Experience Stern | News & Events

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "New York University finance professor Aswath Damodaran writes: 'I don't think that Facebook's management is doing this deal for defensive reasons or because they have explicit plans for generating value, at least as of now. It is WhatsApp's large, growing and engaged user base that makes it so attractive to Facebook, especially given how much the market is pricing all of those factors. You may find it difficult to believe that someone as smart as Mark Zuckerberg would pay $19 billion without a clear vision of how he plans to make money off the deal, but I don't.'”

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "In 1980, if you were a high school graduate and you compared your average wage that you earned to a college graduate, the college-educated graduate made about 20% more than you did. Today, the college graduate makes almost twice as much as the high school graduate. And as Chair Yellen said, the two forces that drive that, primarily, are globalization and technology. In other words, there's been an increase in the demand for high-skilled workers...So today, if you are a high school educated worker with no post-secondary education and you go into the labor force, 90% of the low-wage jobs are held by people with only a high school education. So the key is, how do you get more people into the high-skill category?"

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "There are some important parallels between JCPenney and companies generally in turnarounds and country turnarounds... So, countries that have turned themselves around, in particular, emerging markets, who, in the last three decades, went from third world countries to emerging markets, did it by doing three things. They were disciplined, they provided clarity, and discipline and clarity produce trust. It's the same thing for corporations."

The Strategy and Operations Club and the Management Consulting Association will co-host the Fourth Annual Strategy Forum, themed “Big Data | Big Results,” on February 27th, 2014.

Excerpt from WalletHub -- “Since a lot of the lobbying is hand-to-hand and among personal contacts, money calculations would be misleading. The Academy has rules about this – a recent case had a movie removed from contention for a violation. Still, you have to believe that if they need these rules, the rules get breached.”

Excerpt from Forbes -- "Researchers Uma R. Karmarkar and Bryan Bollinger report their preliminary findings in their working paper BYOB: How Bringing Your Own Shopping Bags Leads to Treating Yourself, and the Environment."

Excerpt from The Huffington Post -- "If you count libertarians as conservatives ... that's going to really dilute your conservatives. What we're talking about are social conservatives. To say that you're an economic conservative isn't really important psychologically. The psychological variable here ... is really about social conservatives. It's really important that libertarians be left out [of the 'conservative' classification]."

On February 25, the Center for Real Estate Finance Research partnered with two student organizations, the Stern Real Estate Club and Stern Women in Business, to host an Executives-in-Residence Day.

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- “'This is one of those companies where you do a traditional cash-flow valuation of the business and it is really tough to justify the valuation that they’re at,' Mr. Damodaran said in an interview. 'But there are a lot of people who have tried to sell short who are getting steam rolled.'”

Excerpt from The Huffington Post -- "Limited individual acts of kindness, according to Jonathan Haidt, a University of Virginia psychologist and author of The Happiness Hypothesis may not be fulfilling. He notes that 'If you do a random act of kindness for a stranger and it's a one-shot deal, there's much less likelihood that you're going to see any benefit.'"

Excerpt from Reuters -- "...Bitcoin isn't well understood right now. And so when something like this happens on what used to be the largest exchange, investor faith in Bitcoin goes down. And this hurts Bitcoin investors around the world even if there were no problems with their exchanges."

In research that is forthcoming in the journal, Management Science, NYU Stern Professor Deepak Hegde and his co-author, Justin Tumlinson of the IFO Institute at the University of Munich, found that US venture capitalists (VCs) were more likely to invest in start-ups led by executives of the same ethnic origin, particularly when the probability of the start-ups’ success appears low.

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- “'I would use more aggressive monetary policy to weaken the currency,' Roubini said at a lunchtime event at the Toronto Hilton, referring to the Canadian dollar. 'That’s what I would do. More than fiscal stimulus I would say a commitment to keep rates low for longer, or having an easing bias, something along those lines.'”

Excerpt from Reuters -- "Canada's housing market is at risk of a meaningful correction, Nouriel Roubini said on Monday, though the economist known as 'Dr. Doom' for his often gloomy forecasts said he was not predicting a crash."

Excerpt from TopMBA -- “'The changes that have occurred,' explains Chernoff, 'come about because many industries have been basing their decision making on intuition and experience. Companies realize now they need managers with higher level analytic skill, being able to work with big data that companies are amassing. It’s not sufficient to just be able to run Excel.' MBA students are alive to this, he says, having spent time in industry, and it is the MBA community in which supply chain expertise is really being cultivated."

Excerpt from Livemint -- "The Chinese stimulus of the past five years has been a big driver of the global rebound from the abyss of fall 2008. As the stimulus subsides and the Chinese government looks for a shift from investment-driven growth to consumption-driven growth, the rest of the world cannot escape a difficult adjustment."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "In practice, however, winner-take-all effects still appear to dominate. Long-tail proponents predict that the least-popular offerings should be capturing market share from the most popular. But as Anita Elberse, a professor at the Harvard Business School, recounts in her 2013 book 'Blockbusters,' the entertainment industry’s experience has been the reverse. Digital song titles selling more than one million copies, for example, accounted for 15 percent of sales in 2011, up from 7 percent in 2007. The publishing and film industries experienced similar trends."

Excerpt from PsychCentral -- "The researchers, Uma R. Karmarkar, Ph.D., assistant professor of business administration at HBS, and Bryan Bollinger, Ph.D., assistant professor of marketing at New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business, were surprised to find that the influential effects linked to reusable bags were not causal, but seemed to worked in tandem, pushing shoppers in seemingly opposite directions at the same time."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "In a paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, economist David Yermack said that Bitcoin shifts too much to be a unit of account or a store of value."

Paula Kerger, President and CEO of PBS, joined Langone MBA students for a 2013-2014 Langone Speaker Series event. Professor Charlie Murphy moderated the conversation, which began with a one-on-one interview focused on Kerger’s experiences at PBS, career path and professional pointers for Langone MBAs.

Excerpt from the Los Angeles Times -- "It isn't 1999, but companies with loads of users — but few prospects for making money — are being handed lofty market values, said Aswath Damodaran, who teaches corporate finance and valuations at New York University's Stern School of Business."

Excerpt for Marketplace -- "'I think in some ways this is a first in the history of Hollywood,' says NYU Stern School of Business professor Luis Cabral.

Excerpt from CIO Magazine -- "Trends of who's going where, in the aggregate, could be an interesting way of discovering things you didn't know were happening in your city, much like trending information on Twitter sometimes leads people to discover news stories, said Arun Sundararajan, professor of information, operations and management sciences at New York University, who studies digital economics."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "'The most likely scenario,' he writes, 'is that most major emerging markets, including China, will experience a transitional growth slowdown but will not be derailed by shifts in monetary policy in the West, with high growth rates returning in the course of the coming year.'"

MBA student Julie Raskin takes on a new partnership role in the private sector, after a career in government.