Experience Stern | News & Events

Excerpt from LinkedIn -- "As malls crumble and Amazon ascends, Department Stores have been on deathwatch. Yet brick-and-mortar retail remains relevant. While growth in clicks outpaces bricks, 90% of retail sales take place in a physical store. Over the next five years, Department Stores will grow 22% globally, with most of the growth coming from emerging markets, specifically China. Department Store brands, including Nordstrom, are seeing big bets on digital begin to pay off, while brands like Sears and JCPenney are looking to digital as a lifeline."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "For about 150 years, finance has essentially charged a 2 percent fee on financial assets, like stocks, bonds and loans, according to research by a New York University economist, Thomas Philippon. That 'fee' adds up the total costs that investment bankers, asset managers, brokers and other financial middlemen charge their clients. Even as financial assets in the economy doubled over the last few decades, that fee percentage stayed remarkably flat."

Excerpt from The Huffington Post -- "While the Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2015 - aka, the 'Audit the Fed' Act - doesn't shut down the Federal Reserve, it would go a long way to putting Congress directly in charge of monetary policy and to weakening the Fed's effectiveness as a lender of last resort."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- “Technology is now the largest single slice of the equity market,” [Damodaran] writes. “Just as growth becomes more difficult for a company as it gets larger and becomes a larger part of the economy, technology collectively is running into a scaling problem, where its growth rate is converging on the growth rate for the economy.”

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "To hear enthusiasts describe them, economic sanctions are trusty swords. By excluding hostile governments and their senior officials from western financial markets, America and its allies can pursue diplomacy with a streak of coercion. The number of US sanctions programmes has doubled in recent years, and they now target the personal assets of a rogue state’s political and economic elite."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "While China probably will avoid prolonged Japan-style stagnation, a major crisis could expose weaknesses that aren't apparent now, according to Smith. 'Most people today are talking about China displacing the United States as the great power of the 21st century,' he said in a telephone interview last week. 'My view is that it is more likely to end up like Japan - that is, the status of a former would-be superpower that isn't.'"

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "'I don’t see the lunacy I saw in the dot-com bubble,' said financial historian Richard Sylla of New York University’s Stern School of Business. 'Computer clicks are still important in our lives, but we don’t use the number of clicks to decide how promising a company is, as people did then. Investors are much more circumspect about thinking, is this thing really going to pay off?'"

NYU Stern’s Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation hosted a conversation with Regina Dugan, leader of Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects Group, this March.

Academics, practitioners and policymakers gathered at NYU Stern on March 2 for a roundtable discussion on “The Biggest Change in Accounting Rules Ever: Proposed Global Standard on Accounting for Leases,” hosted by the Vincent C. Ross Institute of Accounting Research. 

Excerpt from The Washington Post -- "Alexander Ljungqvist, one of the authors of that study and an economist at New York University, said that investors are not necessarily at fault for the inertia at public firms. When the leadership of a publicly traded corporation becomes aware of a new opportunity to invest, they have to find a way to explain their plans to shareholders without divulging any sensitive information their competitors can use against them, he noted. That could be one reason why public firms hesitate to invest."

Excerpt from NBC -- "J.P. Eggers, an associate professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, compared the phenomenon to pop-up stores, increasingly popular in high-traffic areas where rents are high. A seasonal shop in a vacation location has little value once visitors go home, but real estate costs remain high for a store in a place like Brooklyn, he noted. 'The idea of leaving it with either no business because it’s closed or with a business that is just not going to make any money at that time of day or in that season just doesn’t make any sense,' he said. 'It’s far too valuable a property to do that.'"

Excerpt from Fortune -- "Last week, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) formalized the non-discrimination tradition on the Internet and preserved net neutrality. This is good news to ensure that the Internet remains a free market for innovation and provides consumers with unbiased choices when it comes to content."

The NYU Stern Center for Global Economy and Business welcomed Sheila Bair, former chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, for a talk and Q&A session.

