Experience Stern | News & Events

As a part of the Conversations on Urbanization series held by NYU Stern’s Urbanization Project, Paul Romer, Professor of Economics and Director of the Urbanization Project at NYU Stern, University Professor and Director of NYU’s Marron Institute of Urban Management, spoke with Mark Kleiman, Professor of Public Policy in the UCLA School of Public Affairs, in a public presentation on October 9. 

Excerpt from Seeking Alpha -- "The market is protected from new entrants by heavy regulation, high fixed investment and economies of scale. Dish has an excellent relationship with EchoStar, its main supplier, which allows it to lower costs significantly. The company has excellent management with years of experience in the TV and wireless industries, and has demonstrated consistent improvement in average revenue per user of both wireless and broadband services. Dish is also utilizing market conditions to get cheap access to capital. The company currently has $8.9Bn of cash and cash equivalents on its balance sheet, which could be aimed at Spectrum purchases, international expansion and the entry into wireless."

Excerpt from Seeking Alpha -- "ULTA is the first mover in this business model and the company's rapid expansion helps ensure that customers are pulled into the ecosystem. The company also offers a points-based rewards program that keeps customers coming back. In fact, 80% of revenues come from rewards members. ULTA also has best-in-class E-Commerce (+50% Growth YOY), helping the company reach customers wherever they are."

Excerpt from Forbes -- "How much of a price premium will consumers be willing to pay for the benefits, or will the customization be viewed as a competitive tactic to increase new customer acquisitions and brand loyalty, without a price premium? In the latter case, there is a calculable marketing replacement value to customization."

Excerpt from Treasury & Risk -- "'The amount of data that’s being generated just doubles every year,' said Vasant Dhar, a professor and head of the information systems group at NYU’s Stern School and co-director of Stern’s Center for Business Analytics. 'In the old days, data was something that was collected painfully and there wasn’t too much of it. Now we’re in an age where everything is recorded almost as a by-product of how we function. The fact there’s so much that’s out there and available opens up a whole new world of possibilities and risks,' he added. 'This is the new math; it’s a new way of functioning and thinking about the world.'"

Excerpt from Fortune -- "Western companies benefit from a globalized marketplace backstopped by universal values that allows them to improve supply chains and reach new customers. They are engineered to compete with other corporations, not governments. Clashing states will force many companies to make painful choices about how they do business—and where."

Excerpt from Marketplace -- "When [Damodaran] looks at the biggest companies buying back the most stock—companies like Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, IBM—he sees a pattern. 'I mean you look at that list,' he says, 'and every single one of them, you look at the last decade, have a history of destroying value— of investing in things where they have nothing to show for it 5 years out, 10 years out.  I look at that list, and I say: Thank God for buybacks.'"

Excerpt from Seeking Alpha -- "My base case valuation based on comparable company multiples implies a price target range of $122.39 - $130.87 for Ashland compared to DCF intrinsic value of $125.55 — upside of 20.5% to 28.8% compared to current price of $101.57. Applying the worst case scenario discussed earlier, the stock has a valuation range of $109.0 to $112.07 (still an upside of ~8.8%). Running the model based on higher than estimated growth (higher than company estimate but in line with industry outlook) provides a best case SOTP price target of $134.68 (a 32.6% upside). As expected, the stock offers significant upside when valued as a separate businesses."

Excerpt from CNBC -- "'It's like water,' said Marti G. Subrahmanyam, professor at NYU's Stern School of Business, said. 'So long the floodgates have been kept closed and water could not flow from China to Hong Kong. They are slightly opening the floodgates.'"

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "'They are concentrated in the hardest part of the business,' said Roy C. Smith, a former partner at Goldman who is now a historian of the financial industry at New York University. 'In terms of the modern life of the place, this is the most difficult ordeal to manage its way through that the firm has ever faced.'"

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "Critics such as Roy Smith, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, say prosecutors were driven by 'political fever' to extract massive penalties from Wall Street. 'They have to deliver something, so they come up with this,” said Smith, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) partner. 'The fact that it’s unfair never really gets considered. The banks have no choice but to hunker down and accept it.'"

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "The best thing about the American economy is that it is structurally flexible, so the private sector is actually adjusting pretty fast. But we need very heavy investment infrastructure, education, skills, and other things to try to bring the lower half of distribution up."

