Experience Stern | News & Events

On Friday, November 6, the Graduate Marketing Association (GMA) will host its 2015 conference, themed "Engaging Consumers: Differentiating Where It Matters Most."

Excerpt from LinkedIn -- "The Revolutionary Guard controls crucial sectors of Iran’s economy, and many of Iran’s largest companies are controlled by veterans of the group. The last thing they want is competition from international firms, especially American ones, over an Iranian market they’ve had cornered for nearly 30 years. Their other concern is upcoming parliamentary elections in February. The nuclear deal has given Rouhani’s approval ratings a huge lift, and has made Zarif a political superstar in the country."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "I worry a lot about the Chinese banks. ... The capital needs of Chinese state-owned banks have been increasing very steadily since the financial crisis. China is loaded with debt. It's being issued back and forth between the banks and state-owned enterprises and the municipal governments and many of these are not very credit worthy anymore. Yet everything is guaranteed by the government. So, the banks don't see it as a big risk, but the stock market doesn't see the banks as that good of an investment."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "We acknowledge that U.S. economic performance is better than many other major developed economies. But we are unwilling to resort to a theory of 'secular stagnation' to rationalize modest economic performance and low investment. We suggest an alternative explanation that focuses on the interaction of the new conduct of monetary policy with the level and composition of aggregate demand. The importance of the policy issue demands a rigorous and open-minded discussion."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "The critical role of adaptation in responding to the realities of climate change demands a deeper analysis and more prominent discussion of the nature, effectiveness, timing and costs of various adaptation strategies. But whatever the outcome in Paris, or of future discussions of emissions and the climate, the reality is that humans must continue to adapt, as they always have."

Excerpt from eFinancialCareers -- "Roy Smith, a former Goldman MD and partner turned professor at the Leonard Stern School of Business, says there are around 2,000 MDs at Goldman out of 34,000 employees and they’re not all promoted as revenue generators. 'They are selected based on the contribution they make to the firm, which includes their contribution to profits, but also client relations, internal cooperation and teamwork, managerial activity and other qualities such as integrity, loyalty etc,' says Smith. 'They are subject to extensive 360 degree evaluation and checkings with seniors, contemporaries and subordinates. The effort, of course, is to select the best of the eligible year groups.'"

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "The baton has been passed from investment to consumption, according to Michael Spence, the Nobel laureate and economics professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. China’s household consumption is increasing to about 50 percent, and that’s supporting relatively high-speed growth, he said in a speech in Beijing on Wednesday."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "One of the big trends in the United States is that firms are turning their backs on the stock market. That has a number of causes, but one of which I think is important is this notion of short-termism. This is the idea that managers feel pressured to change the way they run their firms when they go public."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "'It’s a validation that they can counter regulation that might be restrictive to their growth,' said Arun Sundararajan, professor at New York University’s business school who studies the sharing economy. 'Strategically, it’s a victory. Here’s a piece of regulation that wasn’t in Airbnb’s best interest and people have voted against it.'"

Excerpt from OZY -- "'It’s an uphill battle,' in general, says Anindya Ghose, professor at NYU Stern School of Business, but that’s because no one’s cornered mobile yet, not even Google. ... Ghose adds that whoever wins at mobile search could win the revenue game too: Mobile advertising has a long way to go, but when companies nail it — which he figures will come in the form of hyperlocal ads that offer you coupons based on where you are — they might nail the industry."

Excerpt from Luxury Daily -- "Mr. Alter identified five major external factors affecting consumer behavior: time, booms and busts, space, ego and hard times. Markets are attuned to the effect that time has on consumer behavior habits on a macro scale, gearing marketing differently toward people of different ages and interacting differently with long-time consumers compared to new ones. However, smaller factors, such as the second digit of a person’s age, are equally important."

Excerpt from Digiday -- "Adam Alter, a marketing and psychology professor at NYU Stern, said that customizable goods have the 'Ikea effect' — people are more attached to products they feel represent themselves. 'Anything that’s rare is going to be more popular,' said Alter. 'And when you make something yourself, you’re really going to love it.'"

Excerpt from CNBC -- "The one-child policy created several unintended consequences that have been distorting the Chinese economy. For example, China's limited social safety net meant that young Chinese face a lifetime of savings to care for themselves, their parents and their grandparents. And a Confucian preference for male offspring has led to a huge gender imbalance and a marriage market in which men and their families are in a financial savings arms race to attract a smaller potential pool of wives. As a consequence, China has one of the highest savings rates in the world, creating a massive over-investment headache."

