Faculty News

Professor Tom Meyvis on the removal of gender-based labels from toys

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Excerpt from Los Angeles Times -- "Tom Meyvis, a professor of marketing at New York University's Stern School of Business, said removing gender labels from toys gives more power to the consumer, a trend in marketing. 'To some extent, you give more control to the customer,' he said. 'So customers can decide for themselves what is the ideal product for their son or daughter, rather than being told this is the category your child falls into.'"
Faculty News

Professor Lawrence White on Moody's plans to change the way it calculates default risk

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Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "During the housing bubble, the widespread practice of so-called ratings shopping fueled a 'race to the bottom' among credit graders as they sought to win business, helping to fuel the later financial crisis...'We don’t know until we know if this is going to be a problem,' said Larry White, an economics professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. 'But surely they don’t want to be wrong a second time.'"
Faculty News

Professor Paul Romer's paper on economic growth is cited

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Excerpt from Harvard Business Review -- "For the classic economics paper on the role of technology on growth, see Paul Romer’s 1990 article 'Endogenous Technological Growth'..."
Faculty News

In an op-ed, Professor Nouriel Roubini explains the problems of ratings agencies and highlights the need for data-driven analysis in the global economy

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Excerpt from Financial Times -- "Spotting risk is difficult, and it is tempting to let others do the hard work. But rating agencies follow an ad hoc and slow-moving approach. Market signals, such as the interest rates payable on sovereign bonds, are noisy and volatile. It takes systematic, data-driven analysis to understand the dangers hidden in a shifting global economic scene."
Faculty News

In a co-authored op-ed, Research Scholar Sarah Labowitz explains how indirect sourcing threatens supply chain workers' safety

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Excerpt from The Globe and Mail -- "The indirect sourcing model is not unique to Bangladesh and has allowed explosive growth in the global apparel industry. But dependence on subcontracting firms outside the system of monitoring and inspection operated by Western brands leaves a significant part of the work force vulnerable to poor conditions."
Faculty News

Professor Stephen Brown explains why hedge funds are not ideal for retail investors

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Excerpt from Australian Financial Review -- "But retail investors [in Australia] can [invest in hedge funds]. You have to be prepared to do the operational due diligence, to know that in a liquidity crisis hedge funds will lose money and to invest in a diversified portfolio. If you can't meet those criteria you shouldn't be investing in hedge funds."
Faculty News

Professor Arun Sundararajan explains why the sharing economy poses a challenge to labor laws

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Excerpt from AFP -- "Arun Sundararajan, who heads New York University's Social Cities Initiative, said policymakers should seek to 'decouple' traditional benefits from the workplace to help gig workers. 'What they are looking for is not to be a full-time employee,' Sundararajan told AFP."
Faculty News

Professor Arun Sundararajan discusses the challenges that the sharing economy poses to the workforce

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Excerpt from New York German Press -- "What's critical is that in the United States right now, a lot of the social safety net, a lot of the benefits ranging from steady salary and paid vacations to insurance of different kinds, health benefits... all of that is tied, and much better, if you are a full-time employee. What's happening as more and more work becomes flexible is that these providers don't have access to benefits that full-time employees do. ... We shouldn't force our workforce into a situation where they have to choose between flexibility and benefits. I think we need new structures where we can get both."
Faculty News

Professor Arun Sundararajan explains the importance of labor classification lawsuits in the sharing economy

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Excerpt from San Francisco Chronicle -- "'Much as Uber and Airbnb have fought regulatory battles in cities around the world, and in the process laid the groundwork for new regulatory systems that accommodate their platforms, this lawsuit could lay the foundation for a better way of providing benefits to gig workers and part-time contractors,' Sundararajan said."
Faculty News

Professor Thomaï Serdari discusses marketing strategies of jewelry companies

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Excerpt from Racked -- "Thomai Serdari, a luxury marketing professor at NYU, says Signet's play for the male consumer is also apparent in where and when its ads are placed: the company spends millions to air commercials during sporting events.'Their branding goes hand-in-hand with how the average American consumer equates relationship milestones with jewelry,' she says. 'Signet tries to stay on top of the mind of the consumer who will watch a football game, see an ad on TV, and equate that brand with the next gift he needs to buy his wife.'"
Faculty News

