Experience Stern | News & Events

Excerpt from Lohud.com -- "Thomas, who took office in January, received an executive MBA in finance and leadership after attending the school for two years every other weekend. 'I think it's going to help me really speak to the economic problems of Mount Vernon and connect a network of disconnects,' Thomas said Tuesday. 'Mount Vernon has never had a clear relationship with its finances. It's always been a political football.'"

Excerpt from The Huffington Post -- "Governor Andrew Cuomo’s $22 billion transportation capital plan, particularly the 'Pave NY' program, will yield major dividends for the Empire State. Should New York provide cities with the option to assess an infrastructure charge, we can leverage more public dollars to do more for the public good. As mayor of one of the densest cities in New York and in the nation, I see immense potential in this idea. It will raise the resources necessary to underwrite major long term construction projects, creating sustainable jobs and economic growth for years to come. Building and maintaining this vast network requires a coalition of engineers, equipment companies, contractors, and educators to trains and ready the workforce to do the work. Additionally, it will raise awareness of the need to reduce carbon emissions, making our air better to breathe."

Excerpt from Fortune -- "Now it turns out that those women who have reached the top have probably been out-earning their male counterparts for years. That’s because companies making a genuine effort to increase diversity in senior management have apparently been holding on to 'high-potential' women — meaning those perceived as having the right skills and talent to move up — at least in part by paying them more than 'high-potential' men. On average, says a new study, high-potential women earn 10% more annually than their high-potential male colleagues."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "In his heyday in the 1990s, Mr. Weill was 'a Sun King — one of the most powerful and successful financial individuals in New York,' said Roy Smith, a finance professor at New York University business school. Mr. Weill gained that status as a deal maker, with a series of ever-larger mergers culminating with Citicorp and the Travelers Group forming the behemoth Citigroup in 1998. The last deal helped knock down the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, which separated banking from the riskier securities business."

Excerpt from Barron's -- "...this year, the recovery rate in high yield bonds has been extremely low — just 13.9%, reports Marty Fridson, chief investment officer at Lehmann Livian Fridson Advisors, in a Tuesday report published Wednesday on S&P Capital IQ LCD. This continues a trend that started last year. Drawing on academic research, primarily done by Edward Altman of New York University Stern School, Fridson reports that the junk bond default rate was 2.83% in 2015, lower than the long-term mean of 3.33%. Normally, the recovery rate is higher when defaults are low. But in 2015, the recovery rate was just 34%, far below its historical average of 46%."

Excerpt from CNBC -- "I think the pathway for Amazon to be worth 700 is there. But it's a very narrow one. I've always called Amazon a 'field of dreams' company, which is if you build it, they will come--the building being the revenues and the profits. And I think what they've had going for them, they've always had that consistent story, which is we're going to go for revenues first and we'll get profits later. So it's built on that trust, and I don't think they can deliver the margins you would need to get to this 700. So that's the basis for my valuation."

Excerpt from Fortune -- "...Thomas Philippon, professor of finance at NYU’s Stern School of Business, argued at the symposium that taxing leverage makes sense, but is easier said than done. He argues that banks could hide their leverage using complex financial instruments like contingent assets or derivatives, avoiding Clinton’s tax while still bulking up on risk."

Excerpt from the Harvard Business Review -- "I propose a risk-oriented framework for deciding when and how to allocate decision problems between humans and machine-based decision makers. I’ve developed this framework based on the experiences that my collaborators and I have had implementing prediction systems over the last 25 years in domains like finance, healthcare, education, and sports. The framework differentiates problems along two independent dimensions: predictability and cost per error."

A new report issued jointly by the NYU Pollack Center for Law & Business and Cornerstone Research finds that U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission enforcements against public companies and their subsidiaries increased more than 50 percent in fiscal year 2015 and are on a pace to equal or exceed that high-water mark in FY 2016. 

Excerpt from the Business Standard -- "He quotes the economist Paul Romer of New York University about macroeconomics being plagued by 'mathiness' and thus failing to progress as a true science should, and that current debates among economists are often as pointless as those between 16th-century advocates of heliocentrism and geocentrism - whether the sun or the earth was at the centre of things."

Excerpt from TechCrunch -- "The difficulty with learning machines arises because they train themselves on what they see, the 'training data,' that cannot completely represent situations the machine will see in the future. These are sometimes called 'edge cases' or 'Rumsfeldian unknowns,' in that they are unknowable in advance. Humans typically deal with such edge cases remarkably well with no prior 'training' by applying common sense or finding analogies and learning from these samples of one."

Excerpt from Dagens Nyheter - "The world's cities are expected to grow by two and a half billion people by 2050. The US economist Paul M. Romer have a suggestion on how we can solve the challenges of overpopulation and migration: Create new sanctuaries where people are given the opportunity to test new ways of living."