Excerpt from The Huffington Post -- "The Stern School of Business has joined with Global Spiritual Life at NYU, with support from the Lenz Foundation, to introduce the NYU Mindfulness in Business Initiative. The first event of the year featured Dan Harris, best-selling author and co-anchor for ABC's Nightline. Being in business school, I expected Harris's recommendations for mindful living to consist of checklists and frameworks. Instead, he shared with us his path to meditation, and the clarity he's found as a result. He made no promises, but offered a convincing case about the value in stepping back and gaining the presence of mind to become aware of thoughts and impulses before acting on them."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "Iconic, charismatic leaders can excite investors, and boost innovation during their tenures. But the 'great man' approach can lead to stymied growth or worse, once the guy heads for the door, said Karen Brenner a professor at New York University Stern School of Business. 'You never want to let it get to a point that the company’s leader is seen as its core operational strength,' Prof. Brenner said."

Excerpt from Bloomberg Businessweek -- "This combination, a more robust and resilient LIBOR for transactions that require a reference rate with a bank credit risk component and the development of an alternative reference rate for transactions like interest rate derivatives that don't, will strengthen our financial system and help undo some of the damage caused by earlier transgressions."

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "At NYU Stern, MBA students work with growing businesses within New York City’s fashion industry through a masters workshop with the Council of Fashion Designers of America. Paired with designers, they advise on finance, product market strategies and business plans. MBA student Laura Musano recently completed the workshop, working on a project for handbag collection Kara. 'I really liked that it opened up two-way learning,' she says. 'Not only could we use our skills but it felt like we were really helping the business grow.'"

Excerpt from Fox News -- "Alvin Lieberman, a marketing professor at NYU and director of the school’s entertainment, media, and technology program, sees fierce competition for The Players’ Tribune. 'Jeter has to fight among the 200-plus cable channels and the many thousands of social networks,' he told FoxNews.com. 'Will he make an impression? Yes. The question is, how long will it last?'"

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "Indeed, scholars find that some of the most elemental differences between liberals and conservatives occur on the moral plane. In his now famous research, New York University’s Jonathan Haidt interviewed hundreds of people and surveyed tens of thousands more about their moral biases. He told outlandish stories (one involved a family eating its dog) and gauged his subjects’ immediate moral reactions. The differences were stark."

Excerpt from the New York Post -- "'It was a pretty good report,' said Joseph Foudy, a business professor at New York University. 'The fact that job growth was in a range of sectors tells you it’s not just a one- or two-industry story.'"

Excerpt from Bloomberg Businessweek -- "'Our goal is to make it clear to those who are entering their career with MBAs that business is a place for them, and that they should be proud to be out,' says Matt Kidd, the executive director of Reaching Out MBA. So far, the business schools at Columbia, University of Chicago, Northwestern, Dartmouth, MIT, and NYU have all agreed to fund one of the scholarships, which will be called Reaching Out MBA fellowships."

Excerpt from Politico -- "An Internet roundtable was held focusing on the economics of the issue, and Chairman Tom Wheeler put forth an interesting question: 'Is there difference between prioritization and paid prioritization? Does the exchange for value change the economics?' he inquired in front of a panel of economists. It’s unclear if they got to the bottom of it, but Nicholas Economides, an NYU professor and executive director of the NET Institute, gave this answer: The ISPs have to prioritize their networks to run smoothly, he explained. 'The payment is the crucial thing because the payment can create disincentives that I think are perverse from the point of view of the public interest, but they are perfectly natural from the business point of view. From the business point of view, it makes perfect sense to create artificial scarcity and make more money.'"

On October 2nd, over 30 Stern students and administrators descended on San Francisco for the Annual Reaching Out MBA (ROMBA) Conference. The weekend came on the heels of good news from the Stern Administration announcing an LGBT fellowship, and included Stern-facilitated admissions, alumni, and career events.

Excerpt from PBS NewsHour -- "Uber’s creating a platform that’s replicating the traditional model of taxi, just doing it far more efficiently."

Excerpt from MyFoxNY -- "There's a lot of good that's come out of the 1999-2000 dot com bust. Ecommerce is what it is today because of what we have learned from the mistakes in the past. There is collateral damage. Sure, investors lost, but society benefited."

 

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "Yesterday’s gap was $9.23 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The shortfall reflects an estimate by Damodaran, the author of four books on company valuation, that Yahoo has $8.02 billion in cash. The discount is a sign of 'investor concerns, merited or not, that Yahoo’s management might do something senseless with the cash,' he wrote two days ago in a posting on his Musings on Markets blog."