Experience Stern | News & Events

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "'Steady incomes and a social safety net are characteristics of a healthy economy which has moved past simply getting people to work for a living to creating a higher quality of existence,' says Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New York University’s Stern School. 'I worry that this could slip away.'"

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "Aswath Damodaran, a professor at N.Y.U.'s Stern School of Business, has long argued about the danger of companies that try to return to the growth stage of their life cycle. These technology companies, he said, are run by people afflicted with something he calls the Steve Jobs syndrome. 'We have created an incentive structure where C.E.O.s want to be stars,' Damodaran explained. 'To be a star, you’ve got to be the next Steve Jobs — somebody who has actually grown a company to be a massive, large-market cap company.' But, he went on, 'it’s extremely dangerous at companies when you focus on the exception rather than the rule.'"

Excerpt from San Francisco Chronicle -- "'They’re investing in Uber basically because of greed,' he said. 'They don’t want to be left out of the next Facebook. I don’t think deep thinking is going on; they want to be in this game because everyone else is.'"

Excerpt from WIRED -- "'The space that Peers has entered—providing the safety net for the providers of the sharing economy—is potentially huge, and really important,' says NYU Stern professor Arun Sundararajan, who has been studying the economic impact of the sharing economy and, full disclosure, is currently working on a research project with Peers."

Excerpt from CCTV -- "We don't know how this election is going to go. If not enough people vote for the president, and he needs a 60% majority in Parliament, then we will have elections and we'll see who wins. It's possible that the left wins and then we will have a serious problem. So, it's possible. It's not out of the question at all."

Excerpt from LinkedIn -- "After a stunning currency collapse, Russia is now fully in the grips of an economic crisis. How deep is the chaos? Here are five stats that put Russia’s woes in context."

Excerpt from Financial Express -- "Don’t fall for the hype from managers and analysts. Be wary of macro stories. Weigh the company’s competitive advantages and whether they are sustainable. Also, focus not only on the promising company but on how competition, customers and the market is changing."

Excerpt from American Banker -- "The proliferation of settlements in an array of financial markets in recent years makes it clear that banks must show they have made credible and persistent efforts to keep their people in line. They must be able to demonstrate that they have organized themselves into proactively watchful and compliant organizations, with thousands of middle managers who are well trained, motivated and rewarded for spotting and fixing trouble before it happens. This functional approach to controlling behavior is the essence of the much-discussed cultural issue in banks."

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "Relative share price movements also contain useful information. Viral Acharya and his colleagues at NYU’s Volatility Institute have convincingly argued that the extent to which a given bank’s share price falls on days when the broader stock market declines is a decent proxy for the riskiness of the bank’s specific business model and mix of assets. On down days, safer banks should fall less than fragile ones."

Excerpt from TechCrunch -- "'Uber is [among] the first real-world disruption with digital technology,' [Sundararajan] said. He contrasts this with Facebook, Google and Twitter which weren’t directly upending any existing business model the way Uber is. He points out the employees at all of these companies come from the same talent pool, but Uber must deal with a lot of different issues as it establishes itself because it’s taking on an existing business."
 

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "My advice in terms of long-term investing is still to try to have an allocation of your assets in various parts of the world... Trying to predict and buy stocks in companies that have a good long-range future is going to be much harder because the companies come and go. Investing in technology companies would look like an obvious thing to do, but they are not investments that you can make with the confidence that they'll be good for five or ten years."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "Social targeting was supposed to replace demographic targeting, but that has not happened. Social media is just another media platform. It’s not re-shaping the business the way we thought it would."
 

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "China has a banking sector which is in need of a lot of help. If you think about what we worry about in the US, we worry about our banks being too big to fail. But in China, the banks are already state owned. There is no possibility that they will fail... The Volatility Institute that I run has now set up a branch in Shanghai called The Volatility Institute at NYU Shanghai. We have translated the whole website into Chinese. It's got loads of Chinese assets in it and it's getting a lot of attention. And it talks about which are the weak banks in China and what could be done."

