Experience Stern | News & Events

Excerpt from The Economist -- "The equity-risk premium, or the annual excess return that investors demand to hold shares rather than bonds, is 5.03 points, against a pre-crisis average of 3.45 points, notes Aswath Damodaran of the Stern School of Business at NYU."

Excerpt from The Atlantic -- "Between 1990 and 2008, 98 percent of new jobs came from so-called 'nontradable' industries that aren't sensitive to international trade, according to the economist Michael Spence."

Excerpt from Business Insider -- "According to Anindya Ghose, a professor at NYU's Stern School of Business, the e-commerce giant could be the first company to break through the $1 trillion barrier for market capitalization. The company is currently worth about $476.07 billion, which means it would need a 110.1% increase in its stock price to reach that level. But Ghose thinks Amazon's rise will come at the expense of lots of retail jobs. 'In many ways, it might actually be a blessing in disguise because it's also simultaneously going to cost lots of jobs in the economy,' Ghose told Business Insider."

Excerpt from Investing.com -- "Vasant Dhar: 'I worry that this time might in fact be different because we haven’t had intelligent machines in the past that we could trust with making decisions. That was in the domain of human beings. Machines assisted us. They helped us. But it’s different this time. And it’s going to be very challenging.' ... Arun Sundararajan: '…digital technology is changing how we organize work. It’s taking us from fulltime employment, which was the predominant way of earning a living in the 20th century, toward a wide variety of non-employment work arrangements.'"

Excerpt from the Financial Times -- "As Stephen Cecchetti and Kermit Schoenholtz nicely show, BNP’s halting of redemptions was followed by an immediate tightening of lending between financial institutions. Below is their graph of the Libor-OIS spread, which measures the difference between the rate at which big banks reported to be lending to one another over a measure of the safest market interest rate."

Excerpt from BYU Radio -- "What my research points out is there is a crucial distinction between those two types of buyers: those who rent out their places - the apartment still remains available for the locals to live in, whereas those who leave their places vacant, in some sense, are literally reducing the supply of available real estate for the local residents."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "Scott Galloway, a professor of marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business, said Mr. Damore’s comments carried additional weight to people on either side of the political spectrum because he was an engineer at Google, one of the world’s biggest technology companies. Alongside other giants such as Facebook, Amazon and Apple, these companies 'are seen as pillars of our society,' Mr. Galloway said. 'Controversy and statements that emanate from these employees take on a different heft.'"

Excerpt from the Sydney Morning Herald -- "It turns out that if the technology settings are right, we are far more likely to trust a stranger than their own colleagues or neighbours. Weird, huh? The findings are from a study co-authored by assistant professor Mareike Möhlmann at Warwick University, professor Arun Sundararajan at New York University, and two executives from BlaBlaCar, a ride-sharing platform that connects drivers and riders mainly for city-to-city travel. It's hitchhiking for the 21st century."

Excerpt from New York Magazine -- "In a study published in June in the journal Psychological Science, researchers recruited 294 participants to tour a museum exhibit of Etruscan artifacts while listening to an audio guide. Half of the participants were given cameras and told to take at least ten photos. At the end of the tour, all participants asked to answer a series of multiple-choice questions about the objects they had seen. Those who took photos, the researchers found, recognized almost 7 percent more objects than those who didn’t."

Excerpt from ValueWalk -- "The rates we’ve had in recent years, including right now, are the lowest in history. The book that I co-authored on the history of interest rates traces back to the code of Hammurabi, Babylonian civilization, Greek and Roman civilization, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and early modern history right up to the present. And I can assure our listeners that the rates that they’re experiencing right now are the lowest in human history."

Excerpt from Climate Wire -- "Koonin advocated for a 'red team' approach to climate science in another Wall Street Journal op-ed in April. The exercise would allow critics to test the 'consensus' around climate science. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has publicly expressed interest in the idea, and he's rumored to be considering hiring Koonin to lead the process.Koonin has met with Pruitt and other Trump administration officials to discuss the idea of a 'red team,' he told E&E News on Friday. He declined to comment on whether he's in talks about running such an operation, but he said he'd consider it if certain conditions were met."

Excerpt from CNBC -- "During a TED Talk earlier this year, New York University's Stern School of Business marketing professor and psychologist Adam Alter presented research which showed the online tools we spend the most time using don't make us happy. Highlighting data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Alter demonstrates how the average 24-hour workday has looked about the same over the past ten years: We sleep between seven and eight hours a day, work between eight and nine hours a day and take care of 'survival activities' like eating and bathing for about three hours a day. The rest of the day — roughly five hours — is our personal time, made up of hobbies, close relationships, creativity and reflecting on whether 'our lives have been meaningful,' Alter says during his TED Talk, which has gotten over a million views."

