Experience Stern | News & Events

Excerpt from NPR -- "'The idea that things are built on top of government infrastructure or are taking advantage of public resources for profit isn't anything new,' he says. 'A lot of the capitalist economy is built on government infrastructure.' Telephone carriers and private garages build their businesses on top of public resources. If a mobile app can efficiently transfer something as small as a parking spot, Sundararajan says, that's innovation."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "The increase could also be the result of interest in the auction itself, said David L. Yermack, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. 'Just the fact that there was such broad demand would tend to push up the value of Bitcoin,' he said."

Excerpt from Harvard Business Review -- "Much of my investigation centered on flat-panel computer displays. I examined company and product data for 55 firms from the 1980s through the 2000s. Initially, companies pursued either plasma screens or liquid crystal displays. LCDs turned out to be the right call, but several firms with an early focus on plasma, including IBM, ended up as the top LCD performers. Why? I believe that switching to a new technology often forces companies to rapidly ascend a steep learning curve, and they can then use their knowledge to beat competitors whose learning proceeded more slowly."

Excerpt from Foreign Affairs -- "Recent advances in technology have created an increasingly unified global marketplace for labor and capital. The ability of both to flow to their highest-value uses, regardless of their location, is equalizing their prices across the globe. In recent years, this broad factor-price equalization has benefited nations with abundant low-cost labor and those with access to cheap capital. Some have argued that the current era of rapid technological progress serves labor, and some have argued that it serves capital. What both camps have slighted is the fact that technology is not only integrating existing sources of labor and capital but also creating new ones."

Excerpt from The Huffington Post -- "In an interview to the New Yorker, Professor Arun Sundararajan of N.Y.U's Stern School of Business shared that 'there's a mind-set that consumers are doing this just to save money, but I think that what's really compelling about the sharing economy is the variety and expansion of choices that it offers. Instead of being tied to owning one car, I can drive twenty different ones. So I expect this will expand consumption, rather than shrink it.'"

Excerpt from Project Syndicate -- "Like individuals, corporations, and other private firms that rely on bankruptcy procedures to reduce an excessive debt burden, countries sometimes need orderly debt restructuring or reduction. But the ongoing legal saga of Argentina’s fight with holdout creditors shows that the international system for orderly sovereign-debt restructuring may be broken."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "While this hypothetical trek is obviously an exaggeration, the NBER report shows there is often bad news on the way from companies which schedule shareholder meetings far from their headquarters and major airports. Their share prices tend to suffer afterward, according to the paper 'Evasive Shareholder Meetings' by Yuanzhi Li of Temple University and David Yermack of New York University that was highlighted in the July issue of the NBER Digest."

Excerpt from ECNS -- "'If growth dips below 7 percent, the markets will be a little scared, but the reason is either they don't have the information or they don't process it to be able to tell whether it's a transition or a trend. 'A trend means the economy keeps going down. A transition means it's a low, and growth will return with a more sustainable pattern,' Spence said during an interview on the sidelines of the Jinjialing Fortune Forum 2014 held in Qingdao, Shandong province, on June 21."
 

Excerpt from Marketplace -- "In order to draw people to the site, Yahoo needs strong, unique content – different from what Netflix or Hulu is offering, says Sam Craig, a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business. 'It’s a crowded marketplace out there and unless you have something with an identity, people aren’t going to come to it,' he explains."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "Technically, without the poison pill, if he can find a way to get himself back in a controlling share, he can find a way to get back in. Obviously, the fact that this has been one of the most entrenched CEOs in US corporate history who was actually ousted by his board full of friends suggests there's no way they're going to let that happen without a very serious fight at this point in time."
 

Excerpt from Cosmopolitan -- "Economists call it the denomination effect: When you have small bills, you're more apt to spend them on little stuff. On the other hand, you wouldn't break a $50 or a $100 bill to buy a pack of gum or a soda."

Excerpt from Charlie Rose -- “Our point is that this situation is one that is not a stable equilibrium, is not even a stable disequilibrium. It’s an unstable disequilibrium. Take for example the eurozone. You cannot have just a monetary union without banking, political, economic, fiscal union. Either you move towards more integration or you’re going to have more fragmentation and disintegration. So the situation we face right now in the global economy, same in the eurozone, is of an unstable disequilibrium, therefore a new abnormal, that cannot be sustained.”

Excerpt from The Villager -- "Affordable housing’s presence in the same building would not likely affect the ability of a condo buyer to secure a mortgage, according to Lawrence J. White, an N.Y.U. economics professor and expert on the mortgage industry. 'It seems odd that Fannie would not buy an individual mortgage loan from an originator by an otherwise perfectly suitable borrower who had all the requisite conditions,' he said in a phone interview."

