Experience Stern | News & Events

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "Edward I. Altman, the creator of the Z score, a widely used method of predicting business failures, estimated that this year will easily set a record for so-called mega bankruptcies — filings by companies with $1 billion or more in debt. And he expects the number of merely large bankruptcies — at least $100 million — to challenge the record set the year after the 2008 economic crisis."

Excerpt from Australian Broadcasting Corporation -- "In my view, COVID-19 is going to be quite dynamic and subpar, because this is not just the natural disaster, it's also a crisis of the time where both corporations have too much debt and therefore given them uncertainty on their hands, on the second wave, on economic insecurity coming from job losses."

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "Those working from home might be right to feel that out of sight means out of mind. Batia Wiesenfeld, a management professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, says research has shown that 'if you look at the pay and promotion outcomes [of those working from home] and adjust it for their higher performance, they were disadvantaged relative to people in the office. We know that if [workers] are remote, it’s better if their manager is also remote.'"

Excerpt from The Economist -- "'There's now a large body of overwhelming evidence, much of which was pioneered by my late colleague Kathy Phillips who was a professor at Columbia University, that shows that diverse teams out-perfrom non-diverse teams in just about every way you can think of. And so the first point that I have tried to make in all that I do is that we're talking about excellence. There are equity issues, equity reasons for promoting diversity, but to me, the leading reason to push for more diversity is we want more excellence."

Excerpt from WEF Blog -- "The COVID-19 pandemic has effectively kicked off a new era in our working lives. Instead of assembling in offices, more fortunate members of the workforce gather virtually, via conferencing software. Our days, seemingly shortened by the freedom from commuting to and from offices, now include juggling personal obligations and catching up on workloads as we can, when we can. Conditions are unlikely to reset to “normal” when the pandemic has passed. This means that, since human cultural norms are established by observation and socialization, corporate culture is certain to become less tangible in this new, remote work environment. Welcome to the age of the intangible company."

Excerpt from CNBC -- "Should it go public or seek additional funding, Coupang would likely field questions from new investors who are nervous about SoftBank’s involvement and whether its recent growth, as well as its unicorn valuation, is sustainable. 'It makes it very difficult to go public if your primary funding has come from someone that the market doesn’t trust,' said NYU Stern professor Aswath Damodaran. 'At the moment, fairly or unfairly, that’s where SoftBank is, and I think it kind of contaminates every company it’s invested in.'”

Excerpt from Barron's -- "While the May numbers will be better than April’s as local economies are showing signs of recovery and people are returning to work, 'many behavior changes and channel shifts will be permanent,' says New York University business-school professor Arun Sundararajan. 'The Covid shutdown has accelerated the ascent and eventual dominance of the e-commerce channel,” Sundararajan says, predicting that when it comes to apparel, U.S. online sales will exceed in-store sales in 2020 for the first time."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "'It tastes awful, but it works,' she says. 'Sometimes you really do need the skill set, and sometimes the nice person is not going to give it to you.' Prof. Shea is a co-author of the March paper and a fellow researcher in the six studies cited, along with Julia Hur, assistant professor of management and organizations at NYU Shanghai, and Rachel Ruttan, an assistant professor of organizational behavior and human resources at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "It isn’t necessarily that product quality is getting worse, says Tulin Erdem, chair of the marketing department at New York University’s Stern School of Business. What is happening instead, she suggests, is that consumers are becoming more savvy, and that in turn is leading them to assess products on a much more critical scale than in the past."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "Most important, understand that social status isn’t static. As Nathan Pettit, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, and Jennifer Carson Marr, a professor at the University of Maryland, recently showed, social status changes over time—hierarchies at work are constantly shifting. So don’t despair: There’s a chance your boss will be back in the black again."

Excerpt from Fast Company -- "Despite the billions of dollars U.S. companies spend on diversity programs each year, current strategies will not necessarily achieve their goals, according to an Academy of Management Review article.

'Staying the course with regard to how diversity initiatives are currently implemented is unlikely to result in substantial progress toward diversity goals,'" Lisa M. Leslie of New York University wrote in 'Diversity Initiative Effectiveness: A Typological Theory of Unintended Consequences.'"

Excerpt from Business Insider -- "We witness border skirmishes between big tech firms on a regular basis. This year, one or more will erupt into a shooting war. Just as most wars are not a function of ideology but economics, the armies of search, handsets, and performative posts will begin landing paratroopers behind enemy lines and initiate heavy equipment assaults. Yes, I watch too much History Channel."

