Experience Stern | News & Events

Excerpt from Next City -- "New York Democrat Nydia Velázquez, for example, said that 'It will be difficult, if not impossible, to capture their contribution in official employment statistics.' She was on the right track, Arun Sundararajan of NYU’s Stern School of Business affirmed: 'One of the ramifications is that we may be not measuring the full extent to which the country is employed, because we tend to count employment in terms of whole jobs.' Lawmakers, he suggested, need to start thinking about the contributions of more fragmented toil to the economy."

Excerpt from The Guardian -- "In their book Co-opetition, Adam Brandenburger and Barry Nalebuff offer the analogy of a judo match – competitors use their own strengths and their opponents' weaknesses as they face each other. The fate of one person is interdependent with the other; the move one person makes influences the moves made by the other. Providers will fare better if they work together rather than working in isolation."

Excerpt from Edge.org -- "The worship of parsimony is understandable in the natural sciences, where it sometimes does happen that a single law or principle, or a very simple theory, explains a vast and diverse set of observations. Newton's three laws really do explain the movements of all inanimate objects. Plate tectonics really does explain earthquakes, volcanoes, and the complementary coastlines of Africa and South America. Natural selection really does explain why plants, animals, and fungi look as they do. But in the social sciences, the overzealous pursuit of parsimony has been a disaster."

Excerpt from CNBC -- "The latest data show inflation in the euro area has slowed well below the European Central Bank's stated goal, and many of the economies risk a renewed contraction. Downward pressure on prices is likely to persist. It is not out of the question that the region could sink into a sustained deflation that would further cripple the economy. The ECB needs to take this threat seriously and demonstrate now that it has the policy tools (and is prepared to use them) in the event of a new deflationary shock."

Excerpt from Huffington Post -- "Stern School of Business Professor Arun Sundararajan says we may see an overall shift in consumer attitudes toward surge pricing in the coming year, as the ridesharing market 'thickens,' with more supply coming online, and less volatile price swings."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "Seven recipients of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences were among 75 economists endorsing an increase in the minimum wage for U.S. workers... Nobel Prize winners Kenneth Arrow, Peter Diamond, Eric Maskin, Thomas Schelling, Robert Solow, Michael Spence and Joseph Stiglitz were among signatories of the letter."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "The economy has been changing, and new forces are causing inequality to feed on itself. One is that the higher incomes of top earners have been shifting consumer demand in favor of goods whose value stems from the talents of other top earners. Because the wealthy have just about every possession anyone might need, they tend to spend their extra income in pursuit of something special. And, often, what makes goods special today is that they’re produced by people or organizations whose talents can’t be duplicated easily."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "Services like Airbnb, RelayRides and DogVacay are on track to account for 'at least a single-digit percentage' of GDP in five years, said Arun Sundararajan, a professor at the Stern School of Business."

Excerpt from City A.M. -- "This year’s fight will not be on policy, regardless of how much noise the two sides make in support of their agendas. Instead, the real struggle will be for the seven Senate seats currently held by Democrats in states won by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 2012. The predictability imposed by the November elections is good news for an economy driven by companies and investors that want a break from political surprises."

Excerpt from the Economic Times -- "Last year, we saw social media companies going public. Four months ago I was debating an analyst who was arguing Twitter was worth four times more than what it is. I asked why do you think it is worth so much. He said the size of the advertising market is going to be huge. I said yes, but it does not mean Twitter is worth a lot. I don't see the direct link. If you think Twitter is going to be winner tell me who the losers are? The analyst was projecting revenues of Twitter of about $45 billion. I said okay, but the online advertising market is right now only $120 billion."

Excerpt from The Washington Post -- "To really improve ethical behavior in business, we’ve got to change the paths on which elephants travel. We’ve got to teach our students how to harness social psychology research as they become leaders, so they can put up guardrails and re-route paths away from slippery ethical slopes. A group of us who teach in business schools have come together to help graduates and corporate leaders do that. We created a site, EthicalSystems.org, which collects research findings about how to reduce the risk of ethical failures."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- “'It used to be business ethics grew out of philosophy, with a focus on the right thing to do,' said Jonathan Haidt, a professor of ethical leadership at New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business. 'In the last 10 years there’s been an explosion of research in behavioral economics' and the underlying reasons people act the way they do."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "Hedge funds must reveal only their stock holdings, though many of them also sell shares short and trade other kinds of securities, said Stephen J. Brown, a professor of finance at New York University. What’s more, hedge funds must disclose only stocks in which they owned at least $100 million worth of shares at quarter’s end and can wait until 45 days after that to file, he said. They don’t have to say whether they changed their holdings in the interim. In a recent paper, Professor Brown and Christopher G. Schwarz, an assistant professor of finance at the University of California, Irvine, found that trading spiked around filing dates but that investing in the disclosed stocks provided a long-term average return no higher than what investors would have earned by putting money in a broad portfolio of stocks with similar characteristics."

