In April 2020, global financial markets were still reeling as the Covid-19 pandemic spread rapidly across the world. Global equity markets had initially fallen by 30% in response to the pandemic, and high-yield credit markets had dropped by nearly 20%. In contrast, U.S. Treasury markets were up 20% year-to-date (YTD). Interestingly, the U.S. Mortgage Backed Security (MBS) market had been much less responsive to the health crisis, exhibiting very low .....more

In 2012, the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice-an NGO dedicated, in large part, to criminal justice reform-led a campaign to enact a new state law in New Jersey known colloquially as "Ban the Box," which barred employers from automatically screening out persons with a criminal record when filling a job opening. The Institute had tried to pass such a law four years earlier, but in the face of concerted opposition from the business lobby, .....more

This is an abridged version of MOD Pizza: A Winning Recipe? Case study number 416-004. Scott and Ally Svenson, the founders of MOD Pizza, had to make a number of decisions in planning how to scale their small company. They wanted to grow MOD from 45 stores as of May 2015 to 200 stores by the end of 2016, and while the two believed that MOD could manage this growth from an operational standpoint, they wanted to make sure that MOD''s culture .....more

On March 14, 2019, the convenience business unit manager of Greenyard Frozen was in his Roeselare, Belgium office preparing for a management meeting that would discuss current challenges facing the company. Greenyard Frozen had to decide on the market positioning of its cauliflower rice and how to promote the new product. The project, which was a great example of co-operation in the value chain and of open innovation for sustainability, had resulted .....more

Increasingly, multinational corporations (MNCs) are pledging to procure the materials and services they need from companies committed to fair labor practices and environmental protections. But the reality is that their suppliers--especially those at low levels of the chain--often violate sustainability standards, exposing MNCs to serious financial and social risks. To explore this problem--and identify solutions--the authors studied the supply networks .....more

Topgolf started with the simple concept that it was time to rethink the "joyless mud fields" of golf-and apply microchip technology to create new frontiers in the game. Topgolf Watford, the company''s first facility, opened in 2000 northwest of central London. Topgolf differentiated itself from traditional driving ranges by offering covered bays, multiple screens, patios and caf s-in addition to new golf accuracy challenges based .....more

For the past few decades, Australia has dealt with the benefits and costs of repeated mining booms-inflation, a housing bubble, a current account deficit and growing dependence on China. Between 1996 and 2007, however, Australia had most of these issues under control and grew at impressive rates, becoming one of the richest of developed countries. Yet competitiveness in its non-mining sectors declined. Since the financial crisis, additional challenges .....more

Arredondar was a nongovernmental organization (NGO) whose objective was encouraging the culture of donation in Brazil through acts of micro-donations. Any shopper could donate at the retail stores that partnered with Arredondar. The process was simple: customers could round up the total value of their purchase to the next whole value, and the difference in cents would be donated to carefully selected NGOs. Arredondar offered a simple, accessible, .....more

Electric vehicles have been "the next big trend" for more than 100 years. The first commercially viable electric car was available in the 1890s but failed to become the dominant design. The case chronicles the development of the Electric Vehicle Company (EVC), founded in 1896, which by the turn of the century was the largest manufacturer and user of electric vehicles in the United States. Students evaluate the competition between the three .....more

The searchable internet contains almost 2 billion websites. And new, text-rich sites are being added at a rapid pace: more than 700 million popped up from 2016 to 2017, according to the International Real Time Statistics Project. A lot of this web-based text is relevant to marketers: online product reviews, information about purchasing behavior, customer-to-customer interactions, and transcribed tele-sales calls. Marketers now have more information .....more