Experience Stern | News & Events

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- “The U.S. has a serious problem with its academic pipeline. High-school graduation rates and the quality of academic preparation vary a great deal by race. Universities can’t draw from this broken pipeline and then hope to declare equality on campus, but they can be part of the effort to fix the problem.”

Excerpt from Bloomberg View -- "In his latest book, 'Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy,' he discusses how underappreciated the role of random chance is in our lives. Successful people tend to credit their skill, hard work and intelligence for their fortunate outcomes. Frank points out that for every big winner, there are scores of people who are as skilled, hard-working and intelligent, but came in just behind. The lack of a lucky break can be the difference between wild success and a near miss or worse."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "I think Trump is very proud as he presents himself as a winner. Interestingly, several people have done the calculation that if he had taken the money that his father gave him--his father was, of course, a very wealthy man--and put it in a mutual fund, he would have more money today than he has today. So he was obviously very, very lucky. He's built some businesses. He's destroyed some businesses."

Excerpt from Bloomberg View -- "The way we do banking, King thinks, needs to change. As it turns out, he has a powerful idea for how to change it. 'The End of Alchemy' is about more than this one idea -- which doesn’t actually appear until roughly 250 pages into the book. To the idea itself he devotes 40 seriously interesting pages, and I have here only a few hundred words. But this idea is the heart of his book and worth telling people about."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "The mass desertion of the AAA reflects a larger truth about corporate finance: Company managers are strongly influenced by what their peers are doing, says Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business. 'If everyone else is borrowing, you tend to borrow, too,' he says. ... Companies that loaded up on debt in the early to mid-2000s were more likely than others to fire workers once the 2007-09 recession hit, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper issued last year. Weak balance sheets were 'instrumental in the propagation of shocks' during the crisis, Xavier Giroud of MIT’s Sloan School of Management and Holger Mueller of the Stern School of Business wrote in the report."

Excerpt from Fashionista -- "'These are difficult, complicated and costly logistics businesses,' says Lawrence Lenihan, cofounder and co-CEO of fashion-focused venture operating firm Resonance Companies. 'Their customers love them for convenience and selection, but I'm not sure that there is a profitable sustainable business at the end of the journey. They seem to be trying to emphasize the high end of the market with watches and jewelry because the margins are the highest and the logistics cost per contribution margin are the lowest. But then they are [facing] a whole host of competition, including the brands themselves who have the credibility of physical presence along with new products.'"

Excerpt from Strategy + Business -- "This smartphone-enabled, venture capital–fueled phenomenon cries out for a biography, a taxonomy, and an impact analysis. In The Sharing Economy, Sundararajan supplies all of those things. While much of the book will be familiar to someone who follows events in this world — he spends a good bit of time explaining how platforms such as Airbnb and Lyft actually work — it’s a useful and fundamentally optimistic attempt to explain where the sharing economy came from, and where it’s going."

Excerpt from Racked -- "'Luxury brands cannot "cheapen" their brands by frequent discounts and price promotions,' says NYU professor of business and marketing Tülin Erdem. 'It is inconsistent with their brand identity since if they do so their brand equity will be diluted. Most luxury brands have a sense of exclusivity and reflect a unique style, [and] too many people using these [discounts] will damage exclusivity and uniqueness.'"

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "New York University finance professor Aswath Damodaran said ROIC is a lazy shortcut for executives, because companies should have visibility into the cash flowing from projects on a more granular basis. 'I could write a paper on perverse ways you could destroy your company by raising your ROIC,' he said."

Excerpt from Project Syndicate -- "There are no politically easy solutions to the global economy’s current quandary. Unsustainably high debt should be reduced in a rapid and orderly fashion, to avoid a long and protracted (often a decade or longer) deleveraging process. But orderly debt-reduction mechanisms are not available for sovereign countries and are politically difficult to implement within countries for households, firms, and financial institutions."

Excerpt from IPE Real Estate -- "Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, part of the three-member expert group, thinks the government is rightly cautious about including unlisted infrastructure investment in the SWF [sovereign wealth fund]. 'Most of the investment needs for infrastructure are in the developing world, and that’s also where most of the risks are,' he says."

Excerpt from The Atlantic -- "That we tend to overestimate our own responsibility for our successes is not to say that we shouldn’t take pride in them. Pride is a powerful motivator; moreover, a tendency to overlook luck’s importance may be perversely adaptive, as it encourages us to persevere in the face of obstacles. And yet failing to consider the role of chance has a dark side, too, making fortunate people less likely to pass on their good fortune."

