Experience Stern | News & Events

Around the world, women with equivalent abilities and qualifications earn 80 percent or less than men. However, new research from NYU Stern Professor Lisa Leslie finds that this gender pay gap is not uniform among all female employees and reverses into a pay premium for certain women.

Excerpt from Harvard Business Review -- "Our findings document a pay premium for high-potential women that is driven by the widespread adoption of organizational diversity goals. Although diversity is a strategic goal in many organizations, women remain severely underrepresented in executive positions. As a result, executive women offer significant value to these organizations and receive a pay premium relative to executive men. We find that the female premium applies to all high-potential women in companies with diversity goals — both those who have already reached the executive ranks and those deemed likely to do so in the future."

On May 9, 2016, NYU Stern's Center for Sustainable Business and The Huffington Post co-hosted a conversation with Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever, and Center Director Tensie Whelan on the next generation of capitalism: how companies, in providing value to society, provide more value to themselves. Panelists discussed both how sustainability embedded in corporate strategy yields financial results, and the challenges the current financial system presents. The event was moderated by Jo Confino, Executive Editor of The Huffington Post.  Dean Peter Henry delivered opening remarks and highlighted the importance of the Center’s mission: A Better World Through Better Business. 

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "By digging through corporate by-laws, Mr. Kim was able to hand collect regularly scheduled meeting times for a sample of over 100 companies. Examining those dates, he found that material news is far more likely to get released on the day of a board meeting and the day immediately following than other days. He then looked at the performance of stock purchases made by outside directors immediately before board meetings. The finding: They outperformed."

Excerpt from Business of Fashion -- "Clothing and accessories often have high value but low usage — characteristics of other items that have proved popular in sharing consumption models, explains Arun Sundararajan, a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business. 'It’s quite common to have clothing that costs three figures or four figures,' he says, many of which are bought and worn only occasionally. In the US alone, over $8 billion worth of clothing sits in closets, unworn, according to a report by online thrift store ThredUp."

Excerpt from Forbes -- "VIX is a trademarked ticker symbol for the CBOE Volatility Index. It measures the predicted volatility of the stock market over a certain period in the future. According to Wikipedia, it was first developed and described by Menachem Brenner and Dan Galai in 1986."

Excerpt from CNBC -- "'In my academic research and industry consulting, I have seen tremendous benefits accruing to firms, organizations and consumers alike from the use of data-driven decision-making, data science, and business analytics,' Anindya Ghose, the director of Center for Business Analytics at New York University's Stern School of Business, said."

Excerpt from Seeking Alpha -- "In a study done by Masakazu Ishihara from New York University, it was found that as the price of new games increased, the average profits per game would fall by 10% while if title prices decreased, the average profits per game actually increased by 19%."

Excerpt from The Washington Post -- "Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, who will soon release a book about the sharing economy, said the approach has a lot of potential. 'The pure peer-to-peer rental model works well when you have high-value assets that aren't being utilized at capacity,' he explained. One of the reasons services like Airbnb and Uber have taken off is because they’ve let normal people make money from their biggest investments — their cars and homes, he said."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- “The U.S. has a serious problem with its academic pipeline. High-school graduation rates and the quality of academic preparation vary a great deal by race. Universities can’t draw from this broken pipeline and then hope to declare equality on campus, but they can be part of the effort to fix the problem.”

At the conclusion of an eight-month competition, NYU’s most promising innovators received a combined $200,000 in start-up cash at the annual $200K Entrepreneurs Challenge, held by NYU Stern’s W. R. Berkley Innovation Lab (iLab). The four winning teams – composed of students, faculty and alumni from across the University – were chosen after pitching their ideas and enduring Q&A by judges from venture capital, technology and design, and social enterprise sectors.

Excerpt from Bloomberg View -- "In his latest book, 'Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy,' he discusses how underappreciated the role of random chance is in our lives. Successful people tend to credit their skill, hard work and intelligence for their fortunate outcomes. Frank points out that for every big winner, there are scores of people who are as skilled, hard-working and intelligent, but came in just behind. The lack of a lucky break can be the difference between wild success and a near miss or worse."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "I think Trump is very proud as he presents himself as a winner. Interestingly, several people have done the calculation that if he had taken the money that his father gave him--his father was, of course, a very wealthy man--and put it in a mutual fund, he would have more money today than he has today. So he was obviously very, very lucky. He's built some businesses. He's destroyed some businesses."

