Experience Stern | News & Events

Excerpt from The Globe and Mail -- "Figuring out the backdating issue began in the 1990s with research by David Yermack, a finance professor at New York University. His work showed that several companies were awarding options and then seeing the stock price rise after the grant date. He believed executives were using insider information to pick the dates, knowing positive news was in the works which would drive up the price. (This is known as spring-loading)."

Excerpt from Business Insider -- "Since that was more than three times higher than any other NBA team had sold for and matched the price tag for the most expensive sports franchise sale in US history (the sale of the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2012), the bid raised questions about whether a sports franchise can be valued, how it is priced and whether there is an ego premium embedded in this particular offer. I am not a Clippers fan, but I love sports, and these questions not only deserve answers but have broader implications for valuing entertainment and media businesses."

Excerpt from MBAPrograms.org -- "The takeaways are learning what measurements from social media to use, and seeing the relationship between the actions you take on this platform and their results. 'The causal relationship is more useful and reliable than mere prediction,' says Ghose. All this, he adds, can improve one's management skills because they teach you how to use data to drive decisions."

Excerpt from MSN -- "'It's critical that you figure out who you are and be comfortable with it. What is important is what you do and how you do it, not where you come from or what you look like. That’s going to be very important for your future,' he said."

Excerpt from Bloomberg Businessweek -- No one expected a lovefest when Meera Joshi, the chairwoman of New York’s Taxi and Limousine Commission, and David Estrada, the vice president of government relations for ride-sharing startup Lyft, sat on a panel to discuss 'Regulation and New Business Models' at a recent conference at New York University. Lyft would love to operate in New York City, but city regulations prohibit the startup’s version of a taxi service, in which nonprofessionals use private vehicles to shuttle passengers. This is exactly the kind of regulatory obstructionism that infuriates proponents of the so-called sharing economy, but an audience expecting fireworks was disappointed. The mutual affection was so thick that several times the moderator apologetically noted his inability to create any contentiousness."

Excerpt from Entrepreneur -- "In an experiment conducted at the Stern School of Business at New York University in 2003, male and female graduate students who assessed the leadership capabilities of a real-life successful entrepreneur named Heidi were far more inclined to admire this accomplished individual when she was recast as Howard. Judging the likeability factor. Students given the case study about Heidi perceived her as 'selfish,' 'out for herself,' and 'a little political' -- in short, not as likable as Howard. When this experiment was replayed in 2013, substituting Kathryn and Martin for Heidi and Howard, students actually liked Kathryn slightly better than Martin (8 versus 7.6) -- but they didn’t trust her nearly as much (6.4 for Kathryn, 7.8 for Martin). As the evaluators explained to CNN correspondent Anderson Cooper, who staged the replay, 'men seem more genuine,' whereas women seem to be 'trying too hard,' making them less trustworthy."

Excerpt from Next City -- "Those five stages — technical possibility, social adoption, regulatory reaction, civil disobedience, and negotiated settlement — argued [speaker Clay] Shirky, are likely going to echo throughout the sharing economy over the next few years. And we’re at least on Stage Two; Shirky told of recently trying to street-hail a Manhattan taxi cab to take his nine-year-old daughter to dance class by waving his arms and scanning the horizon. His daughter’s assessment of that approach: 'Uh, Dad, don’t you have Uber?'"

Excerpt from The Huffington Post -- "Economist William Baumol noticed that in certain of our endeavors labor costs continue to rise though labor productivity does not increase. His famous example was a Beethoven quartet which takes exactly as much time to play today as it did one hundred years ago and with exactly the same number of players. But those musicians now make more money."

Excerpt from Harvard Business Review -- "Boeing’s decision to minimize its assets was made with Wall Street in mind. RONA is used by financial analysts to judge managers and companies, and the fixation on this kind of metric has influenced the choices of many firms. In fact, research by the economists John Asker, Joan Farre-Mensa, and Alexander Ljungqvist shows that a desire to maximize short-term share price leads publicly held companies to invest only about half as much in assets as their privately held counterparts do."

Excerpt from CNBC-TV18 -- "Nobel laureate and an acknowledged authority on growth and policy in developing countries, Spence feels that on policy side, the government should have an open approach. 'The potential in India is enormous. The human capital, the talent and so on, it’s just a matter of getting the obstacles out of the way,' he told CNBC-TV18’s Latha Venkatesh."

Excerpt from Project Syndicate -- "The main causes of these trends are clear. Anemic economic recovery has provided an opening for populist parties, promoting protectionist policies, to blame foreign trade and foreign workers for the prolonged malaise. Add to this the rise in income and wealth inequality in most countries, and it is no wonder that the perception of a winner-take-all economy that benefits only elites and distorts the political system has become widespread. Nowadays, both advanced economies (like the United States, where unlimited financing of elected officials by financially powerful business interests is simply legalized corruption) and emerging markets (where oligarchs often dominate the economy and the political system) seem to be run for the few."

