Faculty & Research

In office for less than a year, RIP Medical Debt CEO Allison Sesso received word in December of 2020 that the organization would be the recipient of a $50 million unrestricted gift from Mackenzie Scott. Sesso believed that the surprise windfall could be a gamechanger for the organization. Conceivably, RIP could continue doing what it was doing, but simply do it on a bigger scale. Alternatively, the organization could use the money to improve its core operations in a way that it might work more efficiently. Most ambitiously, RIP could rethink its entire operating model to better achieve the organization’s mission - to end medical debt. RIP’s model had been built on an understanding of how the medical debt system worked and its strategy had been to work within that system to retire debt.  However, with this large change in resources, RIP could try other strategies, such as direct advocacy, to better address the root causes of the problem.

Unlike nearly all private venture funds, Connecticut Innovations (CI) was an evergreen fund with no pressure from limited partners to distribute proceeds and could hold public shares after a firm's IPO. But should the fund do so? The issue flared in considering CI’s investment in Arvinas, a New Haven biotech firm. CI's investment managers had observed that the valuations of biotech companies often continued to rise after an IPO. After Arvinas’s IPO in 2019, CI had to decide: should it sell its Arvinas shares after the lock-up period, or hold the shares for longer? What were the potential benefits and risks of the decision? And in a larger perspective, did a policy of holding onto public shares make sense for CI from a public policy or financial perspective? If so, what were the appropriate parameters for an investment in public shares?

In 2017, Equinor, one of the world’s largest oil companies, announced that it was planning to expand its renewable energy business while maintaining its oil business with low carbon solutions. In 2020, the company created an ambitious roadmap to get to net zero in terms of its business by 2050, a commitment greeted with skepticism by some environmental groups, who doubted the company’s sincerity and the ambitiousness of its plans. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 made Equinor a key player in ensuring Europe’s energy security during this period of hostilities. It increased its production of natural gas to help fill the EU's energy gap left by declining amounts bought from Russian suppliers. While Equinor maintained that it was continuing its announced roadmap to net zero, environmentalists in Norway and abroad raised alarms about the increasing production and the unusual level of profits from the company's fossil fuel business. How could Equinor’s management continue to make its hybrid strategy credible to stakeholders in this new environment?

In March 2020, the rapid onset of COVID-19 disrupted the U.S. and global economies. Fed policymakers believed that the shock of COVID-19 required more than adjusting monetary policy. Under Section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act, in unusual and exigent circumstances, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System could initiate programs (called facilities) to serve as a liquidity backstop in its role as lender of last resort. Once the facilities were in operation, the New York Fed reconsidered the use of its standard set of counterparties and agents as the new facilities, which focused on markets beyond those typically transacted in for routine open market operations (“OMOs”), provided a broader set of market participants with which to transact. During the 2008-2009 Global Financial Crisis and in its aftermath, the Fed's choice of counterparties had been criticized as being too narrow. Critics had assailed the Fed for not involving smaller financial institutions, including those owned by veterans, women, and minorities. Could the list of counterparties be expanded in response to the COVID-19 crisis?