Experience Stern | News & Events

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."

In a recent article, NYU Stern Professor C. Samuel Craig explores how culture and cultural products – film, television, music, dance, opera, fashion and art – are created and consumed. Referencing more than 40 papers on the topic, he examines the role of cities, context and technology in fostering the creation of culture.

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "A few dating sites abroad have started verifying information about height, income, and other objective claims. But what can you do if you can’t use such a site? What you ideally want to do is prove that you are rich (or whatever characteristic you want to highlight) by incurring some cost that those who do not have that trait would not be willing to incur. This idea of 'signaling' won Michael Spence the Nobel Prize in 2001, though he focused on the higher education market rather than the world of romance."

Excerpt from Marketplace -- "The initial beneficiaries are the people who receive the bonus, but it doesn’t stop there."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "The best financial advice I ever received was advice that I also provided, both to myself and to Edith, my wife. It was more than 40 years ago when I was a young professor of economics and she was a young professor of the history of science. I based the advice on what were then relatively new developments in modern finance theory and empirical findings that supported the theory. The advice was to stash every penny of our university retirement contributions in the stock market."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "Michael Spence, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at New York University, finds the U.S. is shifting from an economy dependent on consumer demand to an economy dependent on trade."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- “'Bitcoin does not behave like a currency at all,' Yermack wrote. 'Instead it resembles a speculative investment similar to the Internet stocks of the late 1990s.'”

Excerpt from Forbes -- "Also head of product, [Kinetic Social Cofounder Jack] Hanlon is the architect of the data-focused Kinetic Social tech platform, which helps marketers and their agencies manage campaigns across social platforms and also gain an understanding of their audiences. The company's more than 500 clients since launch include Mars, H&M and Victoria's Secret's PINK. In one quarter he increased profitability from 19% to 53% while growing the client portfolio."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- “'These funds have a lot of money and push money out into whatever looks hot,' said Alexander Ljungqvist, professor of finance at New York University. 'It’s like throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks.'”

Excerpt from Bustle -- "According to business professors Gavin Kilduff (New York University) and Adam Galinksy (Columbia Business School), the way individuals feel or act upon entering a group setting will shape their long-term status in it. Those who start off confident will be more assertive, and thus appear more able — which in turn will lead to higher regard among group members going forward, the business profs says."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "More broadly there is this Thomas Philippon paper finding that "the finance industry of 1900 was just as able as the finance industry of 2010 to produce loans, bonds and stocks, and it was certainly doing it more cheaply."