Faculty News

Professor Xavier Gabaix's research on crashes in financial markets is highlighted

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Excerpt from Barron's -- "Xavier Gabaix, a finance professor at New York University, has derived a crash-frequency formula that he believes captures a universal trait of all markets, not just equity markets or those in the U.S. According to that formula, the odds of a 12.8% crash in any given six-month period are 0.92%, almost as low as the actual frequency in the U.S. stock market over the last century."
Faculty News

Professor Gian Luca Clementi discusses economic concerns in Japan in advance of the G7 Summit

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Excerpt from Marketplace -- "The Japanese central bank is so desperate to spur growth that they’ve gone over to negative interest rates, and Japan has suggested it would like to devalue its currency to promote growth — which doesn’t sit well with the U.S. The aspect of Abenomics that calls for structural reforms and economic liberalization has been very slow to materialize, which NYU Stern Business School professor Gian Luca Clementi said is key to growing the country’s economy. 'There are lots of small banks that give loans on very dubious criteria, and lots of companies that are definitely not the most productive, but they are entrenched politically. [They] receive continuous financing for projects of dubious productivity,' he said. 'On the other hand, smaller entrepreneurs, younger entrepreneurs have a harder time getting financing.'"
Faculty News

Professor Arun Sundararajan comments on how Airbnb hosts are campaigning against regulation in Albany

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Excerpt from Fast Company -- "Failure to fix Airbnb's regulatory problems in New York and elsewhere would hurt the $25.5 billion-valued company’s prospects with future investors, public markets, and the public. 'The prospect of having to face regulatory risk questions every time they announce earnings, it’s just going to stymie the growth of the company,' says Arun Sundararajan, an NYU professor and the author of a recent book about the sharing economy."
Faculty News

Professor Adam Alter discusses the impact of fluent thinking

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Excerpt from Business 2 Community -- "There’s a phenomenon known as the illusion of explanatory depth, and the idea is that there are certain things that we assume we understand much better than we do. If you ask someone how well can they can explain how a bicycle works on a scale of one to ten, people will between an eight and a ten out of ten."
Faculty News

Professor Emeritus Stephen Brown's research on hedge funds is referenced

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Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "Academics have previously found a more significant two-day effect [of hedge fund investments on stocks], but that is for fast-moving day traders, not investors. Over a month, a study a few years ago by Stephen Brown of New York’s Stern School of Business and Christopher Schwarz of the University of California found no impact from 1999 to 2008."
Faculty News

In an op-ed, Research Scholar Robert Frank emphasizes the role of luck in attaining good fortune, from his book, "Success and Luck"

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Excerpt from The New York Times -- "Most of us have no difficulty recognizing luck when it’s on conspicuous display, as when someone wins the lottery. But randomness often plays out in subtle ways, and it’s easy to construct narratives that portray success as having been inevitable. Those stories are almost invariably misleading, however, a simple fact that has surprising implications for public policy."
Faculty News

Senior Research Scholar Shlomo Angel reviews "The Human City," by Joel Kotkin

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Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "[Kotkin's] answer to 'How should we live?' is: amid an 'urban pluralism' that 'encompasses the city center as well as close-in suburbs, new fringe developments, and exurbs.' I find this quite sensible and level-headed but worry that the middle ground—the place we used to come to and to sit and reason together and agree on the common good—seems to be more and more difficult to get to these days."
Faculty News

Professor Lisa Leslie's research on a pay premium for high-potential women is featured

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Excerpt from Fortune -- "Now it turns out that those women who have reached the top have probably been out-earning their male counterparts for years. That’s because companies making a genuine effort to increase diversity in senior management have apparently been holding on to 'high-potential' women — meaning those perceived as having the right skills and talent to move up — at least in part by paying them more than 'high-potential' men. On average, says a new study, high-potential women earn 10% more annually than their high-potential male colleagues."
Faculty News

