Experience Stern | News & Events

Excerpt from Marketplace -- "'Investment is one of the drivers of economic growth,' Sylla said. 'But ever since the financial crisis, companies have been reluctant to make new investments. And that's partly responsible for our slow economic growth.' Sylla said investor pressure is particularly acute for manufacturing firms such as Dow and Dupont; they face global competition, in a way American tech companies don't."

Excerpt from CNBC -- "I think of Yahoo as a very simple company to think about. It's really a holding company. Right now it's like a closed mutual fund with investments in two other companies. I think about the operating assets as just a distraction. It's less than 10% of the value of the company, and that's all Ms. Mayers has been in control of .. over the last four years. So the reality is, I think if you strip it down to basics, you take the operating assets out... it's really two holdings. And it's only taxes that determine what the value of the company should be."

Excerpt from MarketWatch -- "More than 90% of people said they believe it’s better to eat a well-balanced diet than to use diet products in a 2015 survey of 2,000 Internet users by market research company Mintel. ... As a result, there has been a shift from touting the explicit weight-loss benefits of fitness and food products to promoting an overall lifestyle that is sustainable, said Priya Raghubir, the chair of the marketing department at New York University’s Stern School of Business."

Excerpt from Business Standard -- "Aswath Damodaran, professor of corporate finance and valuation at the Stern School of Business at New York University, said, 'I think it is not only dangerous for any young, start-up, and especially with huge growth potential and large losses today to borrow money. By borrowing money, they run the risk of default and in the process, they are putting their growth potential at risk. Why do that?'"

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "I would say the board has been infected with a severe case of common sense, and when you have an asset that is trading at less than zero, the disposition of that asset is accretive to shareholders. And they recognize that. They're going to sell Yahoo. It's time for this soap opera to end. ... It's going to be good for shareholders. ... It's the right thing to do."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "Norway’s sovereign-wealth fund should be given the leeway to plow more money into real estate and further diversify its portfolio by investing a chunk of its $850 billion in infrastructure, a government-commissioned expert group said Tuesday. The fund, managed by Norway’s central bank and commonly referred to as the oil fund, should be allowed to invest up to 10% of its value in infrastructure and to raise its real-estate portfolio to 10% from a current ceiling of 5%, the group said in a report published Tuesday. The government 'should open up for unlisted infrastructure investment in the management mandate to Norges Bank to take advantage of investment opportunities unavailable in the listed space,' said the group, which was led by Prof. Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh at New York University."

Excerpt from Council on Foreign Relations blog -- "No single actor can underwrite the significant costs of upgrading Bangladesh’s garment sector. Local and international participants should share the costs. Detroit provides a useful model, in which the public-private Blight Removal Taskforce successfully surveyed the city’s problem, developed a blueprint for addressing it, and raised public and private funds to meet the $800 million price tag of clearing blighted structures."

Excerpt from OZY -- "[Economides] believes Greece still has five to 10 years before it can 'convince the world that it is at a stage of recovery.' Meanwhile, having a market for their products is helping them cushion the blow dealt by the economic crisis while fueling Bulgaria’s sputtering economic growth."

Excerpt from LinkedIn -- "Just a few years ago, Best Buy looked like it was on its way to failure, especially as its competitor Circuit City filed for bankruptcy in 2008. The company has since turned itself around and is even considered an undervalued stock at times. A big part of the turnaround was due to CEO Hubert Joly’s 'Renew Blue' program, implemented three years ago. However, L2 data shows digital investment played a big role in preserving and improving the company’s value."

Excerpt from Fortune -- "In July, Eli Bartov, a professor at New York University Stern School of Business and two other researchers found that 'aggregate opinion' from tweets before earnings announcements could predict earnings surprises as well as market reactions for individual stocks, leading to outperformance of 5% to 10% per year."

Excerpt from The Washington Post -- "In an interview with OnLeadership, [Damodaran] calls Steve Jobs' revival at Apple something few would -- 'a great corporate tragedy' -- not because of what Apple achieved, but because of how it's been held up as a nearly impossible-to-reach model for other companies."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "We've had a lot of usury laws in history, and many people trace it back to Aristotle. You know, a very great philosopher, obviously. One of the greatest ever. But he has a curious idea that, I think the translation of the Greeks is: 'Money is barren.' Money doesn't by itself have any productivity. Therefore, interest rates should be zero. When you lend something to somebody, you should not charge them interest. And that was a view, I think, that was not widespread. But it was a philosophical view. Then it was picked up by St. Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages and it became a part of Catholic teaching."

