Experience Stern | News & Events

Lord Mervyn King, Distinguished Visiting Professor at NYU and former head of the Bank of England, recently spoke to NYU Stern faculty and students at an event hosted by the Center for Global Economy and Business.

Excerpt from AP TV -- "If it just kicks the problem down the road a week, that's a little bit of a relief, but at least we didn't go over the cliff this week, but gee, now we have to worry about next week."

Excerpt from Stern Opportunity -- "Will universities fight or embrace the sea change coming to higher education? I hope they will embrace the change. Of course, the skeptic will say: 'Wouldn’t universities, in this case, be acting against their own self-interest?' I think not. It is surely the smart bet to be a part of a revolution that will bring affordable education to more and more of the planet. Opportunities to make a living from such a grand enterprise will surely emerge – and it will surely be much harder to take advantage of these opportunities from the sidelines."

Excerpt from CNBC -- "Here's what I think is the key thing. Angela Ahrendts has always been ahead of the curve in redefining things. She took Burberry from a $2 billion market capitalization company to a $7 billion market capitalization company through innovation. And so I think you have to assume that somebody as smart as she is knows what she's doing this and in her view is a new challenge. She's breaking the mold yet again."

Excerpt from Poets & Quants -- "In my Managing Change elective, taught by a Principal at Booz & Company who is in the Organization, Change and Leadership practice, I’ve met new classmates who are also in management consulting. It’s been interesting to hear their viewpoints on the cases that we’ve discussed as they bring a higher level, strategic approach to analyzing opportunities and challenges. Having been in the retail industry for 18 years, I’ve developed my own expertise in driving opportunities and creating additional value within retail. Gaining a new perspective from my Stern classmates has been invaluable."

In a new study, NYU Stern Professor Adam Alter and his co-authors, Stern alumnus Eesha Sharma (PhD '13) of Dartmouth College, Dan Ariely of Duke University and Nina Mazar of the University of Toronto, find that people believe financial constraints should not excuse immoral conduct. However, when people actually feel worse off financially, they loosen their own moral standards to redress the perceived unfairness of their situation.

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "[Druckenmiller] and Canada are simply convinced that only a Vietnam-war-scale movement by the young can break through the web of special interests to force politicians to put in place the reforms that would actually secure both today’s seniors and future seniors, today’s middle class and the wanna-be middle class. (Watch their N.Y.U. presentation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbgIiAnpcPc)."

Excerpt from VentureBeat -- “[The layer design] is not confusing. We all now expect bright colors. We are increasingly addicted to more stimulation, gradation, nuances. Everything has temporariness to it, short shelf life. We’re not looking for anything fixed [or] stable. We came to terms with instability… [It feels like] sometimes it’s there, sometimes not. It’s not committed. It’s reflective of the times.”

Excerpt from Institute for New Economic Thinking -- "If Congress and the White House fail to raise the debt ceiling this week and the United States defaults on its debt, what can we expect and how can we protect ourselves against these events?"

Excerpt from Bloomberg TV -- "In developed markets, who drives luxury? Affluent people. In emerging markets, it's actually middle-class consumers. The average luxury consumer in the U.S. has $175,000 in income, she's 53 and it is a she. She spends $3,000 a year on handbags. The average luxury consumer in China makes $17,000, is 33 and spends $2,000 on handbags. The emerging middle class in these developing markets loves luxury."

Excerpt from Crain's New York -- "'The role of elite business schools should be to identify those big issues that have material relevance in the world,' said Mr. Henry, 44. 'If you have a deep interest in finance, we can make you a far more effective allocator of capital and a more impactful professional.'"

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "JPMorgan has been singled out by regulators with 'unprecedented aggressiveness,' NYU’s Smith said in an e-mail. 'Most of these settlements either would not have been necessary or would have been for much lesser amounts in Weill’s time.'”

Excerpt from Forbes -- "[Baumols' Cost Disease] is the idea that it’s much easier to improve productivity in some areas than it is in others. Specifically, Baumol is addressing the difficulty of improving labour productivity in services as against the ease with which it can be increased in manufacturing. It is this which tells us that we should expect health care and college costs to rise faster than general inflation because these are largely services provided by human labour."

Excerpt from CNBC -- "'If there is not an agreement, the resulting financial damage could even tip us into a recession,' especially because the economy is growing at a relatively paltry rate of 1.5 to 2 percent, the New York University economist said."

Excerpt from The Chicago Tribune -- "NYU's Sundararajan said consumers have clearly seen value in online services like Airbnb and Uber and regulators should create space for them. 'I'm not arguing that we should not have any regulation at all,' he said. 'But these are clearly things that people want and things that aren't inherently unsafe. So let's create a simple framework.'"

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "My advice for women early in their careers is to establish themselves as a brand that can evolve over time. Figure out what your brand stands for and how your brand can adapt as you grow in your career."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "Aswath Damodaran, a professor of finance at the Stern School of Business at New York University, is among those who think that too many companies rely too heavily on the performance of their shares when computing executive compensation. 'I’m a great believer in markets, but sometimes we need more attention paid to what did this management do to the value of the company and less to what did this management do to the price of the stock,' he said. 'I would like to see compensation systems where managers are rewarded based on what kind of projects they are working on and how big their returns on invested capital are.'”

Excerpt from Forbes -- "To explore the new implications of this vastly improved evolutionary theory for business, we recently organized a one-day symposium at Stern titled 'Darwin’s Business: New Evolutionary Thinking About Cooperation, Groups, Firms and Societies.' The conference featured an international roster of experts on evolution, economics, and human nature."

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "We find that a significant determinant of an optimal asymptotic government debt or government debt-GDP ratio is how interest rate risks are correlated with risks to fundamentals that threaten to widen or narrow inequality in after-tax and after-transfer incomes."

In honor of the 40th anniversary of the celebrated paper, "Theory of Rational Option Pricing," Myron Scholes, Robert Merton and Steve Ross will join some of the most active and influential researchers in the field today to discuss how derivatives theory and practice have developed since 1973 and where they are headed.

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "I strongly recommend that the G.A.O. study the work of Professors Warburton, Anginer and Acharya and of Professors Kelly, Lustig and Van Nieuwerburgh carefully, while assessing the industry arguments with a great deal of skepticism."

Excerpt from Forbes -- "Haidt argues that the six intuitive foundations of morality are caring, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority and sanctity. The traits of caring, fairness and liberty resonate with both liberals and conservatives. But liberals are ambivalent about notions of loyalty, authority and sanctity. One could argue this ambivalence undermines solid, decisive leadership and thus truly holds back societal progress."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- “'Why live in cities?' Mr. Florida asked Wednesday at NYU’s Stern School of Business, where he interviewed venture capitalist Fred Wilson, managing partner of Union Square Ventures and Flatiron Partners. As an investor in firms such as Twitter Inc., MongoDB Inc., Tumblr, Foursquare, Kickstarter and Zynga, Mr. Wilson has played a key role in the emergence of New York City as a tech hub, and also in San Francisco’s rise as an alternative to the startup scene in neighboring Silicon Valley."

As a part of the Conversations on Urbanization series held by NYU Stern’s Urbanization Project, NYU Global Research Professor Richard Florida spoke with Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures in a public presentation on October 9.

Excerpt from Marketplace -- "White says Bernanke’s daring moves kept the economy from going off a cliff. At the same time, he says, Bernanke broke with convention to change the culture of the notoriously cryptic Fed, making it 'a more open, less mysterious place.'”