Experience Stern | News & Events

NYU Stern’s 2nd Annual Risk Management Symposium convened professors and industry practitioners to discuss current global risk issues.

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "Psychologists have long known that different cultures tend to think differently. In China and Japan, people think more communally, in terms of relationships. By contrast, people are more individualistic in what psychologist Joseph Henrich, in commenting on the new paper, calls 'WEIRD cultures.' WEIRD stands for Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic. Dr. Henrich's point is that cultures like these are actually a tiny minority of all human societies, both geographically and historically. But almost all psychologists study only these WEIRD folks."

Excerpt from The Huffington Post -- "We have learned a lot about the nature of humankind since the 1950s. In his best-selling book "The Righteous Mind," social psychologist Jonathan Haidt likens the human mind to a rider (reason) on an elephant (intuition). Back in the 1950s we thought that the rider was in charge, or ought to be. Evidence is accumulating from several fields that this view is wrong; the elephant is in charge and the rider is a much better rationalizer in hindsight than a reasoner in prospect. It seems that, with our limited conscious mental capacity, our minds have evolved to make fast 'good enough' decisions under pressure of time and conditions of uncertainty. Sometimes, especially in evolutionarily unfamiliar contexts, these intuitions play us false, but most of the time they work just fine and we couldn’t live without them."

Excerpt from CNBC -- "Everyone is worried about the economy, but overall you have to take the GDP numbers, you have to take the more macroeconomic factors as more of a 10,000-foot level and... in making specific investments, you have to narrow it down more to a company-specific investment and that's what I do in investing. That's what we do at Stern as well. I work in the student Michael Price investment fund and we're always looking at stocks. We're always evaluating different positions and poking holes in different theses..."

Excerpt from CCTV -- "Now that China's become the world's largest investor – investing twice as much as the US last year in real terms, so it's really the largest investor by a wide margin – the efficiency of China's investment is a matter of global concern. And China's financial system will largely determine the efficiency of that investment because it's the financial system that decides which projects get financed. And China's financial system has been dominated by its banking sector, while the stock market's been a bit of a side show. But what our research is finding is that China's stock market is actually doing quite well and probably deserves more attention and more capital."

The Macro-Financial Modeling Group will host its 2014 conference, focusing on sovereign credit risk and financial stability, at NYU Stern from May 30-31. 

Excerpt from CNBC -- "'I think the central bank is making occasional interventions to make traders understand that this [the yuan] can go up or down. It does look like tactical maneuvering more than anything else,' Michael Spence, professor of economics, at the NYU Stern School of Business, said on CNBC, with regards to whether the central bank was deliberately guiding the yuan lower in order to support the economy."

Excerpt from WIRED UK -- "The next time someone says that Twitter is worth $50 billion because it's going to have $100 billion in advertising revenue, stop them and ask, 'Well, if it's going to have $100 billion in ad revenue, then who's losing? Because it can't be coming from The New York Times, as most newspapers are penny change in this market. It's got to be coming from Facebook or Google. So if you have Twitter, Facebook and Google in your portfolio and you're telling me that each of these companies is going to be collecting enormous revenues, then I have a problem. Because you have all winners and no losers. It's not a zero-sum game; at some point for every winner there have to be some losers."

Excerpt from Ecommerce Times -- "'In the case of Zappos, because it is about prospective job candidates, people are going to be very measured and selective about what they say and do on these internal forums,' Ghose told the E-Commerce Times. 'They would want to give the best possible impression to prospective recruiters, and so their content will be very carefully curated.'"

Excerpt from CNBC -- "It looks like China is not scheduled for any kind of hard landing as far as I can see, and they're really just nervous because they're waiting for the household sector to kick in and sort of help out because the export sector is contributing next to nothing to growth and they don't want to overuse the investment lever."

Excerpt from mbaMission -- "An expert on game theory and its practical application to business strategy, Adam Brandenburger ('Game Theory and Business Strategy') was voted the NYU Stern MBA Professor of the Year in 2006, and in 2008 received an NYU Excellence in Teaching award in recognition of his teaching and course development work."

Excerpt from Mashable -- "'I've noticed that in cities where Uber competes with Lyft, the pricing is substantially lower than in markets where they don't compete,' said Arun Sundararajan, professor of Information, operations and management sciences at New York University. 'New York is one of the markets where they don't compete with Lyft.'"

