Experience Stern | News & Events

Excerpt from Livemint -- "'I do believe that collectively, the markets that are being used to justify these valuations  (online advertising in particular) are not big enough to justify the prices being paid, which I guess is a backhanded way of saying that the stocks are collectively overpriced,' [Damodaran] said in an interview."

Excerpt from The Boston Globe -- "'The basic dilemma is build or buy,' said C. Samuel Craig, director of the Entertainment, Media and Technology Initiative at New York University’s Stern School of Business. 'It’s very difficult for large companies to build internally because the corporate structure is risk-averse, and it’s hard to move quickly. If you see something out there that’s already working, the temptation is to buy or buy in.'"

Excerpt from Bloomberg View -- "Here are Stephen Cecchetti and Kermit Schoenholtz on liquidity. Their analysis includes the sentence 'We can separate claims about a loss of bond market liquidity into two fairly distinct categories: those about U.S. Treasury bonds and those regarding corporate bonds,' so I like them already. I feel like 90 percent of what I read about bond market liquidity treats Treasuries and corporates interchangeably, and as far as I can tell those markets have opposite liquidity problems (too much decentralized trading of Treasuries, too little of corporates)."

Excerpt from KIRO Radio -- "The idea that words are so dangerous, that anything could hurt anyone, and words are so dangerous in books that we need trigger warnings... this is new. And this is totally incompatible with the idea of a university, which is free speech, free thought... you should be able to say anything. ... Once you start saying that words are violence, that then can justify literal violence in response. So this is a very, very dangerous move. And it's only a few years old."

Excerpt from WWD -- "'Firms and organizations that compete on price — Amazon, China, Wal-Mart, McDonald’s — will view employees as a cost and the majority of innovation will be around how to get more, for less, from them,' said Scott Galloway, New York University marketing professor and founder of L2 Inc. 'This leads to companies that can be brutal places to work.'"

Excerpt from AdAge -- "As for the psychology of the whole business, Tom Meyvis, professor of marketing at the Stern School of Business at New York University, says it is likely there isn't 'too much research going on' when developing IVRs. 'The large aim of this business is to control cost,' he said. 'That's why we don't have live operators right away.'"

Excerpt from Forbes -- "At valuation conferences and in valuation treatises, we spend our time immersed in valuation details including how best to estimate cash flows, discount rates and deal with valuation loose ends, but we seldom talk about the bias, uncertainty and complexity. Valuation practice will be better served if we had an honest and open discussion of how we deal with these structural problems, because they remain the biggest barriers to good valuations."

Excerpt from HuffPost Live -- "The basic psychological point that I think is the crux of our article is that human psychology is as follows: There's a wonderful book by Nassim Taleb called 'Anti-Fragile.' It's about things that actually get stronger when you bump 'em around. My first book was on ancient wisdom and the ancients all got this one right. So here's a quote from Mencius, the ancient Chinese philosopher: 'When heaven is about to confer a great responsibility on any man, it will exercise his mind with suffering, subject his sinews and bones to hard work, expose his body to hunger,' et cetera... The point is, people are anti-fragile. You have to give them trials and tests. They have to suffer, they have to overcome it. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger."

Excerpt from The Huffington Post -- "It may seem counterintuitive, but in order to inspire free thinking, the first step is often to set some limits. While some academics and consultants advocate not restricting brainstorming creativity in any way, I've found allowing infinite options with few guidelines can paralyze innovation. Creativity flourishes when some parameters exist for what brands stand for and the brand equity elements that marketing tactics and line-extensions must protect and extend. Apple is a great example of a brand that adheres to a strong identity and vision for what it stands for, and the company continues to innovate while staying true to their brand parameters."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "The vote 'showed that the government coalition is very significantly weakened,' said Nicholas Economides, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. 'Elections are very likely in early fall. The most difficult part of the agreement, its implementation, will fall to a new government, to be elected in the fall.'"

Excerpt from Poets & Quants -- "...Apollo says she’s been given the opportunity to flex her own creative muscle and problem solving for Saks. 'I’m in dress collections so the buyer was interested in seeing which trends were in for this year’s prom season. Using "#prom," I was able to incorporate social media to investigate popular trends, then I created a board to visually show the trends.'"

Excerpt from Financial News -- "...US public infrastructure (highways, bridges, airports and so on) is paid for by user taxes and tolls that politicians are loath to raise, or by direct government grants that are equally unpopular. Thus it is continually under-depreciated, under-maintained, and under-financed."

