School News

Unilever CEO Paul Polman's talk on the 21st Century Corporation with Professor Tensie Whelan at Stern is highlighted

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Excerpt from Wall Street Daily -- "Polman is dedicated to securing Unilever’s role as a positive influence on the planet as well as the market. He’s dedicated to green energy, fair taxation, and innovations that help all kinds of people. Further, he’s keenly aware of the habits and patterns of consumers all over the world. His efforts will attempt to maintain Unilever’s sales and success, as, by 2020, millennials will have the majority of the U.S. vote. This rising generation is becoming more vital to the economy, and 80% of millennials want to work towards solving the issue of climate change."
School News

Mount Vernon Mayor Richard Thomas' graduation from Stern’s Executive MBA Program is highlighted

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Excerpt from Lohud.com -- "Thomas, who took office in January, received an executive MBA in finance and leadership after attending the school for two years every other weekend. 'I think it's going to help me really speak to the economic problems of Mount Vernon and connect a network of disconnects,' Thomas said Tuesday. 'Mount Vernon has never had a clear relationship with its finances. It's always been a political football.'"
School News

In an op-ed, Richard Thomas (MBA '16), Mayor of Mount Vernon, New York, discusses Governor Andrew Cuomo's "Pave NY" program

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Excerpt from The Huffington Post -- "Governor Andrew Cuomo’s $22 billion transportation capital plan, particularly the 'Pave NY' program, will yield major dividends for the Empire State. Should New York provide cities with the option to assess an infrastructure charge, we can leverage more public dollars to do more for the public good. As mayor of one of the densest cities in New York and in the nation, I see immense potential in this idea. It will raise the resources necessary to underwrite major long term construction projects, creating sustainable jobs and economic growth for years to come. Building and maintaining this vast network requires a coalition of engineers, equipment companies, contractors, and educators to trains and ready the workforce to do the work. Additionally, it will raise awareness of the need to reduce carbon emissions, making our air better to breathe."
Faculty News

Professor Lisa Leslie's research on a pay premium for high-potential women is featured

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Excerpt from Fortune -- "Now it turns out that those women who have reached the top have probably been out-earning their male counterparts for years. That’s because companies making a genuine effort to increase diversity in senior management have apparently been holding on to 'high-potential' women — meaning those perceived as having the right skills and talent to move up — at least in part by paying them more than 'high-potential' men. On average, says a new study, high-potential women earn 10% more annually than their high-potential male colleagues."
Faculty News

Professor Roy Smith comments on Citigroup founder Sanford Weill's business legacy

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Excerpt from The New York Times -- "In his heyday in the 1990s, Mr. Weill was 'a Sun King — one of the most powerful and successful financial individuals in New York,' said Roy Smith, a finance professor at New York University business school. Mr. Weill gained that status as a deal maker, with a series of ever-larger mergers culminating with Citicorp and the Travelers Group forming the behemoth Citigroup in 1998. The last deal helped knock down the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, which separated banking from the riskier securities business."
Faculty News

Professor Emeritus Edward Altman's research on high yield bond defaults is referenced

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Excerpt from Barron's -- "...this year, the recovery rate in high yield bonds has been extremely low — just 13.9%, reports Marty Fridson, chief investment officer at Lehmann Livian Fridson Advisors, in a Tuesday report published Wednesday on S&P Capital IQ LCD. This continues a trend that started last year. Drawing on academic research, primarily done by Edward Altman of New York University Stern School, Fridson reports that the junk bond default rate was 2.83% in 2015, lower than the long-term mean of 3.33%. Normally, the recovery rate is higher when defaults are low. But in 2015, the recovery rate was just 34%, far below its historical average of 46%."
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.'"