Experience Stern | News & Events

Excerpt from Fast Company Co.Exist -- "Lisa Leslie, an associate professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business who has studied workplace inequalities, says the EDGE approach could be help companies be proactive about not just putting a gender equality policy in place but making sure it's effective. Often, she notes, well-meaning policies have 'backlash effects.' She gives the example of a company where none of upper management will take advantage of flexible work hours, sending the signal that lower level employees will be penalized for using them. Or a policy can even have stigmatizing effects, if, say, co-workers believe that women or minorities in leadership are promoted because of who they are, rather than their merits."

Excerpt from CNBC -- "I'm not getting a piece of a company,' [Damodaran] said. 'I'm getting a piece of a shell that owns a company where a politburo, basically, sets the board of directors. And if you're a trader, you really don't care. I mean, you're going to be out in six months or three months. What do you care that Jack Ma has power for life? The way I see it, traders date companies, investors marry companies. If you marry a company, you've got to be in here for the long term, and it scares the heck of me that I have absolutely no power over how this company will be run, or what can happen in the future.'"

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "The tendency of banks to rely on each other to net positions means one firm’s failure can cascade through the system. The danger that one party can’t hold up its end of the deal is known as counterparty risk. It means even if positions are netted, every trade adds risk unless it’s fully backed by collateral, said Marti Subrahmanyam, a finance professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business."

Excerpt from CCTV -- "I don't think it's a surprise, but it seems like the Fed is trying to reassure the market that nothing radical is going to happen quickly, but at the same time be firm that there is going to be a change. My feeling about this is that this change, this increase in interest rates, is going to happen faster rather than later... I would expect it to happen in the first few months of 2015, but of course people can disagree on that, and it remains to be seen."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "According to the study, commuters purchased 2.1% of the deals when the train was at two people per square meter, for example, versus 4.3% at five people per square meter. A stuffy train, the study concludes, can effectively send commuters into the hands of brands.'This was the mechanism to cope with the loss of personal space in a crowded situation,' said Anindya Ghose, co-director of Stern’s Center for Business Analytics and co-author of the paper. 'Commuters essentially escape from all of this by going to the personal mobile space.'"

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "Here is a very thoughtful Aswath Damodaran post on the value to shareholders of corporate governance, reviewing both the theory and the evidence: 'Proponents of stronger corporate governance argue that it critical to corporate performance, but the evidence of the link between the two is not very strong.'"

Excerpt from Vox -- "The problem with shadow banking then is that while it makes the good times better, it also makes the bad times worse. In the language of economics, shadow banking imposes a negative externality on the rest of the economy. During the boom, individual institutions have little incentive to take into account the impact of their actions on the severity of the bust. Shadow banking allows them to fund riskier assets more cheaply, but doing so decreases the economy’s supply of good collateral when times get rough."

Excerpt from MarketWatch -- "'They will be experimenting with new tools. Any time you do that, there are uncertainties and there are risks. We expect them to be able to manage it, but it could be a bumpy ride,' said Kim Schoenholtz, a professor in New York University’s Stern School of Business."

Excerpt from Quartz -- "'For better or worse, bankers are not feted for getting the price right but for getting it wrong, albeit in one direction and not by too much,' Aswath Damodaran, a professor of finance at New York University, blogged earlier this month. A well priced IPO is one where the stock jumps 5% to 10% on the first day of trading, Damodaran wrote."

Excerpt from PBS -- "Jonathan Haidt’s metaphor of the elephant and the rider is useful here. In Haidt’s telling, the mind is like an elephant (the emotions) with a rider (the intellect) on top. The rider can see and plan ahead, but the elephant is far more powerful. Sometimes the rider and the elephant work together (the ideal in classroom settings), but if they conflict, the elephant usually wins. After reading Haidt, I’ve stopped thinking of students as people who simply make choices about whether to pay attention, and started thinking of them as people trying to pay attention but having to compete with various influences, the largest of which is their own propensity towards involuntary and emotional reaction. (This is even harder for young people, the elephant so strong, the rider still a novice.)"

Excerpt from City AM -- "After analysing every Formula 1 driver in all races between 1981 and 2010, research led by Cass Business School found that individual driver performance declined in teams with two top ranking drivers. In other words, hiring too many stars can take the shine off performance."

Excerpt from Business Insider -- "Professor Damodaran is known for his genius valuations. Catch some of that insight outside the classroom."