Excerpt from CFO -- "In early April, at a roundtable on materiality at the NYU Stern School of Business, the proposal drew fire from the accounting, legal, and investment professions, as well as a more moderate critique from the corporate side. Stanley Siegel, an emeritus professor at NYU Law School, blasted the notion of introducing legal definitions into the U.S. accounting system. 'Materiality has meanings in several different contexts … it doesn’t follow that what’s material for a criminal case is material for accounting,' he contended. 'We’re in a worrisome area when we attempt to apply one standard in another setting.'"

Excerpt from Bloomberg View -- "The way we do banking, King thinks, needs to change. As it turns out, he has a powerful idea for how to change it. 'The End of Alchemy' is about more than this one idea -- which doesn’t actually appear until roughly 250 pages into the book. To the idea itself he devotes 40 seriously interesting pages, and I have here only a few hundred words. But this idea is the heart of his book and worth telling people about."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "The mass desertion of the AAA reflects a larger truth about corporate finance: Company managers are strongly influenced by what their peers are doing, says Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business. 'If everyone else is borrowing, you tend to borrow, too,' he says. ... Companies that loaded up on debt in the early to mid-2000s were more likely than others to fire workers once the 2007-09 recession hit, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper issued last year. Weak balance sheets were 'instrumental in the propagation of shocks' during the crisis, Xavier Giroud of MIT’s Sloan School of Management and Holger Mueller of the Stern School of Business wrote in the report."

Excerpt from Ethisphere -- "'Having an external view of CSR helps, tremendously when designing strategies to address human rights,' said Ron Popper, head of Corporate Responsibility at the electrical engineering giant ABB, during a roundtable event at NYU Stern’s Center for Business and Human Rights. 'You need to consider expectations such as what do all the different stakeholders expect— the government expects companies to pay their taxes while investors want to see a robust risk management framework and civil society wants to make sure the company is not doing any harm.'"

Excerpt from Fashionista -- "'These are difficult, complicated and costly logistics businesses,' says Lawrence Lenihan, cofounder and co-CEO of fashion-focused venture operating firm Resonance Companies. 'Their customers love them for convenience and selection, but I'm not sure that there is a profitable sustainable business at the end of the journey. They seem to be trying to emphasize the high end of the market with watches and jewelry because the margins are the highest and the logistics cost per contribution margin are the lowest. But then they are [facing] a whole host of competition, including the brands themselves who have the credibility of physical presence along with new products.'"

Excerpt from Strategy + Business -- "This smartphone-enabled, venture capital–fueled phenomenon cries out for a biography, a taxonomy, and an impact analysis. In The Sharing Economy, Sundararajan supplies all of those things. While much of the book will be familiar to someone who follows events in this world — he spends a good bit of time explaining how platforms such as Airbnb and Lyft actually work — it’s a useful and fundamentally optimistic attempt to explain where the sharing economy came from, and where it’s going."

Excerpt from Racked -- "'Luxury brands cannot "cheapen" their brands by frequent discounts and price promotions,' says NYU professor of business and marketing Tülin Erdem. 'It is inconsistent with their brand identity since if they do so their brand equity will be diluted. Most luxury brands have a sense of exclusivity and reflect a unique style, [and] too many people using these [discounts] will damage exclusivity and uniqueness.'"

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "New York University finance professor Aswath Damodaran said ROIC is a lazy shortcut for executives, because companies should have visibility into the cash flowing from projects on a more granular basis. 'I could write a paper on perverse ways you could destroy your company by raising your ROIC,' he said."

Excerpt from Project Syndicate -- "There are no politically easy solutions to the global economy’s current quandary. Unsustainably high debt should be reduced in a rapid and orderly fashion, to avoid a long and protracted (often a decade or longer) deleveraging process. But orderly debt-reduction mechanisms are not available for sovereign countries and are politically difficult to implement within countries for households, firms, and financial institutions."

Excerpt from IPE Real Estate -- "Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, part of the three-member expert group, thinks the government is rightly cautious about including unlisted infrastructure investment in the SWF [sovereign wealth fund]. 'Most of the investment needs for infrastructure are in the developing world, and that’s also where most of the risks are,' he says."

Excerpt from Euro Weekly News -- "Chilean actor and co-writer Martin Bacigalupo said when collecting his prize, 'This independent film has given me the opportunity to work with freedom to express through my character the things I wanted to say.'"

Excerpt from The Atlantic -- "That we tend to overestimate our own responsibility for our successes is not to say that we shouldn’t take pride in them. Pride is a powerful motivator; moreover, a tendency to overlook luck’s importance may be perversely adaptive, as it encourages us to persevere in the face of obstacles. And yet failing to consider the role of chance has a dark side, too, making fortunate people less likely to pass on their good fortune."