was economic profit, a measure of a firm’s profit above and beyond opportunity cost. (To To do this, we take the firm’s returns, deduct the cost of capital, and multiply by the firm’s total invested capital.)

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How Banks Can Compete Against an Army of Fintech Startups

Harvard Business Review

Banks’ cost of capital is typically 50 basis points or less. These low-cost and reliable sources of funds are from taxpayer-insured deposits and the Federal Reserve’s discount window. ” Can banks out-compete the disruptors?

Banking 12
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What You Don’t Know About Sales Can Hurt Your Strategy

Harvard Business Review

The goal of strategy is profitable growth, meaning economic value above the firm’s cost of capital. In my experience, most CEOs, CFOs, and other C-suite executives involved in strategy formulation know these finance basics. It may seem that sales has little impact on the fourth value-creation lever, the firm’s cost of capital.