NYU Stern’s 2nd Annual Risk Management Symposium convened professors and industry practitioners to discuss current global risk issues.

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "Psychologists have long known that different cultures tend to think differently. In China and Japan, people think more communally, in terms of relationships. By contrast, people are more individualistic in what psychologist Joseph Henrich, in commenting on the new paper, calls 'WEIRD cultures.' WEIRD stands for Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic. Dr. Henrich's point is that cultures like these are actually a tiny minority of all human societies, both geographically and historically. But almost all psychologists study only these WEIRD folks."

Excerpt from The Huffington Post -- "We have learned a lot about the nature of humankind since the 1950s. In his best-selling book "The Righteous Mind," social psychologist Jonathan Haidt likens the human mind to a rider (reason) on an elephant (intuition). Back in the 1950s we thought that the rider was in charge, or ought to be. Evidence is accumulating from several fields that this view is wrong; the elephant is in charge and the rider is a much better rationalizer in hindsight than a reasoner in prospect. It seems that, with our limited conscious mental capacity, our minds have evolved to make fast 'good enough' decisions under pressure of time and conditions of uncertainty. Sometimes, especially in evolutionarily unfamiliar contexts, these intuitions play us false, but most of the time they work just fine and we couldn’t live without them."

Excerpt from CNBC -- "Everyone is worried about the economy, but overall you have to take the GDP numbers, you have to take the more macroeconomic factors as more of a 10,000-foot level and... in making specific investments, you have to narrow it down more to a company-specific investment and that's what I do in investing. That's what we do at Stern as well. I work in the student Michael Price investment fund and we're always looking at stocks. We're always evaluating different positions and poking holes in different theses..."

Excerpt from CCTV -- "Now that China's become the world's largest investor – investing twice as much as the US last year in real terms, so it's really the largest investor by a wide margin – the efficiency of China's investment is a matter of global concern. And China's financial system will largely determine the efficiency of that investment because it's the financial system that decides which projects get financed. And China's financial system has been dominated by its banking sector, while the stock market's been a bit of a side show. But what our research is finding is that China's stock market is actually doing quite well and probably deserves more attention and more capital."

The Macro-Financial Modeling Group will host its 2014 conference, focusing on sovereign credit risk and financial stability, at NYU Stern from May 30-31. 

Excerpt from CNBC -- "'I think the central bank is making occasional interventions to make traders understand that this [the yuan] can go up or down. It does look like tactical maneuvering more than anything else,' Michael Spence, professor of economics, at the NYU Stern School of Business, said on CNBC, with regards to whether the central bank was deliberately guiding the yuan lower in order to support the economy."

Excerpt from WIRED UK -- "The next time someone says that Twitter is worth $50 billion because it's going to have $100 billion in advertising revenue, stop them and ask, 'Well, if it's going to have $100 billion in ad revenue, then who's losing? Because it can't be coming from The New York Times, as most newspapers are penny change in this market. It's got to be coming from Facebook or Google. So if you have Twitter, Facebook and Google in your portfolio and you're telling me that each of these companies is going to be collecting enormous revenues, then I have a problem. Because you have all winners and no losers. It's not a zero-sum game; at some point for every winner there have to be some losers."

Excerpt from Ecommerce Times -- "'In the case of Zappos, because it is about prospective job candidates, people are going to be very measured and selective about what they say and do on these internal forums,' Ghose told the E-Commerce Times. 'They would want to give the best possible impression to prospective recruiters, and so their content will be very carefully curated.'"

Excerpt from CNBC -- "It looks like China is not scheduled for any kind of hard landing as far as I can see, and they're really just nervous because they're waiting for the household sector to kick in and sort of help out because the export sector is contributing next to nothing to growth and they don't want to overuse the investment lever."

Excerpt from mbaMission -- "An expert on game theory and its practical application to business strategy, Adam Brandenburger ('Game Theory and Business Strategy') was voted the NYU Stern MBA Professor of the Year in 2006, and in 2008 received an NYU Excellence in Teaching award in recognition of his teaching and course development work."

Excerpt from Mashable -- "'I've noticed that in cities where Uber competes with Lyft, the pricing is substantially lower than in markets where they don't compete,' said Arun Sundararajan, professor of Information, operations and management sciences at New York University. 'New York is one of the markets where they don't compete with Lyft.'"

Excerpt from Forbes -- "One theoretical economical model that comes to mind that supports Kelly’s belief is Michael Spence’s signalling model of education. In this model, a person with high ability, ability that cannot be directly observed by prospective employers, looks for some way to signal that ability to differentiate himself from lower ability competitors."