Experience Stern | News & Events

Excerpt from LinkedIn -- "As malls crumble and Amazon ascends, Department Stores have been on deathwatch. Yet brick-and-mortar retail remains relevant. While growth in clicks outpaces bricks, 90% of retail sales take place in a physical store. Over the next five years, Department Stores will grow 22% globally, with most of the growth coming from emerging markets, specifically China. Department Store brands, including Nordstrom, are seeing big bets on digital begin to pay off, while brands like Sears and JCPenney are looking to digital as a lifeline."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "For about 150 years, finance has essentially charged a 2 percent fee on financial assets, like stocks, bonds and loans, according to research by a New York University economist, Thomas Philippon. That 'fee' adds up the total costs that investment bankers, asset managers, brokers and other financial middlemen charge their clients. Even as financial assets in the economy doubled over the last few decades, that fee percentage stayed remarkably flat."

Excerpt from The Huffington Post -- "While the Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2015 - aka, the 'Audit the Fed' Act - doesn't shut down the Federal Reserve, it would go a long way to putting Congress directly in charge of monetary policy and to weakening the Fed's effectiveness as a lender of last resort."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- “Technology is now the largest single slice of the equity market,” [Damodaran] writes. “Just as growth becomes more difficult for a company as it gets larger and becomes a larger part of the economy, technology collectively is running into a scaling problem, where its growth rate is converging on the growth rate for the economy.”

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "To hear enthusiasts describe them, economic sanctions are trusty swords. By excluding hostile governments and their senior officials from western financial markets, America and its allies can pursue diplomacy with a streak of coercion. The number of US sanctions programmes has doubled in recent years, and they now target the personal assets of a rogue state’s political and economic elite."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "While China probably will avoid prolonged Japan-style stagnation, a major crisis could expose weaknesses that aren't apparent now, according to Smith. 'Most people today are talking about China displacing the United States as the great power of the 21st century,' he said in a telephone interview last week. 'My view is that it is more likely to end up like Japan - that is, the status of a former would-be superpower that isn't.'"

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "'I don’t see the lunacy I saw in the dot-com bubble,' said financial historian Richard Sylla of New York University’s Stern School of Business. 'Computer clicks are still important in our lives, but we don’t use the number of clicks to decide how promising a company is, as people did then. Investors are much more circumspect about thinking, is this thing really going to pay off?'"

Excerpt from The Washington Post -- "Alexander Ljungqvist, one of the authors of that study and an economist at New York University, said that investors are not necessarily at fault for the inertia at public firms. When the leadership of a publicly traded corporation becomes aware of a new opportunity to invest, they have to find a way to explain their plans to shareholders without divulging any sensitive information their competitors can use against them, he noted. That could be one reason why public firms hesitate to invest."

Excerpt from NBC -- "J.P. Eggers, an associate professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, compared the phenomenon to pop-up stores, increasingly popular in high-traffic areas where rents are high. A seasonal shop in a vacation location has little value once visitors go home, but real estate costs remain high for a store in a place like Brooklyn, he noted. 'The idea of leaving it with either no business because it’s closed or with a business that is just not going to make any money at that time of day or in that season just doesn’t make any sense,' he said. 'It’s far too valuable a property to do that.'"

Excerpt from Fortune -- "Last week, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) formalized the non-discrimination tradition on the Internet and preserved net neutrality. This is good news to ensure that the Internet remains a free market for innovation and provides consumers with unbiased choices when it comes to content."

Excerpt from Quartz -- "There is no such thing as a real conversation over email. Period. The back-and-forth of emails and text messages offer the appearance of intimacy. Unfortunately, it’s a false one, as Justin Kruger of New York University and Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago proved. The two psychologists showed that people could only accurately determine sentiment in text-based communications about half of the time."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "Thomas Philippon, a finance professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, is another academic who has studied the role of finance in the economy. In a November 2012 article in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Mr. Philippon and Ariell Reshef, an economist at the University of Virginia, reported on wages in the United States financial industry from 1909 to 2006. Among their findings: Finance accounted for 15 to 25 percent of the overall increase in wage inequality between 1980 and 2006."

Excerpt from Project Syndicate -- "Over time, of course, negative nominal and real returns may lead savers to save less and spend more. And that is precisely the goal of negative interest rates: In a world where supply outstrips demand and too much saving chases too few productive investments, the equilibrium interest rate is low, if not negative. Indeed, if the advanced economies were to suffer from secular stagnation, a world with negative interest rates on both short- and long-term bonds could become the new normal."

