Faculty News

Professor Aswath Damodaran shares his views on Amazon stock

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Excerpt from CNBC -- "I think the pathway for Amazon to be worth 700 is there. But it's a very narrow one. I've always called Amazon a 'field of dreams' company, which is if you build it, they will come--the building being the revenues and the profits. And I think what they've had going for them, they've always had that consistent story, which is we're going to go for revenues first and we'll get profits later. So it's built on that trust, and I don't think they can deliver the margins you would need to get to this 700. So that's the basis for my valuation."
Faculty News

Professor Thomas Philippon's comments at a panel on bank bailouts are highlighted

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Excerpt from Fortune -- "...Thomas Philippon, professor of finance at NYU’s Stern School of Business, argued at the symposium that taxing leverage makes sense, but is easier said than done. He argues that banks could hide their leverage using complex financial instruments like contingent assets or derivatives, avoiding Clinton’s tax while still bulking up on risk."
Faculty News

In a feature article, Professor Vasant Dhar discusses artificial intelligence and decision making

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Excerpt from the Harvard Business Review -- "I propose a risk-oriented framework for deciding when and how to allocate decision problems between humans and machine-based decision makers. I’ve developed this framework based on the experiences that my collaborators and I have had implementing prediction systems over the last 25 years in domains like finance, healthcare, education, and sports. The framework differentiates problems along two independent dimensions: predictability and cost per error."
Press Releases

Total SEC Enforcement Actions against Public Companies and Subsidiaries Rise

Henry Kaufman Management Center
A new report issued jointly by the NYU Pollack Center for Law & Business and Cornerstone Research finds that U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission enforcements against public companies and their subsidiaries increased more than 50 percent in fiscal year 2015 and are on a pace to equal or exceed that high-water mark in FY 2016. 
Faculty News

Professor Paul Romer's research on "mathiness" is referenced

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Excerpt from the Business Standard -- "He quotes the economist Paul Romer of New York University about macroeconomics being plagued by 'mathiness' and thus failing to progress as a true science should, and that current debates among economists are often as pointless as those between 16th-century advocates of heliocentrism and geocentrism - whether the sun or the earth was at the centre of things."
Faculty News

In an op-ed, Professor Vasant Dhar addresses several challenges surrounding artificial intelligence

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Excerpt from TechCrunch -- "The difficulty with learning machines arises because they train themselves on what they see, the 'training data,' that cannot completely represent situations the machine will see in the future. These are sometimes called 'edge cases' or 'Rumsfeldian unknowns,' in that they are unknowable in advance. Humans typically deal with such edge cases remarkably well with no prior 'training' by applying common sense or finding analogies and learning from these samples of one."
Faculty News

Professor Paul Romer’s proposal of city sanctuaries for refugees is highlighted

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Excerpt from Dagens Nyheter - "The world's cities are expected to grow by two and a half billion people by 2050. The US economist Paul M. Romer have a suggestion on how we can solve the challenges of overpopulation and migration: Create new sanctuaries where people are given the opportunity to test new ways of living."
School News

MBA student Ro Reddick is profiled in the "Best & Brightest MBAs" - Class of 2016 list

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Excerpt from Poets & Quants -- "In my professional career I am most proud of the entrepreneurial endeavors I’ve taken on before and during my time at Stern. I have a production company, Little Red Ro Productions, through which I’ve produced several short films. While at school, I co-created the Little Bright Notebook, a project design tool for creative types and entrepreneurs, along with my classmate Lenore Champagne Beirne. Stern does a great job of creating a diverse and interesting class of students each year. Our collaboration is a perfect example of two people with wildly different backgrounds and areas of expertise coming together to build something that helps the broader creative community. I’m not sure we would have crossed paths were it not for Stern."
Faculty News

Professor David Yermack's research on the impact of First Lady Michelle Obama's fashion choices is featured

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Excerpt from NPR -- "'It was truly remarkable how much more effect Mrs. Obama had on the commercial fashion industry that almost any other celebrity you could find in any other commercial setting,' Yermack says. And it wasn't just a freak blip on the graph: 'This would be a very permanent thing,' Yermack emphasized. 'The stocks would not go down the next day. So to put a number on it for just a generic company at a routine event, it was worth about $38 million to have Mrs. Obama wear your clothes.'"
Faculty News

Professor Vasant Dhar comments on the increasing job opportunities involving big data

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Excerpt from BusinessBecause -- "'Data is their business. It's the growth path for all of them,' said Vasant Dhar, NYU Stern professor of business and data science, and editor of the Big Data journal. 'The advice I give students these days is to take as many courses as possible that require working with real data,' he added."
Faculty News

In an op-ed, Professor Arun Sundararajan explores what Uber and Lyft's exit from the Austin, Texas market means for the future of regulation in the sharing economy

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Excerpt from Fortune -- "Governments should view Uber and Lyft as friends, not enemies. As I argue in my book ‘The Sharing Economy,’ society’s interests are served well when governments partner with platforms in the creation and enforcement of regulation rather than treating them as its target."
Faculty News

Professor Pankaj Ghemawat shares his views on business strategy

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Excerpt from Thinkers50 -- "Perhaps we need additional frameworks. But I think we probably need a little bit of attention to what kind of criteria we might be able to use to separate interesting frameworks from frameworks that in some essential sense, really don't meet the test of history based on frameworks we've seen come and go."
Faculty News

Research Scholar Robert Frank discusses his new book, "Success and Luck"

