Experience Stern | News & Events

On February 27, Jesse Eisinger, senior reporter and editor of Propublica, came to NYU Stern for a discussion about his new book, The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives, with Professor Paul Zarowin.

Excerpt from LiveMint -- "A new paper by German Gutierrez and Thomas Philippon of the Stern School of Business at New York University takes a look at superstar firms in the US economy over the past six decades. Their careful empirical work ends with a counter-intuitive conclusion. Superstar firms have not become larger, have not become more productive and their contribution to productivity growth has fallen by more than a third."

Excerpt from MarketWatch -- "Paul Zarowin, a professor of accounting at the Stern School of Business at New York University, told MarketWatch, 'If Berkshire Hathaway is holding a lot of assets that are marked-to-market now, it makes sense that he would shift his focus to share price. A new emphasis on share repurchases is aligned with that.'"

Excerpt from Poets & Quants -- "To make my decision, I created an Excel spreadsheet that ranked schools by: prestige (based on U.S. News reports), academic flexibility (from school websites), leadership development opportunities (from school websites), job prospects (based on employment reports), alumni willingness to help (based on conversations with friends at those programs), social life (based on conversations with friends), cost, and closeness to family. Highest weightings went to job prospects/alumni, social life, and closeness to family."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "Valuation guru Aswath Damodaran late last year figured it was worth about $38 billion, while analysts at Deutsche Bank thought a disposal of part of the business would fetch a little over $10 billion after taxes."

Excerpt from Ad Age India -- "While you try and convince me that Matt Damon is the best person to host the Oscars, I want to put up my nomination for Alexa to play the part. She is smart, she has a soothing voice, she has an impeccable track record (outside of the unexplained sinister laugh once-in-a-while) and she is a lot of fun."

Exceprt from the Harvard Law blog -- "Our new working paper, Common Ownership in America: 1980–2017 provides a new analytical framework for this debate, by comprehensively analyzing the theoretical and empirical implications of the common ownership hypothesis among all S&P 500 firms from 1980–2017. Our paper identifies why common ownership presents such a tremendous challenge to markets and regulators if prevailing hypotheses are true, but we also identify important data problems, misconceptions and erroneous assumptions that call into question the reliability of existing research."

Excerpt from MetroMBA -- "'NYU Stern’s new Master of Science in Quantitative Management program is primarily designed for early-career non-business majors who are interested in gaining the fundamental business knowledge and high-demand business analytics skills essential for fast-tracking their careers,' says Corfman.'"

Excerpt from Poets & Quants -- "NYU Stern’s Entertainment, Media and Technology (EMT) program and W. R. Berkley Innovation Labs hosted entrepreneur, investor and ABC ‘Shark Tank’ judge Mark Cuban for a fireside chat with Professor Greg Coleman, a Q&A with the Stern community and a first-ever ‘Stern Tank,’ featuring three NYU startups."

On February 25, the NYU Center for Sustainable Business will host a panel entitled, "Engaging with the Blue Economy."

Excerpt from The Guardian -- "Alain Bertaud, a former World Bank principal urban planner, said despite New Zealand being an otherwise 'exceptionally well-managed country', its housing market was in a state of crisis. He said the government’s efforts were being closely watched because they were broadly following global best practice in improving housing affordability."

Excerpt from CNBC -- "Instead, identify your talent and zero in there. 'Find out what you're good at and then invest 10,000 hours in it — and become great at it,' Galloway says."

Excerpt from Insider -- "Decades ago, when the frontiers of AI involved beating a human player at checkers, the decision variables were straightforward. Today, asking an AI to weigh in on a medical diagnosis or to predict the next financial market crash involves data and decisions that are orders of magnitude more complex. So instead, our systems are built for optimization. Implicit in optimizing is unpredictability—to make choices that deviate from our own human thinking."

Excerpt from Fox News Radio -- "I think the biggest change in the world of tech—in the world of screens—is that the consumers of screens are much more careful now about how they consume. We're paying a lot more attention to the way we spend our time, and I think we're starting to demand more from the companies that deliver those screens."

Excerpt from Business Insider -- "The same year, Paul Romer, the chief economist of the World Bank, proposed that macroeconomics — the 'science' of capitalism — was perhaps a fantasy field of study equivalent to string theory, which no longer had any legitimate claim to describing the workings of the real economy."

The 15th Annual NYU/Penn Conference on Law and Finance, jointly sponsored by the NYU Pollack Center for Law & Business and the University of Pennsylvania Institute for Law and Economics, was held February 22-23 at NYU Stern.

On Friday, February 22, NYU Stern's Private Equity Club will host their 14th Annual Private Equity & Venture Capital Conference.

Excerpt from The Bond Buyer -- "In that report Clive Lipshitz, a managing partner at Tradewind Interstate Advisors and Ingo Walter, a finance professor at New York University studied the 25 largest public pension plans and found that managers are becoming increasingly interested in investing in infrastructure."

Excerpt from Adweek -- "'You also have most of the press from around the world there. If you have a story to tell, it’s like shooting fish in the barrel. The press come[s] to you. You have everybody there,' Hardart said. 'There’s a huge benefit; it’s just a question of how much you can cut through because there’s a lot of people trying to do the exact same thing.'"

Excerpt from Yahoo Finance -- "'I think Amazon's biggest problem right now is it has a target on its back. Target on its back politically, economically,' Damodaran told Yahoo Finance’s The Final Round, several days after the e-commerce giant decided not to build a second headquarters in New York City amid fierce opposition from local advocates."

Excerpt from Canadian Accountant -- "Entire industries that are largely intangible, including software, biotech and Internet services, came into being during the 1980s and 1990s, Lev points out in The End of Accounting. 'And for all other business, the major value drivers shifted from property, plant, machinery, and inventories, to patents, brands, information technology, and human resources.'"

NYU Stern faculty are available to offer insights on the 2019 Academy Awards.

On Thursday, February 21, NYU Stern's W.R. Berkley Innovation Labs will welcome NYU alumni, investors and entrepreneurs to the 17th Annual New Venture Showcase.

Excerpt from Reuters -- "A paper by German Gutierrez and Thomas Philippon looked at the largest American companies, both overall and by industry. They found that the trend lines for these “star” firms changed dramatically around the year 2000."

Excerpt from Reuters -- "'Data standardization is critical to that undertaking. This is one of the core lessons of 2008 that has only been partially realized thus far,' adds Berner, who is now at New York University’s Stern Business School."