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Should Companies Retain "Strategic" Cash?

Harvard Business Review

Strategic cash provides more flexibility concerning the timing and pricing of potential acquisitions; having cash on hand is the best insurance that CFOs will be able to respond with alacrity to opportunities and not be subject to the vagaries of the financial markets. Barring a tax holiday, this cash is effectively "trapped" offshore.

Company 13
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We Can’t Study Short-Termism Without the Right Metrics

Harvard Business Review

However, firms can efficiently increase margin growth without much revenue growth by managing to squeeze out their fixed costs to service the same level of output. Many compensation plans reward managers for higher earnings and higher stock prices, as opposed to rewarding them for adding long-term value to the firm.

EPS 8
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What U.S. CEOs Should Do with the Money from Corporate Tax Cuts

Harvard Business Review

One option, of course, is to drive up the stock price by buying back shares, and some CEOs may choose that course. The cost of capital is at historic lows, averaging below 6% for most large U.S. Indeed, for most companies, the value of accelerating growth greatly exceeds the value of returning capital to shareholders.

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The Comprehensive Business Case for Sustainability

Harvard Business Review

Today’s executives are dealing with a complex and unprecedented brew of social, environmental, market, and technological trends. These require sophisticated, sustainability-based management. ” Improving risk management. Investing in sustainability is not only a risk management tool; it can also drive innovation.

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Why Those Guys Won the Economics Nobels

Harvard Business Review

The prizes were awarded “for their empirical analysis of asset prices,” but what the three had been doing looked from the outside less like a common endeavor than a not-all-that-coherent argument. So I wanted to see if Campbell could make sense of the prizes and the current state of academic knowledge about asset prices.

CAPM 8
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Case Study: A Short-Seller Crashes the Party

Harvard Business Review

When the well-known hedge fund manager and short-seller Jeremiah Hughes first put Terranola in the spotlight, issuing ominous warnings about unsold products, a looming patent expiration, and flawed growth projections, the considered judgment of the executive team was to do nothing. “I Doom and Gloom. As CFO, A.J. The discussion was heated.