Excerpt from LinkedIn -- "Finance professor David Yermack demonstrated that firm performance suffers when CEOs have access to a corporate jet for personal travel. Guess who uses that privilege most often? CEOs with membership in exclusive golf clubs far from their homes."

Excerpt from New York Magazine -- "Kilduff has found that rivalry increases both effort and performance. An analysis of competitive runners showed that they shaved more than four seconds per kilometer off their times when a rival was in the same race. In another study, Kilduff and colleagues found that NCAA basketball teams play stronger defense — a good measure of hustle — when competing against rivals."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "'Either this was a very clever piece of disinformation or a very careless error by the government. It’s a little hard to know which from a distance,' David L. Yermack, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, said of the leak. 'You want to create the illusion that there’s immense demand for this if you’re the government because you want people to bid as much as they’re willing to.'"

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "The U.S. prosecution of a major international bank for evading sanctions has changed the game. BNP allegedly stripped out identifying information from wire transfers to disguise sanctioned countries as origins or destinations of international payments. By raising the cost of violating the rules to significant levels, the Justice Department has ensured that U.S. sanctions will be complied with and effective."

Excerpt from Scientific American -- "In Melissa Schilling’s network model of cognitive insight, insight can be viewed as the emergence of clarity among a tangled web of thoughts and ideas. According to Schilling, cognitive insight occurs when an atypical association is made, resulting in a shortcut in a person’s network of semantic representations. Insight affects the organization of the entire network, causing a decrease in path length, a new perspective on the entire network, and a cascade of other connections to come online."

Excerpt from Harvard Business Review -- "As many as one-fourth of all mergers and acquisitions of public companies in the U.S. appear to be the targets of undetected insider trading by investors with advance knowledge, according to a New York Times report on research by Menachem Brenner and Marti G. Subrahmanyam of New York University and Patrick Augustin of McGill University. The researchers discovered the instances of what they call 'informed trading' through a statistical analysis of stock-option movements; fewer than 5% of the deals became the subject of Securities and Exchange Commission litigation over insider trading."

Excerpt from Forbes -- "One of the very best forms of stimuli comes from looking at other industries for ideas, relevant analogies, and problem solving. The trickiest part is to figure out which industries to benchmark. That, in itself, requires brainstorming sessions."

Excerpt from Scientific American -- "That music can move us is no surprise; it’s the point of the art form, after all. What’s new here is the manner in which the researchers have quantified in fine-grained detail the cognitive ramifications of unpacked melodic compounds. This investigation of music’s building blocks may be more relevant than you suppose. Nowadays, experts in the production room can hone a track—the timbre, tone, rhythm, phrasing—with digital precision. These songwriters and producers are the true geniuses behind the success of popular music today, and they seem to have an intuitive grasp of the phenomena underlying the findings of this psychology article. An extra breath-sound here, a pitch adjustment there—these additives pepper the songs we hear on the radio. So the next time you hear a piece of music from the Billboard Top 40, it may be interesting to wonder, how many components were manipulated just so, in order to change the way I think?"

Excerpt from Marketplace -- "The argument going back 80 years ago was that this kind of financing would not otherwise have been available. So this is an area of market failure, as economists say. That's a much less compelling argument in the 21st century. Financial markets are extraordinarily sophisticated and could probably step in, so it's harder to make a case that the government has got to step in."

Excerpt from CNBC -- "We believe that trading based on inside information has negative externalities for the market as a whole and should be illegal, as it is, in many countries. Our study raises a red flag regarding activity in one area of the market, and hence, it may be worth paying more attention to the activity in the options market ahead of important corporate announcements. Does this evidence suggest that the U.S. stock markets are rigged? We do not believe so. There is possibly some rogue trading, but it does not necessarily have a major impact on M&A activity, and certainly not on the market as a whole."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "'While the SEC has taken action in several cases where the evidence was overwhelming, one can assume that there are many more cases that go undetected, or where the evidence isn't as clear-cut,' authors of the Stern School/McGill study wrote."

Excerpt from VoxEU -- "Many important policy decisions require a consideration of costs and benefits that arise in the distant future. For example, many of the costs of climate change occur 100 or more years from now, yet actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions have to be taken today to avert those long-run costs. In recent weeks, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change mitigation report, or UN climate change report, presented and discussed different options for reducing such emissions, but contended that 'most mitigation strategies have costs in the present and yield benefits in the future. Policy making involves assessing the values of these benefits and costs and weighing them against each other.'"