Professor Lawrence White on Hillary Clinton's claim that the stock market has performed better under Democratic presidents

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Excerpt from PolitiFact -- "In fact, if you remove Hoover from the GOP column, the average monthly return for Republicans improves significantly, from a 0.38 percent average monthly return to a 0.61 percent monthly return. The Hoover-free GOP number is within striking distance of the Democratic mark of 0.73 percent, said Lawrence J. White, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. White doesn’t argue that it’s fairest to remove Hoover from the GOP’s calculation. Rather, he said, it’s a reminder that relatively small changes due at least in part to unlucky timing can have big effects on the end result."
Faculty News

In an op-ed, NYU Global Research Professor Ian Bremmer argues against Donald Trump's recommendation to build a wall at the US-Mexico border

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Excerpt from TIME -- "Walls don’t deter migrants, who simply take longer, harsher routes. Walls are incredibly costly to build and maintain. They can disrupt trade and hurt a country’s reputation. Nor will walls solve terrorism. Tunisia is building a wall to separate itself from chaotic Libya, but it will not stop the more than 3,000 Tunisians who have reportedly traveled to fight in Syria from coming home. Rather than building walls, politicians need to address root causes. In Europe, that means financing local development across the Mediterranean to reduce migrants’ incentive to leave their home countries."
Faculty News

In an op-ed, NYU Global Research Professor Ian Bremmer explains the value of business mentors

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Excerpt from LinkedIn -- "Cold calling almost never works, unless you’re unbelievably lucky. I wasn’t, and you probably won’t be either. A mentor can introduce you to the right people and tell you why exactly you need to know that person. The mentor can tell you who is worth trusting and who isn’t. Knowing who to trust requires experience, which you don’t have yet. He/she can also help you understand where you need connections to succeed and where you’re better off going it alone. You won’t believe how much time and effort that will save you."
Faculty News

Professor David Yermack on executive compensation disclosure

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Excerpt from The Atlantic -- "Executive compensation hasn’t changed much after disclosure requirements, 'say-on-pay' rules that put up CEO pay to nonbinding shareholder votes, or even the financial crisis. What might work instead? Yermack, the NYU professor, has one big-picture idea. 'I think the solution lies in making the median worker more productive through better education and training, an area where the U.S. has not been particularly successful,' he says. 'We are very good as a country at educating high-skilled workers for elite jobs, but we do not do nearly as well as other countries in educating people in the broad middle of the labor market.'"
Faculty News

Professor Adam Alter's research on the connection between pronounceable names and status at work is highlighted

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Excerpt from Business Insider -- "In a New York University study, researchers found that people with easier-to-pronounce names often have higher-status positions at work. One of the psychologists, Adam Alter, explains to Wired, 'When we can process a piece of information more easily, when it's easier to comprehend, we come to like it more.' In a further study, Alter also found that companies with simpler names and ticker symbols tended to perform better in the stock market."
Faculty News

Professor Arun Sundararajan outlines the challenge that the growing gig economy presents for lawmakers

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Excerpt from NextCity -- "'The critical thing in the next decade or two is that we structure labor law in a way that allows a wider variety of work arrangements,' Sundararajan adds. 'The same protections, the hard-won protections of full-time employment should be extended to other categories of work so that we don’t bias people towards one particular form.'"
Faculty News

In an op-ed, Professors Jennifer Carpenter and Robert Whitelaw share lessons learned from China's stock market crash

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Excerpt from Foreign Policy -- "Few people who give international markets even a cursory glance can have missed the recent meltdown in China’s stock market. Between June 12 and July 8, the Shanghai and Shenzhen indices were down 32 percent and 40 percent, respectively, generating headlines around the world. After the authorities took dramatic steps to halt the plunge, the markets stabilized, but then dropped a record 8.5 percent last Monday. It is not too early to start extracting some lessons from this meltdown — lessons that could serve China well going forward. If the country is still committed to making the stock market one of the important components of its new, more market-based capital allocation model, then the recent collapse, while painful, could yet prove extremely useful."
Faculty News