Professor Roy Smith comments on Citigroup founder Sanford Weill's business legacy

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Excerpt from The New York Times -- "In his heyday in the 1990s, Mr. Weill was 'a Sun King — one of the most powerful and successful financial individuals in New York,' said Roy Smith, a finance professor at New York University business school. Mr. Weill gained that status as a deal maker, with a series of ever-larger mergers culminating with Citicorp and the Travelers Group forming the behemoth Citigroup in 1998. The last deal helped knock down the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, which separated banking from the riskier securities business."
Faculty News

Professor Emeritus Edward Altman's research on high yield bond defaults is referenced

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Excerpt from Barron's -- "...this year, the recovery rate in high yield bonds has been extremely low — just 13.9%, reports Marty Fridson, chief investment officer at Lehmann Livian Fridson Advisors, in a Tuesday report published Wednesday on S&P Capital IQ LCD. This continues a trend that started last year. Drawing on academic research, primarily done by Edward Altman of New York University Stern School, Fridson reports that the junk bond default rate was 2.83% in 2015, lower than the long-term mean of 3.33%. Normally, the recovery rate is higher when defaults are low. But in 2015, the recovery rate was just 34%, far below its historical average of 46%."
Faculty News

Professor Aswath Damodaran shares his views on Amazon stock

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Excerpt from CNBC -- "I think the pathway for Amazon to be worth 700 is there. But it's a very narrow one. I've always called Amazon a 'field of dreams' company, which is if you build it, they will come--the building being the revenues and the profits. And I think what they've had going for them, they've always had that consistent story, which is we're going to go for revenues first and we'll get profits later. So it's built on that trust, and I don't think they can deliver the margins you would need to get to this 700. So that's the basis for my valuation."
Faculty News

Professor Thomas Philippon's comments at a panel on bank bailouts are highlighted

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Excerpt from Fortune -- "...Thomas Philippon, professor of finance at NYU’s Stern School of Business, argued at the symposium that taxing leverage makes sense, but is easier said than done. He argues that banks could hide their leverage using complex financial instruments like contingent assets or derivatives, avoiding Clinton’s tax while still bulking up on risk."
Faculty News

In a feature article, Professor Vasant Dhar discusses artificial intelligence and decision making

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Excerpt from the Harvard Business Review -- "I propose a risk-oriented framework for deciding when and how to allocate decision problems between humans and machine-based decision makers. I’ve developed this framework based on the experiences that my collaborators and I have had implementing prediction systems over the last 25 years in domains like finance, healthcare, education, and sports. The framework differentiates problems along two independent dimensions: predictability and cost per error."
Faculty News

Professor Paul Romer's research on "mathiness" is referenced

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Excerpt from the Business Standard -- "He quotes the economist Paul Romer of New York University about macroeconomics being plagued by 'mathiness' and thus failing to progress as a true science should, and that current debates among economists are often as pointless as those between 16th-century advocates of heliocentrism and geocentrism - whether the sun or the earth was at the centre of things."
Faculty News

In an op-ed, Professor Vasant Dhar addresses several challenges surrounding artificial intelligence

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Excerpt from TechCrunch -- "The difficulty with learning machines arises because they train themselves on what they see, the 'training data,' that cannot completely represent situations the machine will see in the future. These are sometimes called 'edge cases' or 'Rumsfeldian unknowns,' in that they are unknowable in advance. Humans typically deal with such edge cases remarkably well with no prior 'training' by applying common sense or finding analogies and learning from these samples of one."
Faculty News

Professor Paul Romer’s proposal of city sanctuaries for refugees is highlighted

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Excerpt from Dagens Nyheter - "The world's cities are expected to grow by two and a half billion people by 2050. The US economist Paul M. Romer have a suggestion on how we can solve the challenges of overpopulation and migration: Create new sanctuaries where people are given the opportunity to test new ways of living."
Faculty News

Professor David Yermack's research on the impact of First Lady Michelle Obama's fashion choices is featured