Excerpt from Pivot -- "I can see a couple of industries being potentially threatened in the near term. I certainly think that commercial real estate is going to be increasingly threatened. There’s already been a threat stemming from the popularity of co-working, but this is definitely an important industry that hasn’t yet been affected substantially by the sharing economy in the same way that hotels have been affected by Airbnb. That’s certainly a place that I’m looking to as one that is ripe for disruption."

Excerpt from Forbes -- "'Gamification' uses characteristics like challenges, rewards, competitions, and moving to the next level based on performance skills or luck, in non-game contexts. It’s often accompanied by progress tracking metrics. The objectives are to engage users and change their behaviors in ways brands and organizations want. The extremely broad and expanding range of ways gamification has been successfully utilized in recent years provides insights into other ways the tactic can achieve strategic objectives."

Excerpt from Barron's -- "'The Fed can raise rates gradually, and it doesn't have to be bad for the market,' says New York University financial historian Richard Sylla."

Excerpt from The Economist -- "Republicans and Democrats do have different shopping habits, observes Vishal Singh, an academic who studies marketing at NYU Stern. Republicans tend to drink more American beers; Democrats more foreign and craft brews. In Republican-voting districts Cracker Barrel, a southern-themed restaurant, is common; upscale Whole Foods shops cluster in Democratic areas. But this mostly reflects the different lives Democrats and Republicans lead. Southern food is popular, unsurprisingly, in the South, which is heavily Republican. Costly groceries are popular with affluent urbanites, who tend to be Democrats."

Excerpt from The Economist -- "Even if the most extravagant boast about buy-backs—that firms can use them to create value through market timing—is flaky, they can still be a flexible cash-management tool. Aswath Damodaran of the Stern School of Business at New York University explains that they let firms vary their cash returns to shareholders as their profits oscillate. He sees dividends as a throwback to the 19th century, when investors insisted on bond-like payments."

Excerpt from Marketplace -- "'Cost reduction. It’s the economics,' says Ed Glickman, executive director of the Center for Real Estate Finance Research at the NYU Stern School of Business. He says co-workers tend to be young and live in expensive cities like New York or Seattle. For the renter out of home desk-space, co-working can literally pay off. 'All of the sudden not only do you have company, you have somebody who might give you connections but you also have a way to help you pay your rent,' he says."

Excerpt from WIRED -- "'This kind of technology could be used to see how communities respond to sociologically relevant events like a terrorist attack, a basketball victory, or extreme weather—all things that seem to pull people together,' Haidt said. For example, he says, New Yorkers often say people were nicer to each other in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. 'If you’re tracking people over time, it would be interesting to see if people do more nice things for each other, if they’re more trusting and cooperative, when the local team wins. If there’s a threat, does everyone band together, or do people band together along ethnic lines or lines of similarity?'"

Excerpt from Bloomberg Businessweek -- "Paul Romer, who runs the Urbanization Project at New York University’s Stern School of Business, argues that instead of complaining about London, other U.K. cities should stop restricting real estate development, which drives up housing costs and stunts their growth."

Excerpt from Forbes -- "Does retail therapy remind people of their shortcomings, distract them from cognitive tasks and break down their self-control? The paper suggests that all of those things happen, unless someone tells the person that he made a smart choice in getting the product he hoped would make him more competent."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "Britain has one of most streamlined systems on the planet, said Kermit Schoenholtz, Mr. Cecchetti's blogging partner and an economist at New York University's Stern School of Business. 'We have one of the most chaotic.'"

Excerpt from The Huffington Post -- "And when, in addition, these corporate actions are praised, and are described as what American companies should do, or even must do, people begin to wonder if something is seriously wrong--and they are right to wonder. Inversions may or may not be important in themselves, but understanding the forces that drive corporate inversions reveals a surprising amount about the cause of two major problems; the problem of extreme income inequality and the problem of stagnating wages in America."

Excerpt from Fox Business -- "'A low sense of power makes people feel less confident and optimistic, meaning that employees will be less likely to believe that speaking up will make a difference,' Elizabeth Morrison, one of the study's authors and a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, told Business News Daily. 'This feeling of "why bother?" has been found to be a strong inhibitor to speaking up.'"

Excerpt from NBC News -- "'Many people don’t want to feel like they have been left behind,' said Russ Winer, professor of marketing at the NYU Stern School of Business. 'If you’re with out with someone and they pop out a flip phone, someone is bound to make a joke about it.'"