Excerpt from Forbes -- "Reverse mentoring can be a fun and enlightening experience for both parties. It frees Marketing execs of the embarrassment of looking and being out of date and out of touch, and importantly for the business, helps execs understand and adopt new approaches (assuming they’re better) more quickly. It’s a win/win way to infuse new perspectives in the organization."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "The junk-bond default rate rose to 2.6% from 2.1% this year and will likely jump to 4.3% in 2016, breaching the 30-year average of 3.8% for the first time since 2009, said New York University Finance Professor Edward Altman, inventor of the most commonly used default-prediction formula. ... 'In most high-default periods we’ve seen in the past, the rise in default rates precedes a recession,' said Mr. Altman, who has been studying the subject for more than 50 years."

Excerpt from The Washington Post -- "'Her speech there is the kind of thing she would talk about in class,' said Tom Pugel, an economics professor at New York University who took Yellen’s course in macroeconomics when he was a young doctoral student at Harvard University. 'You’re still seeing someone who comes at this from a professorial point of view.'"

Excerpt from International Business Times -- "'This time the FCC used like a bazooka, the most strong and wide-ranging section of the act, the Title II. It’s extremely unlikely that, on the same grounds [as 2014], it will be ruled against. I expect it will be upheld,' said Nicholas Economides, a professor of economics at NYU Stern School of Business who has defended the regulations on regulations before Congress in October."

Excerpt from Engineering News-Record -- "The ENR Top 250 International Contractors survey provides an annual snapshot of the cross-border activities of the world’s largest contractors. Here, we take a longer perspective, using data from the 2005-15 surveys to analyze the globalization of the world’s largest contractors and identify actionable strategy implications."

Excerpt from Credit.com -- "'We find that regulatory limits on credit card fees reduced overall borrowing costs to consumers by an annualized 1.7% of average daily balances, with a decline of more than 5.5% for consumers with the lowest FICO scores,' the paper said."

Excerpt from Reuters -- "Despite promising in early 2013 to be a global service by 2014, the company has yet to open offices outside the United States. Lyft is currently in about 150 U.S. cities. 'I don't think Lyft wants to or can,' become a global ride service, said Aswath Damodaran, a professor of finance at New York University's Stern School of Business. 'It is a company with much smaller ambitions.'"

Excerpt from The Huffington Post -- "An independent central bank is a device to overcome the problem of time consistency: the concern that policymakers will renege in the future on a policy promise made today. Keeping inflation low and stable requires a credible policy commitment to price stability that will, from time to time, be highly unpopular. When inflation rises, the central bank must promptly raise interest rates. And, should deflation threaten and the policy rate hit the zero bound, the central bank must respond by using its balance sheet flexibility. In this way, an independent central bank improves economic performance: it can achieve lower and more stable inflation rate without sacrificing long-run economic growth."

Excerpt from The Street.com -- "Enron's collapse was driven by governance weaknesses, auditing inefficiencies and accounting problems, and significant strides were made afterward in correcting the first two of those problems, said Baruch Lev. An accounting and finance professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, Lev testified before Congress after Enron's fall and has written five books including Winning Investors Over, published in 2012. 'Corporate boards are now more independent than they used to be, and they have committees that are completely composed of independent board members, like the audit committee,' he noted."

Excerpt from Salt Lake City Weekly -- "The study points out that Salt Lake City's lack of density is essentially the cause of lack of vibrancy. Downtown currently has an estimated population of just over 5,000 residents. But, according to the study, nearly 58,000 more residents would move downtown from nearby metro areas if it were feasible."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "The coal mine of Yahoo has canaries dying everywhere. Everyone that has watched [Marissa Mayer's] tenure really closely, whether it's her senior managers, her colleagues, or the hedge fund guy who put her in the CEO spot, they've either sold all their shares and headed for the hills or they've left the company, and the numbers speak for themselves."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "'Because of the immediacy and the flexibility of the app, it does give them a certain advantage,' said Arun Sundararajan, professor at New York University’s business school who studies the sharing economy. 'For their size, they have immense amounts of regulatory battles. Uber seems to be a strong believer in using consumer collective action as one of the forces in their political battles.'"

Excerpt from Inc. -- "At least one academic report suggests chief executives tend to make significant stock gifts following a run up in share prices. And given the current frothy environment around tech stocks, where Facebook's own stock is at a near historic high of $107 a share as of Wednesday afternoon, the timing makes sense. 'The gift date itself on average represents a turning point in the stock's trajectory, with company prices moving lower in the months after a gift is made,' David Yermack, a professor of finance at the NYU Stern School of Business, wrote in a 2008 article in the Journal of Financial Economics."