Excerpt from Poets & Quants -- "In my professional career I am most proud of the entrepreneurial endeavors I’ve taken on before and during my time at Stern. I have a production company, Little Red Ro Productions, through which I’ve produced several short films. While at school, I co-created the Little Bright Notebook, a project design tool for creative types and entrepreneurs, along with my classmate Lenore Champagne Beirne. Stern does a great job of creating a diverse and interesting class of students each year. Our collaboration is a perfect example of two people with wildly different backgrounds and areas of expertise coming together to build something that helps the broader creative community. I’m not sure we would have crossed paths were it not for Stern."

Excerpt from NPR -- "'It was truly remarkable how much more effect Mrs. Obama had on the commercial fashion industry that almost any other celebrity you could find in any other commercial setting,' Yermack says. And it wasn't just a freak blip on the graph: 'This would be a very permanent thing,' Yermack emphasized. 'The stocks would not go down the next day. So to put a number on it for just a generic company at a routine event, it was worth about $38 million to have Mrs. Obama wear your clothes.'"

Excerpt from BusinessBecause -- "'Data is their business. It's the growth path for all of them,' said Vasant Dhar, NYU Stern professor of business and data science, and editor of the Big Data journal. 'The advice I give students these days is to take as many courses as possible that require working with real data,' he added."

Excerpt from Fortune -- "Governments should view Uber and Lyft as friends, not enemies. As I argue in my book ‘The Sharing Economy,’ society’s interests are served well when governments partner with platforms in the creation and enforcement of regulation rather than treating them as its target."

Excerpt from Thinkers50 -- "Perhaps we need additional frameworks. But I think we probably need a little bit of attention to what kind of criteria we might be able to use to separate interesting frameworks from frameworks that in some essential sense, really don't meet the test of history based on frameworks we've seen come and go."

Excerpt from New York Magazine -- "Humans don’t, as a general rule, do well with ambiguity. We like to tell clear, coherent stories about the world we see in front of us, and success is no exception. Hindsight bias, which is — and I’m just going to go with the Wikipedia definition here, because it’s good — 'the inclination, after an event has occurred, to see the event as having been predictable, despite there having been little or no objective basis for predicting it,' can partly explain how we come up with stories that cause us to discount the role of luck. Frank provided two examples of how hindsight bias warps our understanding of success in this manner: the Mona Lisa and Bryan Cranston."

Excerpt from The Huffington Post -- "There is an enormous gap between free trade as it is taught in textbooks and advocated by those who benefit from it and free trade as it is actually practiced in today’s world. Textbooks still unabashedly teach the virtues of free trade, but their arguments assume a world of pure market forces. But the American people don’t live in a world that is anything like that."

Excerpt from The Economic Times -- "It can be nice to imagine the much-derided banking industry unmoored from our daily needs, left to scramble for business like other non-essential industries. Of course, our transaction histories would be much more visible to governments than they are today . This imaginary world of effectively socialized money is being seriously discussed by researchers and central bankers alike. In a new paper, Max Raskin and David Yermack of New York University talk about it as a distinct possibility, albeit a radical one that 'carries significant risks for the rest of the financial system.'"

This Executive Education Short Course program examines best-practices related to the business use of social media and digital marketing. While there will be sufficient attention given to top level strategy used by companies adopting social media and digital marketing, the course will also focus on digital analytics oriented tools: how to make organizations more intelligent in how they conduct business in the digital age.

Continuing an annual tradition, NYU Stern faculty and guests gathered to celebrate the School’s community of scholars and to recognize excellence in research and scholarship, excellence in teaching, excellence in mentorship, excellence in influence and excellence in innovation.

Excerpt from Techonomy -- "There's a number of different ways in which IoT and the sharing economy are going to interface. As you sort of start to give a household device, for example, the ability to know where it is, the ability to know how much is being used, and in some sense, the ability to call on transport when it needs it, you dramatically increase the potential for peer-to-peer rental marketplaces."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "Helping establish a guild is a savvy decision by Uber, said Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New York University’s business school who’s writing a book titled 'The Sharing Economy.' 'They’re nurturing their relationship with their drivers,' he said. 'It seems like a smart move.'"

Excerpt from Fortune -- "The trouble comes if Cirrix buys too many of LendingClub’s loans, which is possible with Lending Club as a partial investor. 'If 80% of [Cirrix’s] portfolio is in LendingClub, it is very dangerous,' says Aswath Damodaran, professor of finance at the Stern School of Business at New York University. 'You become almost a quasi-bank, and you need to worry about all the things that banks do.'"