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Excerpt from New York Magazine -- "Humans don’t, as a general rule, do well with ambiguity. We like to tell clear, coherent stories about the world we see in front of us, and success is no exception. Hindsight bias, which is — and I’m just going to go with the Wikipedia definition here, because it’s good — 'the inclination, after an event has occurred, to see the event as having been predictable, despite there having been little or no objective basis for predicting it,' can partly explain how we come up with stories that cause us to discount the role of luck. Frank provided two examples of how hindsight bias warps our understanding of success in this manner: the Mona Lisa and Bryan Cranston."
Faculty News

In an op-ed, Professor Ralph Gomory outlines the negative impact of free trade

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Excerpt from The Huffington Post -- "There is an enormous gap between free trade as it is taught in textbooks and advocated by those who benefit from it and free trade as it is actually practiced in today’s world. Textbooks still unabashedly teach the virtues of free trade, but their arguments assume a world of pure market forces. But the American people don’t live in a world that is anything like that."
Faculty News

Professor David Yermack's research on the blockchain is referenced

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Excerpt from The Economic Times -- "It can be nice to imagine the much-derided banking industry unmoored from our daily needs, left to scramble for business like other non-essential industries. Of course, our transaction histories would be much more visible to governments than they are today . This imaginary world of effectively socialized money is being seriously discussed by researchers and central bankers alike. In a new paper, Max Raskin and David Yermack of New York University talk about it as a distinct possibility, albeit a radical one that 'carries significant risks for the rest of the financial system.'"
Research Center Events

Executive Education Short Course: Digital Marketing and Social Media Strategy

Phone Screen
This Executive Education Short Course program examines best-practices related to the business use of social media and digital marketing. While there will be sufficient attention given to top level strategy used by companies adopting social media and digital marketing, the course will also focus on digital analytics oriented tools: how to make organizations more intelligent in how they conduct business in the digital age.
Business and Policy Leader Events

NYU Stern’s Sixth Annual Faculty Excellence Dinner

Peter Henry
Continuing an annual tradition, NYU Stern faculty and guests gathered to celebrate the School’s community of scholars and to recognize excellence in research and scholarship, excellence in teaching, excellence in mentorship, excellence in influence and excellence in innovation.
Faculty News

Professor Arun Sundararajan discusses the intersection of the sharing economy and the Internet of Things (IoT)

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Excerpt from Techonomy -- "There's a number of different ways in which IoT and the sharing economy are going to interface. As you sort of start to give a household device, for example, the ability to know where it is, the ability to know how much is being used, and in some sense, the ability to call on transport when it needs it, you dramatically increase the potential for peer-to-peer rental marketplaces."
Faculty News

Professor Arun Sundararajan weighs in on the creation of a union for drivers in New York City

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Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "Helping establish a guild is a savvy decision by Uber, said Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New York University’s business school who’s writing a book titled 'The Sharing Economy.' 'They’re nurturing their relationship with their drivers,' he said. 'It seems like a smart move.'"
Faculty News

Professor Aswath Damodaran weighs in on LendingClub's relationship to Cirrix Capital

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Excerpt from Fortune -- "The trouble comes if Cirrix buys too many of LendingClub’s loans, which is possible with Lending Club as a partial investor. 'If 80% of [Cirrix’s] portfolio is in LendingClub, it is very dangerous,' says Aswath Damodaran, professor of finance at the Stern School of Business at New York University. 'You become almost a quasi-bank, and you need to worry about all the things that banks do.'"
Faculty News

Professor Lisa Leslie is interviewed about her research on a pay premium for high-potential women

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Excerpt from The Huffington Post -- "It’s basically an issue of supply and demand, Lisa Leslie, an associate management professor at New York University and one of the paper’s authors, told The Huffington Post. 'There’s a market for high-potential women. If you want them in senior ranks, you’ll have to pay them more,' she said."
Faculty News

Professor Scott Galloway comments on Budweiser renaming its beer "America"

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Excerpt from the Financial Times -- "'This is a bold move. It’s a bit like if Apple changed its name to "innovation", because one of the core associations of (Budweiser) is already America,' said Scott Galloway, a professor at New York University. 'It could be a stroke of genius, but I think it’s a risky change … to what is arguably one of the world’s greatest brands.'"
Faculty News

Professor Roy Smith weighs in on Goldman Sachs' use of technology

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Excerpt from Quartz -- "Roy Smith, an ex-Goldman Sachs partner and a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, says Goldman, which declined to comment for this article, has plenty of incentive to put technology to work. 'Under the [financial] burden of regulation, firms have to evolve into things that use big technology more than they did in the past,' he says, adding that Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein 'is also saying [the firm] may get into some businesses that can be operated technologically, without many human beings involved.'"
Faculty News

Professor Arun Sundararajan comments on Mayor Bill de Blasio's "NYC Digital Playbook"

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Excerpt from amNewYork -- "There is 'a lot of information that individual citizens have that often stays with them,' says Arun Sundararajan, professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University and author of 'The Sharing Economy.' That information, from potholes to trash pick-up, can be funneled to local government. Other easy uses of a digital mentality, says Sundararajan, could include digitally-enabled ridesharing that would allow people to share NYC taxis a la UberPool, saving time and reducing road-hours."
Faculty News

Professor Anindya Ghose discusses the impact of startup devaluation

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Excerpt from Quartz -- "'Startup devaluations…can be a blessing in disguise, in the sense that it makes the company leadership take a close hard look at the current monetisation model, re-evaluate any fragilities and make strategic and tactical adjustments accordingly,' Anindya Ghose, director of New York University’s Center for Business Analytics said."