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "Worldwide investigations into financial benchmarks have been under way for years now and the list of suspect benchmarks continues to grow. It now includes headliners such as Libor, Euribor, Tibor, ISDAfix, Platts and foreign exchange, with potentially more to come. Hundreds of trillions of dollars in contracts and trades are anchored to these benchmarks, impacting financial markets across the globe. These recent scandals have shaken the market’s confidence in benchmarks. Market participants are beginning to understand that too many benchmark systems are structured to provide the means, motive and opportunity to collude and manipulate these important numbers."

Excerpt from The Atlantic -- "We consider many things morally wrong not because they cause immediate harm but because they seem physically or spiritually impure. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt and collaborators have explored reactions to many examples of purity violations, such as eating a dead dog, or signing a piece of paper declaring your soul for sale."

Excerpt from Marketplace -- "Vasant Dhar heads the information systems group at NYU’s Stern School of Business. And he’s a Watson fan. But he thinks the company should adjust its thinking. 'The strategy they’ve followed so far doesn’t seem to me to be the path to riches,' he says."

Excerpt from The Washington Post -- "In the past 20 years, global companies have increased their focus on human rights issues. Whether addressing factory safety in Bangladesh, security challenges in mining or Internet privacy, companies are grappling with these important issues."

Excerpt from Project Syndicate -- "In the past year, systemic risk declined. Europe came together around the need to stabilize the eurozone, with the European Central Bank and Germany playing the leading roles. China’s leadership transition was completed and a relatively clear policy direction has been established, featuring a more level playing field for the private and state sectors and an expanding – indeed “decisive” – role for markets. Germany’s general election pointed to policy continuity, though an extended period of slow growth and high unemployment seems unavoidable."

Excerpt from TIME -- "The main reason Republicans and Democrats can’t agree on basic economic facts is that people—including politicians and economists—seek out the facts required by their values. When faced with complicated or ambiguous evidence, human reasoning is notoriously bad at asking 'what is the truth?'”

MBA student Yaopeng Zhou and NYU Stern alumnus Marc Albanese (MBA ’08) have teamed up to develop a portable vision examination device, the Smart Autorefractor, an idea which most recently won them a $1 million prize in the healthcare category of Verizon’s Powerful Answers Challenge.

Excerpt from CNC World -- "I've studied that history as a financial historian and it’s very important that the Fed has strong leaders and there have been a number of them. There have been some other cases where the Fed has weak leaders and usually the country gets into a little trouble and the financial system does when the Fed leadership is weak. I would say that the leader of the Fed has to be strong, has to be a good leader that is able to know where the Fed should be going."

Excerpt from The Atlantic Cities -- "According to Scott Galloway, a marketing professor at the NYU Stern School of Business, naming rights for big city infrastructure is actually not a bad sell. It comes with the guarantee that millions of people will see the brand on a more permanent basis. Galloway says his gut is that a lot of companies might want to purchase naming rights for things like mass transit, they’re just not sure how much they're really worth."

Excerpt from NYC Media Lab -- "As a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, Provost noticed during his data classes that there weren’t any books he could recommend to his MBA students that taught the fundamental principles. They were either too granular and focused on the math, or else too high-level. Provost stopped using a book altogether and started writing class notes, eventually compiling them into a book with former colleague Tom Fawcett. Data Science for Business goes beyond this note-taking, designed to equip business executives with the knowledge they need to manage data scientists, gather data, and extract value from it."

Excerpt from Chief Marketer -- "One of the most powerful symbols in the world of marketing is money, which sits at the root of all consumer behavior. We know, for example, that people experience the act of handing over money in exchange for goods or services as a form of pain not unlike physical pain. If you look at their brains as they pay for something—or even if they imagine parting with money—you see the same patterns of activity you might expect to see when they experience mild physical pain."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "Jeffrey Sharlach, chairman and chief executive at the JeffreyGroup, will also serve as chairman at Pinta. Mr. Sharlach, who founded the JeffreyGroup in 1993, said he had been thinking for a while about taking a step like the formation of Pinta. 'Like most agencies, we’re always in a process of evolving,' said Mr. Sharlach, who is 60."