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Excerpt from NPR -- "'It was truly remarkable how much more effect Mrs. Obama had on the commercial fashion industry that almost any other celebrity you could find in any other commercial setting,' Yermack says. And it wasn't just a freak blip on the graph: 'This would be a very permanent thing,' Yermack emphasized. 'The stocks would not go down the next day. So to put a number on it for just a generic company at a routine event, it was worth about $38 million to have Mrs. Obama wear your clothes.'"
Faculty News

Professor Vasant Dhar comments on the increasing job opportunities involving big data

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Excerpt from BusinessBecause -- "'Data is their business. It's the growth path for all of them,' said Vasant Dhar, NYU Stern professor of business and data science, and editor of the Big Data journal. 'The advice I give students these days is to take as many courses as possible that require working with real data,' he added."
Faculty News

In an op-ed, Professor Arun Sundararajan explores what Uber and Lyft's exit from the Austin, Texas market means for the future of regulation in the sharing economy

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Excerpt from Fortune -- "Governments should view Uber and Lyft as friends, not enemies. As I argue in my book ‘The Sharing Economy,’ society’s interests are served well when governments partner with platforms in the creation and enforcement of regulation rather than treating them as its target."
Faculty News

Professor Pankaj Ghemawat shares his views on business strategy

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Excerpt from Thinkers50 -- "Perhaps we need additional frameworks. But I think we probably need a little bit of attention to what kind of criteria we might be able to use to separate interesting frameworks from frameworks that in some essential sense, really don't meet the test of history based on frameworks we've seen come and go."
Faculty News

Research Scholar Robert Frank discusses his new book, "Success and Luck"

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Excerpt from New York Magazine -- "Humans don’t, as a general rule, do well with ambiguity. We like to tell clear, coherent stories about the world we see in front of us, and success is no exception. Hindsight bias, which is — and I’m just going to go with the Wikipedia definition here, because it’s good — 'the inclination, after an event has occurred, to see the event as having been predictable, despite there having been little or no objective basis for predicting it,' can partly explain how we come up with stories that cause us to discount the role of luck. Frank provided two examples of how hindsight bias warps our understanding of success in this manner: the Mona Lisa and Bryan Cranston."
Faculty News

In an op-ed, Professor Ralph Gomory outlines the negative impact of free trade

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Excerpt from The Huffington Post -- "There is an enormous gap between free trade as it is taught in textbooks and advocated by those who benefit from it and free trade as it is actually practiced in today’s world. Textbooks still unabashedly teach the virtues of free trade, but their arguments assume a world of pure market forces. But the American people don’t live in a world that is anything like that."
Faculty News

Professor David Yermack's research on the blockchain is referenced

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Excerpt from The Economic Times -- "It can be nice to imagine the much-derided banking industry unmoored from our daily needs, left to scramble for business like other non-essential industries. Of course, our transaction histories would be much more visible to governments than they are today . This imaginary world of effectively socialized money is being seriously discussed by researchers and central bankers alike. In a new paper, Max Raskin and David Yermack of New York University talk about it as a distinct possibility, albeit a radical one that 'carries significant risks for the rest of the financial system.'"
Faculty News

Professor Arun Sundararajan discusses the intersection of the sharing economy and the Internet of Things (IoT)

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Excerpt from Techonomy -- "There's a number of different ways in which IoT and the sharing economy are going to interface. As you sort of start to give a household device, for example, the ability to know where it is, the ability to know how much is being used, and in some sense, the ability to call on transport when it needs it, you dramatically increase the potential for peer-to-peer rental marketplaces."
Faculty News

Professor Arun Sundararajan weighs in on the creation of a union for drivers in New York City

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Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "Helping establish a guild is a savvy decision by Uber, said Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New York University’s business school who’s writing a book titled 'The Sharing Economy.' 'They’re nurturing their relationship with their drivers,' he said. 'It seems like a smart move.'"

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