Excerpt from The Economist -- "A recent paper* by Uma Karmarkar of Harvard Business School and Bryan Bollinger of Duke Fuqua School of Business finds that shoppers who bring their own bags when they buy groceries like to reward themselves for it. For two years the authors tracked transactions at a supermarket in America. Perhaps unsurprisingly, shoppers who brought their own bags bought more green products than those who used the store’s bags. But the eco-shoppers were also more likely to buy sweets, ice cream and crisps."

Excerpt from Fox Business -- "When you're talking about economic growth, it is innovation that's the driver of that growth. So the way you increase growth, you have to have a vested increase in increasing the pace of innovation. And the way you increase the pace of innovation is increase the exchange of ideas - or between different industries. So, New York has a tremendous advantage because it's not just tech.... you know, fashion, media... it's all mixing of ideas."

Excerpt from Business News Network -- "I think that when we, nowadays, have so much electronic trading, and we have guidelines on what type of collaborations among competitors are allowed, having five competitors chatting live in a way that is not disclosed to the market on what the prices of gold, on which they have a variety of derivatives benchmarked on, and at the time when they themselves are trading for their clients and their own books, and nobody is monitoring... and ensuring that this process is robust, that is extremely problematic. It's very problematic also because we do see the patterns in the data."

Excerpt from HuffPost Live -- "I do think that there are some merits to allowing states to have a say in directing the flow of immigration because they understand local costs imposed by immigrants... and also the benefits. I think one advantage that the state-based visa would have, for example, over an employment-based visa is that the immigrants themselves would have more flexibility within the states. So they'd be able to work for any number of different employers. That would create a thicker labor market, which would, of course, benefit employers as well. So there would be a higher potential for good matches between employers and workers. In the existing system, if you take, for example, the H1B specialty employment visa, it ties a worker to one employer. So you don't have that kind of labor market flexibility, which is ultimately detrimental to the immigrant and the economy and the labor market."

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "'Something of this magnitude is rather unusual,' said Joshua Ronen, professor of accounting at New York University Stern School of Business and co-editor of the Journal of Law, Finance and Accounting."

Excerpt from The Guardian -- "In contrast, the Fair Labor Association launched its code alongside its charter. 'We realized we couldn’t just launch a set of principles,' Michael Posner, a former US assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor and head of New York University’s Center for Business and Human Rights, told me. 'It couldn’t just be that every company was "on a journey"; we needed metrics and ways to evaluate compliance.'"

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "Nicholas Economides, an economics professor at New York University, says paid prioritization would let ISPs pick the Internet’s winners, which would naturally be the richest players. 'In an industry with lots of change and innovation, there are big dangers of allowing only the people who can pay you today to win,' he said."

Excerpt from Luxury Daily -- "'Not all brands need be patrons of the arts but luxury brands most often are,' said Thomaï Serdari, Ph.D. brand strategist and adjunct professor of marketing at New York University, New York. 'Traditionally, luxury objects have been items of great craftsmanship and artistic intent, often made of the most precious and rare materials — in fact, most of the luxury objects produced in pre-modern times are housed in renowned museum collections today.'"

Excerpt from Forbes -- "The Harvard Business School Case, El Bulli: A Taste of Innovation, provides business lessons from the way Ferran Adria innovates (the Catalan chef, thought by many to be the most creative chef in history) and it truly changed my life. Ferran’s methods inspired both my book, Catalyzing Innovation and innovation program for global executives, Inventours™, and it made me far more observant of how others innovate across industries, wherever I go. Given how much I learned by studying Ferran, I thought learning how the best 'mixologists' innovate could yield similar insights, given the art and entertainment form inventive craft cocktails have become."

Excerpt from CKGSB Knowledge -- "[Economides's] models suggest that even small network effects can help a good company realize high profits, more sales and greater profits, and the stronger the effect, the more likely that the company will be able to achieve a monopoly position. 'If we have a network, we will see a lot of inequality among companies, which means that some people are going to make a lot of money,' he says."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "It's a great time to be a writer, someone who's trying to greenlight a script. There's going to be more original scripted series this year than, I think, in the history of television. It's just not a great time to be in the business of selling eyeballs on an ad-supported model. HBO, great business. Netflix, great business. Amazon media might be a great business. Trying to get a ton of people to show up and then selling commercials to beer companies, that's going to be a difficult business."

Excerpt from WIRED -- "'Having a greater business in Ireland would certainly help Apple make a case to the European Commission that a larger fraction of their operations are based in the country in which they have this tax deal,' says Arun Sundararajan, professor of information, operations, and management sciences at NYU’s Stern School of Business."