Excerpt from the Financial Times -- "Thomas Philippon and Ariell Reshef have shown how closely linked pay has been to deregulation of the sector. The chart shows wages in the finance industry relative to the rest of the US economy, plotted against the two academics’ own “deregulation index”, which is based on legislative activity related to finance."

Excerpt from the Boston Globe -- "The annual interest rate on a loan funded through the visa program typically runs about 5 percent, say EB-5 financing experts, about half the rate charged by more traditional investment firms. On a five-year, $225 million loan, the difference could easily top $50 million. 'It’s the cheapest source of capital they can find,' Friedland said. 'The reason it’s cheaper is because the immigrant investors are making the loan strictly to qualify for a visa. They’re willing to accept a negligible return."

Excerpt from Fox Business -- "The market was pleased. The predictions had been for the job growth to be a little smaller. So when the actual exceeds the predictions, the market is going to take that into account and that's all well and good. In addition, we've now been below 5% unemployment for over a year. We're basically back to where we were in 2007. And people forget 2007 was a pretty good year."

Excerpt from Reuters -- "And don’t believe that the whole economic pie will grow if banks are freed up to make more loans. There is little evidence for that, as economists Stephen Cechetti and Kim Schoenholtz argue. ... They also say Mnuchin's plan would make the financial system less safe. Investors hoping the whole stock market will make them rich if banks lend more should look at how that worked out in 2005-2007."

Excerpt from the Financial Post -- "The economists start with two facts. Competition has been declining in many U.S. industries, at least when measured by the number of competitors accounting for a given share of output (which they are quick to concede may not be the very best measure of competition). And investment has been lower than you’d expect, all else equal. In their view, these two trends are linked. Investment and innovation are things companies do when they have to, not when they want to."

Excerpt from the Australian Financial Review -- "The few hours that remain are our discretionary time, when we might read a book, enjoy a hobby, call an old friend for a talk, play Monopoly with the family or get to the gym. According to Alter's research, our white space is increasingly consumed by computer screens and that's not making us happy."

Excerpt from CNBC -- "An S-curve like the one Musk has invoked compares what a company gets against the amount of effort or money spent to achieve it. Melissa Schilling, professor of management and organizations at NYU's Stern School of Business, said the curve starts low and slow because 'at first you don't know what the hell you're doing.' Companies experiment with designs, manufacturing methods, cope with failures and learn what works and what doesn't. 'You're pumping a lot of money in, and you're getting very little return,' Schilling said."

Excerpt from HR Digest -- "According to the Dunning-Kruger effect, smart people realize they’re not very good and try to do better. On the other hand, stupid people think they’re good at whatever it is, and don’t try to get better and they don’t get any better either."

Excerpt from Bloomberg View -- "Here is Aswath Damodaran on ‘The Crypto Currency Debate: Future of Money or Speculative Hype?’ … What I did not know is that there is a whole literature about analysts getting tired as the day goes on, and it is fascinating. Here for instance is 'Oh What a Beautiful Morning! Diurnal Influences on Executives and Analysts: Evidence from Conference Calls' by Jing Chen, Elizabeth Demers and Baruch Lev..."

Excerpt from CNBC -- "'The question that you would need to address, if you are paying $2,775 for a bitcoin on August 1, 2017, is whether you can (or even will be able to) buy $2,775 worth of goods and services with that bitcoin,' Damodaran said. He said bitcoin's high price can be justified if the digital currency becomes widely accepted as payment, especially since by design only 21 million bitcoins can ever exist. High demand for a limited supply of coins will naturally send prices higher."

Excerpt from CNBC -- "We've had decreases in some crucial prices. That helps. But [low inflation] is a mystery. Labor costs are remaining low even though labor markets are in pretty good shape. 4.4% unemployment, that's back where we were in 2007. We've been below 5% unemployment now for over a year, and yet, labor costs are not going up, which would be an underlying cause for higher inflation. The Fed doesn't really understand it. Most academics don't understand why labor costs, why wages, aren't going up more rapidly."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "'While the digital disruption is destroying the traditional retail business model,' Dr. Sundararajan said, 'the Amazon model that replaces it will continue to live in the physical world and require human labor for the foreseeable future.'"

Excerpt from The Source -- “Governments can help protect water sources by charging corporate users the real cost of water and use the proceeds to protect the water source; provide communities with funds to protect the forests in their watersheds; and build green infrastructure to reduce stormwater runoff into waterways. Charging for water at realistic rates will likely encourage businesses to install water conservation technologies (in order to reduce their fees), especially if government also provides subsidies for those technologies."