Excerpt from Reuters -- "There are a number of ways employers can offer such a benefit, including a single lump-sum payment or regular monthly payments for a finite or indefinite period. “With these contributions, employees will see an instant boost to their bottom line,” explains Alex Dontoh, a professor of accounting at New York University’s Stern School of Business. 'According to Federal Reserve statistics, the monthly average student loan payment is $393. A monthly loan payment of $393 is quite a large amount considering that the average before-tax salary of a college graduate in the U.S. is about $50,000,'"

Excerpt from Express -- "U.S. economist Nouriel Roubini, lecturer New York University's Stern School of Business, said the package was smaller than Italy, Spain and Greece had hoped. Mr Roubini has warned 'the danger comes from Italy' if the ECB is unable to help surface the county’s debt through bonds."

Excerpt from HBR France -- "Research shows that highly indebted companies are particularly vulnerable in the event of a recession. In a 2017 study, Xavier Giroud (then at the Sloan School of Management at MIT) and Holger Mueller (Stern School of Business at NYU) examined the relationship between business closings, related unemployment and falling prices for real estate in different American counties. Overall, the more property prices fell, the more consumer demand fell, leading to higher business closings and unemployment."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "The case for today’s valuations is that corporate profits will snap back as the economy reopens and that the Fed will continue to keep interest rates low, spurring growth and making stocks look attractive in relation to interest-earning securities such as Treasury bonds. NYU’s Damodaran says the S&P 500 is probably fairly valued at 2,900 to 3,000 based on projected earnings, interest rates, and other factors, but its current level of about 3,200 is 'not so wildly inconsistent where you’d say it makes no sense.'”

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "Besides drawing down credit lines Acharya and Steffen (2020) show that firms also raised cash by accessing bond markets, but this started later. New bond issuance was muted until mid-March but accelerated after the Fed announced its corporate bond purchase programs through which it can purchase investment-grade rated corporate bonds (including ‘fallen angels’) and ETFs."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "Edward Altman said he expects a record number of mega-bankruptcies this year, surpassing the previous high of 49 in 2009 for companies with liabilities greater than $1 billion. Defaults on junk bonds also will spike, the professor emeritus at NYU’S Stern School added. 'It’s not only the impact of Covid-19, which is of course the primary reason, but also the enormous amount of debt that had been building up in the economy prior to it,' said Altman, who developed a widely used method called the Altman-Z-Score for predicting business failures."

Excerpt from CNBC -- “'Moderation is messy because there are very few absolute standards that govern what’s acceptable,' says Professor Arun Sundararajan from New York University’s Stern School of Business. He adds that Facebook may open 'a Pandora’s box in many ways' in possibly redefining its responsibilities for moderating online content, as its founder Mark Zuckerberg deals with widespread backlash over alleged inaction on U.S. President Donald Trump’s posts."

Excerpt from The Washington Post -- "That’s being blamed for a variety of economic ills. In his 2019 book 'The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets,' Thomas Philippon, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, argues that a lack of competition leads to lower wages, less business investment and slower economic growth.

Excerpt from US News -- "In a 2019 New York University-Harvard study, business school students said they'd be OK with getting poorer quality health care as long as it was provided by a human instead of AI. People resisted AI, the study authors found, because they felt it would not take their "idiosyncratic characteristics and circumstances" into account."

Excerpt from WIRED -- "In addition to the public health emergency, Covid-19 has also spurred a severe employment crisis, and Lieberman sees rental companies as poised to flourish, because people are cautious about spending. This is a view shared by New York University marketing professor Tom Meyvis, who studies consumer behavior. Because people tend to be more careful with money during economic downturns, Meyvis suspects people may choose renting certain goods and services over owning them to avoid the steep price tags of big-ticket purchases. 'They may be more reluctant to pay high up-front costs, even if they're able to do so,” he says.'"

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "Are things at work, in fact, eventually going to go back to something like they were before coronavirus? Humans overestimate the long-term impact of the things we are living through; what futurist and NYU Stern Business School professor Amy Webb calls 'the paradox of the present'. She suggests we learn to overcome it by becoming more comfortable with uncertainty."

Excerpt from El Espectador -- "Speaking to Efe, Professor Nicholas Economides, from the Stern Business School of the University of New York (NYU), foresees a slow recovery of the hospitality industry and small businesses, such as hairdressers, aesthetic centers or barber shops, since they require close contact with the client and its opening will be later, according to the calendar of phases to return to economic activity planned by the state."

Excerpt from RetailWire -- "In a column for Harvard Business Review, Steven Altman, senior research scholar at the NYU Stern School of Business, wrote that he believes globalization and shifts away from globalization will offer opportunities and challenges for businesses. He wrote, 'A volatile world of partially connected national economies expands possibilities for global strategy even as it complicates the management of multinational firms.'”