Excerpt from Forbes -- "One theoretical economical model that comes to mind that supports Kelly’s belief is Michael Spence’s signalling model of education. In this model, a person with high ability, ability that cannot be directly observed by prospective employers, looks for some way to signal that ability to differentiate himself from lower ability competitors."

Excerpt from The Globe and Mail -- "In the retail sector, Mr. Galloway argued that Amazon.com Inc. is a big winner at the expense of brands that have weak digital strategies, such as Target. He offered what might be the best metaphor I’ve ever heard to explain what Amazon is doing by building gigantic fulfilment centres outside of urban areas. He suggests that while the cable company is your conduit for digital bits (think cable modem service), Amazon’s fulfilment business is set to become your conduit for atoms (physical stuff). Because Amazon spends so much money on technology and fulfilment, Mr. Galloway says it’s like they’ve gone underwater with a huge oxygen tank and forced their competitors, who have much smaller oxygen tanks, to dive down too. He calmly predicts that the weaker players will run out of air and drown."

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "I think the best way I can explain [the difference between price and value] is with an analogy. Let's suppose you go to look at a house that you want to buy. Your realtor points to the house. She names a price, or he names a price, and you say, 'Where did you come up with that number?' And the reality is, he or she came up with that number by looking at other houses in the neighborhood and what they sold for. A lot of people invest the same way. If you ask them, why are you paying $50 for Twitter or $600 for Apple, the reality is they haven't valued the company in any real sense, they've priced the company by looking at what other people are paying for the stock. That's the essence of the difference. Price is based on what other people pay. Value is based on what you think you can get back in cash flows from investor."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "'Anything that harms Alibaba has a direct impact on the reputations of everyone in the industry,' said Joseph Foudy, a professor of Asian studies at New York University’s Stern School of Business. 'That doesn’t mean they won’t do it, it just means that decision will be taken at the highest level, where they’re tremendously proud of Alibaba.'"

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "Mr Fulop [MBA '07] describes the project as 'a great marriage' and is planning to bring another team of Stern students to work on Jersey City’s public library system. 'I’m getting top-calibre talent who are donating their time and doing meaningful work. There is no other way that I could get that type of person with the capacity to donate that type of manpower and hours without this relationship with Stern.'"

Excerpt from El Paso Times -- "The financial landscape can change quickly, and that's why regulators need to be 'aware of when risks are growing and need timely evidence. And I'm not sure a once-a-year stress test (instituted in 2009) is enough to see what is going on, and make good decisions,' [Engle] said. A more frequent monitoring system is needed, and that's what Engle said he and his colleagues have developed at NYU."

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "'The fix is easy to manipulate and it is not a good benchmark,' said Rosa Abrantes-Metz, adjunct professor at New York University Stern School of Business and author of a soon-to-be-published research paper on the fix. 'The news shows that illegal behaviour did occur and there will be concerns about what else was happening.'"

Excerpt from Forbes -- "One theoretical economical model that comes to mind that supports Kelly’s belief is Michael Spence’s signalling model of education. In this model, a person with high ability, ability that cannot be directly observed by prospective employers, looks for some way to signal that ability to differentiate himself from lower ability competitors."

Excerpt from TopMBA -- "Drawing on his own experiences, Banga spoke of the importance he attaches to diversity for business and leadership. Plus, in a nod to NYU Stern’s torch logo, he ended his commencement address by declaring, 'You’ve been handed a torch to a future of greater diversity and better business that can truly light the way to a better, more equal world.'"

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "Unusual trading patterns around the afternoon fixing in London are a sign of collusive behavior and should be investigated, Rosa Abrantes-Metz, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, wrote in a draft research paper, which was reported by Bloomberg News in February."

Excerpt from The Washington Post -- "A recent study from New York University estimates that CARD Act fee reductions have saved consumers $12.6 billion a year since being enacted. Researchers examined 150 million credit card accounts and found that limits on fees reduced overall borrowing costs to consumers by an annualized 1.7 percent of average daily balances."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "[Our central bank system] is quite distorted. I don't think Europe can recover unless there is a significant weakening of the Euro, so, very reluctantly, the ECB is about to move into that territory."

Excerpt from Project Syndicate -- "The world we are entering is one in which the most powerful global flows will be ideas and digital capital, not goods, services, and traditional capital. Adapting to this will require shifts in mindsets, policies, investments (especially in human capital), and quite possibly models of employment and distribution. No one knows fully how all of this will play out. But attempting to understand where the technological forces and trends are leading us is a good place to start."