Excerpt from Quartz -- "There is no such thing as a real conversation over email. Period. The back-and-forth of emails and text messages offer the appearance of intimacy. Unfortunately, it’s a false one, as Justin Kruger of New York University and Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago proved. The two psychologists showed that people could only accurately determine sentiment in text-based communications about half of the time."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "Thomas Philippon, a finance professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, is another academic who has studied the role of finance in the economy. In a November 2012 article in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Mr. Philippon and Ariell Reshef, an economist at the University of Virginia, reported on wages in the United States financial industry from 1909 to 2006. Among their findings: Finance accounted for 15 to 25 percent of the overall increase in wage inequality between 1980 and 2006."

Excerpt from Project Syndicate -- "Over time, of course, negative nominal and real returns may lead savers to save less and spend more. And that is precisely the goal of negative interest rates: In a world where supply outstrips demand and too much saving chases too few productive investments, the equilibrium interest rate is low, if not negative. Indeed, if the advanced economies were to suffer from secular stagnation, a world with negative interest rates on both short- and long-term bonds could become the new normal."

Excerpt from The Economist -- "A recent paper* by Uma Karmarkar of Harvard Business School and Bryan Bollinger of Duke Fuqua School of Business finds that shoppers who bring their own bags when they buy groceries like to reward themselves for it. For two years the authors tracked transactions at a supermarket in America. Perhaps unsurprisingly, shoppers who brought their own bags bought more green products than those who used the store’s bags. But the eco-shoppers were also more likely to buy sweets, ice cream and crisps."

Excerpt from Fox Business -- "When you're talking about economic growth, it is innovation that's the driver of that growth. So the way you increase growth, you have to have a vested increase in increasing the pace of innovation. And the way you increase the pace of innovation is increase the exchange of ideas - or between different industries. So, New York has a tremendous advantage because it's not just tech.... you know, fashion, media... it's all mixing of ideas."

Excerpt from Business News Network -- "I think that when we, nowadays, have so much electronic trading, and we have guidelines on what type of collaborations among competitors are allowed, having five competitors chatting live in a way that is not disclosed to the market on what the prices of gold, on which they have a variety of derivatives benchmarked on, and at the time when they themselves are trading for their clients and their own books, and nobody is monitoring... and ensuring that this process is robust, that is extremely problematic. It's very problematic also because we do see the patterns in the data."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "If this era of war ever ends, and we emerge from the slumber of automated killing to the daylight of moral questioning, we will face a reckoning. If we are honest with ourselves, the answers won’t be simple."

NYU Stern announced that Peter Henry, an economist and dean of the School, was awarded the Foreign Policy Association Medal at the organization’s annual Financial Services Dinner, held last evening at the Pierre Hotel in New York City.

On Friday, February 27, the NYU Stern Private Equity Club will host its 10th Annual Stern Private Equity Conference.

Organized by NYU Stern’s Citi Leadership & Ethics Program and Business & Society Program, with generous support from the Citi Foundation, the 2015 conference featured this year’s Distinguished Citi Fellow in Leadership & Ethics Tensie Whelan, president of the Rainforest Alliance and NYU alumna (BA ’80), as well as global business leaders, funders and the managing director of a Rwandan Specialty Coffee Company.

Excerpt from HuffPost Live -- "I do think that there are some merits to allowing states to have a say in directing the flow of immigration because they understand local costs imposed by immigrants... and also the benefits. I think one advantage that the state-based visa would have, for example, over an employment-based visa is that the immigrants themselves would have more flexibility within the states. So they'd be able to work for any number of different employers. That would create a thicker labor market, which would, of course, benefit employers as well. So there would be a higher potential for good matches between employers and workers. In the existing system, if you take, for example, the H1B specialty employment visa, it ties a worker to one employer. So you don't have that kind of labor market flexibility, which is ultimately detrimental to the immigrant and the economy and the labor market."

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "'Something of this magnitude is rather unusual,' said Joshua Ronen, professor of accounting at New York University Stern School of Business and co-editor of the Journal of Law, Finance and Accounting."