Excerpt from Vox -- "Overall, our findings suggest that offering some basic level of copyright protection can increase both the quantity and quality of works that create revenue through repeat performances."

The 12th Annual Social Entrepreneurship Conference, sponsored by NYU Stern and Northeastern D'Amore-McKim School of Business, convened scholars, practitioners and students from around the world to explore topics in social enterprise, innovation, sustainability and impact.

Excerpt from International Financial Law Review -- "'I don’t think a lot of mergers will be challenged in 2016. But in 2017 there’s going to be a new US administration, whether Republican or Democrat, and that may well lead to questions over whether there will be a new attitude to enforcement,' said Lawrence J White, professor of economics at NYU Stern. 'My prediction would be there will be more enforcement challenges in 2017,' White added."

Excerpt from The Huffington Post -- "... when the government considers the imposition of safety targets, it must estimate the cost and balance that against the prospective benefit. To do this, officials estimate the "economic value of a statistical life" by examining questions of the following form: How much would a typical person be willing to pay to eliminate a mortality risk that is 1 in 50,000? An answer of $200 implies that the expected value of reducing one fatality is $10 million. Consistent with estimates in academic studies, the Department of Transportation currently uses a value of $9.4 million."

Excerpt from Salon -- "I’ve looked at the analysis that the city of San Francisco and Airbnb did on its impact on short-term rental availability, and the conclusion I drew was that there are other factors – the growth of the population, the widespread prevalence of rent control – that have had far greater impact on the shortage of affordable rental housing than Airbnb."

Excerpt from Harvard Business Review -- "In the multi-stage study, consumers of various ages watched 37 real television ads from six different companies, spanning 15 brands in the lab. The researchers compared commonly used behavioral marketing research methods with a raft of neuromarketing techniques including eye-tracking, which reveals what captures people’s attention, facial emotion coding, which measures people’s ongoing emotional responses in real-time, biometrics such as heart rate, and neural measurements using electroencephalography (EEG) and fMRI. The goal was to see which source of data could most accurately predict the effect of advertising on sales, specifically the percentage change in sales due to a 1% change in advertising effort."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "Expectations for a December rise based on fed funds pricing have snapped back to 50 percent. That may be exactly where the Fed’s leadership wants to keep it when they speak Wednesday, said Kermit Schoenholtz, director of the Center for Global Economy and Business at the NYU Stern School of Business, because they still want to see incoming data before making a final decision. 'December is still on the table, but it’s premature for them to close the door one way or the other,' he said."

Excerpt from New China TV -- "One way to think about it is you can grow by getting more people working. You can grow by getting capital to workers. And you can grow by being more productive or innovative. And in China's case, the growth success over the last 30 or 40 years has been a combination of real innovation and technology on the ground. But it's also just been increasing roads, bridges, equipment and factories."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "In analyzing financial reports and quarterly conference calls at some 3,000 companies over the past 50 years, Baruch Lev, an accounting professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, found that analysts have all but stopped asking about information in financial reports, like sales and earnings figures. They are now asking more questions about strategy and nonstandard metrics, such as customer churn or the impact of foreign currencies. 'The usefulness of financial information to investors decreased tremendously over the last 20 to 30 years,' Mr. Lev said, adding that companies don’t say enough about intangible assets, such as patents and brands, that can drive their business."

Excerpt from Business Insider -- "'I think that Uber is easier to define through the traditional regulatory lens for the regulator. Uber is like taxi. There’s an immediate connection,' said Arun Sundararajan, an NYU professor and expert in the sharing economy. 'With Airbnb, it’s different. It’s sort of serving the needs that these hotels serve, but no one thinks of this room in their apartment being equivalent to a 100-room hotel.'"

Excerpt from the Financial Times -- "Joshua Ronen, a professor of accounting at New York University’s Stern School of Business said the OFR’s study — which did not cite individual banks by name — showed that lenders with the lowest capital ratios were making the biggest quarter-end reductions."

Excerpt from Barron's -- "'The stock market is a key component in whether China develops its wonderful tech companies or remains strait-jacketed by state-owned enterprises,' says Jennifer Carpenter, who specializes in the Chinese economy at New York University’s Stern School of Business."