Excerpt from Forbes -- "Brilliant research by economists from the Stern School of Business and Harvard Business School, Alexander Ljungqvist, Joan Farre-Mensa, and John Asker, entitled 'Corporate Investment and Stock Market Listing: A Puzzle?' compares the investment patterns of companies in the public sector and private sector. It turns out that the lag in investment is a phenomenon of the public firms, not the privately owned firms."

Excerpt from The Atlantic -- "In a paper that will soon be published in the journal Sociological Science, Greenberg and Fernandez write that the students were significantly more likely to accept jobs found through networking—done either through alums of their program or their own social connections—even if those jobs came with lower pay than offers arriving through more formal channels, like on-campus recruiting. The choice, the researchers suggest, may be driven by students’ interest in their own career development, and a belief that taking a job with more networking opportunities would give them a professional edge, even if it came at the cost of compensation."

Excerpt from RT -- "The ride-sharing market has seen a lot of street firing, competitive tactics, even in the United States. A couple of years ago, we had Uber and Lyft booking--or allegedly booking--rides in each other's services to try and flood the network with a lot of demand. And so, I think you're seeing something similar play out in India now, where Uber is in a sort of heated competitive battle with the domestic giant Ola."
 

Excerpt from Consumer Reports -- "For such illegal sales to stop, the regulations that govern sale prices will have to be improved—a slow process since pricing is regulated at the state level. Meanwhile, though, all the bad publicity and penalties could cause merchants to tone down their marketing tactics, says Vicki G. Morwitz, a marketing professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "In a 2012 article, a trio of social psychologists found that liberals had a less accurate perception of the moral views of conservatives than conservatives had of liberals. One of the authors, Jonathan Haidt, suggests over email that liberals and conservatives increasingly view each other through the stereotypes that have traditionally divided city and country folk. The urban stereotype of the rural is that they’re mired in idiocy."

Excerpt from The Huffington Post -- "This is to be expected, says Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New York University’s Stern Business School and the author of the upcoming book The Sharing Economy. Sundararajan likened ClassPass’ new subscription options to mobile data plans, saying: 'We used to pay a fixed amount for unlimited internet on our phones, and now have moved to tiered plans. It’s a natural part of the evolution of a business like that.'"

Excerpt from Quartz -- "Given India’s price-sensitive buyers, there are high chances of online retailers losing customers once discounts are discontinued. 'If they do not offer deep discounts, Indian consumers will switch back to offline retailers, which seem to be always on sale,' Ghose of New York University said. 'I do not think this cultural behavior of the average Indian consumer will change even with a substantial increase in the average disposable income in India.'"

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "One challenge is to break down your expenses according to whether they are ordinary and recurring or exceptional and unusual, says Mr. Alter. 'What you’ll start to notice is that so-called exceptional expenses account for a large chunk of your budget,' and need to be acknowledged as recurring spending, he says."

Excerpt from BBC News -- "'We are now in the early stages of a different model of organising economic activity,' says Prof Arun Sundararajan at New York University. Indeed he argues the sharing economy taps into a basic human need. 'We are wired for social connection. The appeal [of sharing] is to integrate some semblance of human interaction into our economic activities.'"
 

Excerpt from Project Syndicate -- "...in an environment of low long-term interest rates and deficient short-term aggregate demand (which means there is little risk of crowding out the private sector), it is a mistake not to relax fiscal constraints for investment. In fact, the right kind of public investment would probably spur more private-sector investment. Identifying such investment is where today’s debt debate should be."

Excerpt from Vox -- "Evidence suggests that failure to recognize luck's role in success increases tax resistance by reinforcing the natural sense of entitlement to income produced by the fruits of one's own labor."

Excerpt from Chief Learning Officer -- "Baruch Lev, director of the Intangibles Research Project at New York University Stern School of Business, has stated that 'people are the most important asset of most companies.'"

Excerpt from RT -- "Lazy investors and lazy analysts get exactly what they deserve. Nobody forces anybody to use pro forma statements. We use them because it fits our preconceptions. So as Valeant was climbing from 50 to 60 to 80 to 100 to 120 to 140, a lot of people were looking for reasons to buy it. And what those accounting numbers did--remember they still were reporting the GAAP numbers. They were also reporting the pro forma numbers and the cash earnings per share. But those are almost add-ons. Investors chose to latch on to whatever number they thought would give them a justification for buying the stock."