Experience Stern | News & Events

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."

Excerpt from BusinessBecause -- "It is not just enterprise cloud specialists that are snapping up business school graduates for cloud computing roles, but tech groups like Facebook, and Google, whose business models rely on data. 'They created cloud computing, and now they are collecting rents on it,' says Vasant Dhar, Professor, NYU Stern and the Center for Data Science."

Excerpt from The Economist -- "Mr Greenberg also looked how much MBAs who tapped their network earned. Counterintuitively, job offers from connections brokered through alumni paid $15,000 lower in starting salary than those who were offered a job after an on-campus recruitment event. Job offers from closer connections—friends and family members—were even more miserly, putting paid to the concept that it’s who you know, not what you know. Closer connections do not equal better initial compensation."

Excerpt from The Times of London -- "'The pessimistic view of Rana Plaza is that little has changed. The optimistic view is that Bangladesh is a turning point for the low-end garment industry,' says Labowitz. 'Certainly, there is a change of consciousness in fashion. The question is, how do you impose rules on a system that has been without rules?'"

Excerpt from Fortune -- "Is it better to be lucky or good? That’s the timeless question posed by New York Times economics columnist Robert H. Frank, made more pressing in today’s era of growing inequality. Frank comes down on the side of kismet."

Excerpt from the San Francisco Chronicle -- "Sundararajan said ride-hailing companies such as Lyft and Uber have to employ nonprofessional drivers. And at Airbnb, he added, everyday people are converted into part-time hoteliers. 'Munchery and Sprig aren’t converting hobbyist home cooks into commercial chefs. They’re simply creating a bigger market for professionals.'"

Excerpt from The Boston Globe -- "These workers may want the benefits that come with regular full-time jobs while maintaining the ability to work whatever hours they choose, said Arun Sundararajan, author of the upcoming book 'The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism.' 'You’ve got this Faustian bargain: You either get the flexibility or you get the benefits,' said Sundararajan, a New York University professor. 'All we’ve got to do is come up with a funding model that allows both.'"

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "Over the last year, America’s professional intelligentsia has been placed under the microscope in several interesting ways. First, a group of prominent social psychologists released a paper quantifying and criticizing their field’s overwhelming left-wing tilt. Then Jonathan Haidt, one of the paper’s co-authors, highlighted research showing that the entire American academy has become more left-wing since the 1990s."

Exerpt from Austin American-Statesman -- "Experts said Whole Foods took too long to respond to the New York case by releasing an apologetic video featuring Mackey and co-CEO Walter Robb. The video felt awkward and didn’t go far enough, experts said. 'They waited a week before responding — in an era of 24/7 news coverage and endless social media, that’s an eternity,' said Irv Schenkler, clinical professor of management communication for New York University’s Stern School of Business. 'And the New York City market is the most intense media-centric of markets. So their surprise at the rate of coverage speaks to an unusual lack of media savvy.'"