In an op-ed, Professor Nicholas Economides debunks myths surrounding Greece's financial crisis

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Excerpt from CNBC -- "If the program is implemented correctly, Greece will grow and re-enter the financial markets in 2017. In 2014, despite many errors by previous governments, and despite the ruthless and misleading opposition of Syriza, Greece had the fastest growth in the euro zone. Moreover, Greece succeeded in issuing new bonds at a yield of 3.5 percent only two years since it imposed a haircut of 74 percent to its bonds in 2012! These achievements occurred without structural reforms and despite the increasing political uncertainty because of the ascent of Syriza."
Faculty News

Professor Arun Sundararajan on the impact of classifying Uber drivers as independent contractors vs. employees

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Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "Classifying drivers as employees would result in higher prices, and fewer Uber drivers overall who must work longer hours, said Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business. The higher costs would be passed on to consumers, with reductions in drivers' income and Uber's cut of their fares, he said. The effect on Uber’s global revenue would likely be small, Sundararajan said. 'I think the real risk is that if they lose in California, other states will follow,' he said."
Faculty News

Professor Nicholas Economides discusses the state of banking in Greece

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Excerpt from CNN -- "I think there is a recession that is getting deeper in Greece and Greece needs the agreement with the Europeans as fast as possible and it needs the money from the Europeans, the loans from the Europeans, as well as the rehabilitation of the banks. The reason why the banks are the worst performing stocks right now is because the shareholders are going to lose a lot of their value once the banks get recapitalized. Still the banks need to be recapitalized as soon as possible."
Faculty News

Professor Aswath Damodaran discusses what metrics to use when creating valuations for a technology company

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Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "I think that traditional metrics are a sign of laziness...You have to look at what will create the earnings in the first place. In Facebook, it's a user base and how well they're working at converting that user base into earnings. And you have to give them credit - they've taken the 1.5 billion users they have and they've been incredibly creative about making money off those users. In contrast, you look at Twitter with a 300 million user base - it's not figured out a way to convert that user base into earnings. As an investor when I look at these companies, I'm looking at what they can do to create earnings and whether they're working to put the pieces in place to create those earnings and then I look at the price at which I'd be able to buy them."
Faculty News

Professor Nicholas Economides on the effects of bundling following AT&T's acquisition of DirecTV

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Excerpt from Marketplace -- "'[Bundling] makes it hard for people to switch off a particular service and that reduces competition in markets across the board,' says Nicholas Economides, economics professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He says companies are less inclined to offer better prices or service when it’s troublesome for you to choose another option."
Faculty News

Research Scholar Brandon Fuller's piece on how cities can help low-income workers without raising the minimum wage is cited

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Excerpt from CityLab -- "But as that $15 number mobilizes voters from Seattle to New York, scholars have suggested that other metros wait and see how these large hikes actually impact minimum-wage workers before adopting it themselves. Meanwhile, as Brandon Fuller pointed out on CityLab in June, the nation’s priciest cities (ahem, New York and Los Angeles) can do more to improve the lives of low-income residents, such as increasing housing stock and advocating for tax policies that reward work."
Faculty News

Professor Frances Milliken and Professor Elizabeth Morrison's joint research on employee silence is cited

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Excerpt from Harvard Business Review -- "In research by Frances Milliken of New York University and two colleagues, the majority of 40 employees at knowledge companies reported having concerns about such issues as workflow improvement and ethics — but not speaking up about these issues to their supervisors. The belief that raising the issues would make no difference was the third most frequently cited reason. Said one employee: 'Even if I did comment on the issue, it was unlikely to change anything.'"
Faculty News

NYU Global Research Professor Ian Bremmer explains why foreign policy is an important issue in the 2016 elections

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Excerpt from Business Insider -- "The average American understands that things are not going well for America outside of our borders. When you look outside the US, you've got failed states across the Middle East, you've got the most powerful terrorist organization that just dealt us a setback, you've got more refugees than at any point since World War II, you have Putin telling us to go scratch whenever we say we want him to do something. These are enormous challenges, and we have our allies that are unnerved by this, and they're hedging."

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