Excerpt from Bloomberg View -- "Students demanding that campus life be bowdlerized to preserve their peace of mind seem to believe that the best way to deal with trauma is to avoid any mention of it. But [Greg] Lukianoff and [Jonathan] Haidt argue that this is exactly backward; chronic avoidance breeds terror. The current climate on campus is a recipe for producing fearful adults who are going to have difficulty coping in an adult world. It's as if we were trying to prepare the next generation of American citizens by keeping them in kindergarten until the age of 23."

Excerpt from TIME -- "The cybersecurity law will also have a chilling effect on privacy in China by building a single nationwide ID system that ties the online identity of citizens to their physical identity. Chinese officials insist that anonymity online allows terrorists and criminals to operate in the shadows–and that anonymity must be eliminated to protect Chinese citizens. Foreign companies will have to help manage these threats–even when they don’t agree with Beijing on what constitutes 'terrorism' or a legitimate threat to national security. The cybersecurity law also provides a legal basis for the government to shut down the Internet in the event of serious social unrest."

Excerpt from Marketplace -- "'America and consumers love to forgive,' says Galloway. 'It’s like a relationship. When your spouse gets angry at you, the easiest way to end the issue, "You’re right, I’m sorry. This is what I’m going to do to address the issue." It’s the same thing in the world of business.'"

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "It looks like there are going to be laws passed in Greece, the agreement laws... But then the laws have to be implemented, and that will happen sometime in the fall and that will be problematic. Additionally, there is a very important political wrinkle in this problem that the ruling coalition government does not have enough votes to pass these laws because some of their own deputies are going to vote against them, so these laws are going to pass with the opposition votes, which puts the government in a very precarious position. And it makes very likely that in early fall, this government will look for elections... as a way out of its problems."

Excerpt from PaRR -- "White noted that Libor is a collaboratively determined interest rate — a price, but it is an interest rate. However, according to Judge Buchwald, this interest rate is separate from the marketplace where people were buying and selling securities or mortgages or other products, and thus there was no collusion in those markets, he said. Buchwald 'didn’t see the collaborative effort in setting the Libor interest rate as a market antitrust issue,” White said. 'My personal belief is she is wrong and eventually is going to get overturned, either by the Second Circuit or the Supreme Court,' he added."

Excerpt from CNBC -- "The big jumps have been in the global classes, faculty-led classes that are taking our students to Milan, to China, to other places so that students can get a real hands-on experience in the country, see the culture, see the historical significance and perspectives of those countries and bring those back into companies that are increasingly multi-national in scope."

Excerpt from MarketWatch -- "...we have no choice but to conclude that we’re not in another bubble like it [the Internet bubble]. That...is the conclusion I reached upon grading the current market according to five dimensions of investor sentiment that were devised by the authors of perhaps the leading academic study of stock market bubbles. Those authors are finance professors Jeffrey Wurgler of New York University’s Stern School of Business and Malcolm Baker of Harvard Business School."

Excerpt from The Atlantic -- "Universities themselves should try to raise consciousness about the need to balance freedom of speech with the need to make all students feel welcome. Talking openly about such conflicting but important values is just the sort of challenging exercise that any diverse but tolerant community must learn to do. Restrictive speech codes should be abandoned."

Excerpt from Los Angeles Times -- "Tom Meyvis, a professor of marketing at New York University's Stern School of Business, said removing gender labels from toys gives more power to the consumer, a trend in marketing. 'To some extent, you give more control to the customer,' he said. 'So customers can decide for themselves what is the ideal product for their son or daughter, rather than being told this is the category your child falls into.'"

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "During the housing bubble, the widespread practice of so-called ratings shopping fueled a 'race to the bottom' among credit graders as they sought to win business, helping to fuel the later financial crisis...'We don’t know until we know if this is going to be a problem,' said Larry White, an economics professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. 'But surely they don’t want to be wrong a second time.'"

Excerpt from Harvard Business Review -- "For the classic economics paper on the role of technology on growth, see Paul Romer’s 1990 article 'Endogenous Technological Growth'..."

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "Spotting risk is difficult, and it is tempting to let others do the hard work. But rating agencies follow an ad hoc and slow-moving approach. Market signals, such as the interest rates payable on sovereign bonds, are noisy and volatile. It takes systematic, data-driven analysis to understand the dangers hidden in a shifting global economic scene."

Excerpt from The Globe and Mail -- "The indirect sourcing model is not unique to Bangladesh and has allowed explosive growth in the global apparel industry. But dependence on subcontracting firms outside the system of monitoring and inspection operated by Western brands leaves a significant part of the work force vulnerable to poor conditions."