Excerpt from The Australian -- "Michael Posner, a former State Department human rights official in Barack Obama’s first term, said the detailed accounts of physical and emotional abuse inflicted on prisoners by the CIA would have 'longstanding consequences in terms of reinforcing the need for oversight of the intelligence agencies'."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "Working with University College London economist Áureo de Paula and New York University economist Vishal Singh, Mr. Hong used the Homescan data to examine another bubble, in rice. This started in late 2007 when India, worried about food security, banned rice exports. Fears of shortages emerged and panic buying ensued. The U.S. didn’t face a rice shortage, but prices still shot higher, and people started to hoard. Costco Wholesale and Sam’s Club even started rationing bulk purchases."

Excerpt from The Economist -- "The most elegant solution comes from Joshua Ronen, a professor at New York University. He suggests 'financial statements insurance', in which firms would buy coverage to protect shareholders against losses from accounting errors, and insurers would then hire auditors to assess the odds of a mis-statement. The proposal neatly aligns the incentives of auditors and shareholders—an insurer would probably offer generous bonuses for discovering fraud. Unfortunately, no insurer has offered such coverage voluntarily. New regulation may be needed to encourage it."

Excerpt from The Huffington Post -- "There is now a strong literature suggesting that at some point, finance largely becomes extractive, while remaining at the same efficiency level. Thomas Philippon finds that the cost of financial intermediation has not fallen in 30 years."

Excerpt from Marketplace -- "While many Americans have stabilized their balance sheets, Thomas Cooley, a business professor at NYU’s Stern School, said young people have staggered under the weight of growing student debt. 'That’s a constraining factor in their ability to and their willingness to take on mortgage debt and more auto loan debt and so on,' he said."

Excerpt from Forbes -- "NYU Stern School of Business professor and sharing economy expert Arun Sundararajan explains the importance of this trend, 'As the scale of peer-to-peer expands. . . society needs new ways of keeping consumers safe and of protecting workers. . . Governments need to understand and embrace this ongoing transition rather than impeding it, realizing that society’s interests are best served if they wield regulatory power to proactively partner with or delegate responsibility to the platforms.'"

Excerpt from CNBC -- "For firms like Facebook, China presents two risks. First, not only does the Chinese market remain a very difficult one to crack, but favoritism toward domestic firms could quickly reappear if the firm is too successful... Second, in answering the siren call of 1.3 billion potential users, the firm risks alienating its global user base."

Excerpt from MSNBC -- "'Increasingly, platforms like these are going to be the source of creating new work,' which could create tension between states or cities with tougher or looser regulations, Sundararajan said. 'It will be a conversation of "do we want to constrain the platforms in the interest of consumer protection or do we want them to let them flourish in the interest of work creation?"'"

Excerpt from LinkedIn -- "But last night, I was reading an enlightening book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haidt. I thought the book was about the politics of the left and right, but it’s more about how we make any type of important life decisions. From a hiring perspective, the big 'aha' moment for me was that people are programmed to make instantaneous intuitive judgments for just about everything and then look for evidence to justify them. According to Haidt and his years of research, it’s at the core of our evolutionary human nature. Given the fact that intuition drives reasoning, I offer the following techniques for preventing bad hiring decisions due to the impact of first impressions."

Excerpt from Salt Lake Tribune -- "The desire for parking in a private garage or driveway appears to trump other so-called 'smart growth' choices, putting residents of the wider Salt Lake Valley at odds with urban land-use trends now gaining national popularity. Smart growth strategies include higher density development, reduced use of land and water, neighborhood designs that encourage walkability and access to public transit."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "The austerity measures worked. In fact, Greece has a balanced budget. It even has a surplus, so that worked very well. The real problem is that people are very unhappy that their incomes have declined. There is a five-year recession and there is a lot of support for an opposition party, which, given the intricacies of the parliamentary system in Greece, might have a chance to be elected in March or so. And that has, of course, slumped the market because that left-wing party doesn't have any reasonable policies."

Excerpt from Forbes -- "The Google/Luxottica partnership is a brilliant one. Google glasses speak to technology but not fashion and Luxottica’s brands speak to fashion and not tech. The partnership will result in attractive Google glasses that could be purchased based on looks alone, and the cutting edge technology can give Luxottica brands a reason for purchase that justifies a premium price. Luxottica’s glasses are increasingly being undercut on price by retailers such as Costco, TJ Maxx and Warby Parker."