Experience Stern | News & Events

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "A paper by two economists, Xavier Gabaix of New York University and David Laibson of Harvard, provides an explanation. When people are choosing a product or service, they don’t pay close attention to all of its features. When I signed up for cable, I wasn’t thinking about the headaches of canceling down the road."

Excerpt from Motley Fool -- "After analyzing the universe of stocks that traded publicly for at least 30 years between 1926 and 2011, the authors concluded that Berkshire Hathaway, under Buffett's stewardship, had the highest Sharpe ratio (which measures risk-adjusted performance) of them all. On top of this, the authors found that Buffett had a higher Sharpe ratio than 'all U.S. mutual funds that have been around for more than 30 years.'"

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- “'Buffett’s performance appears not to be luck, but an expression that value and quality investing can be implemented,' said Andrea Frazzini and David Kabiller of AQR Capital Management LLC and Lasse H. Pedersen of Copenhagen Business School. 'If you travel back in time and pick one stock in 1976, Berkshire would be your pick.'”

"Many of the problems with low wages and poor working conditions stem from the purchasing practices of global retailers. But too often, efforts to solve the problem focus on noncompliant factories and an endless cycle of inspections. The H&M announcement is another acknowledgement that the supply chain operations of global retailers are perhaps the most important place to look for improvements in wages and working conditions."

Excerpt from TIME -- “'Our lives are circumscribed by our everyday circumstances,' says Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist and ethicist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. 'When bad things happen, we want to know about them. This is why people rubberneck at traffic accidents.'”

Excerpt from Bloomberg TV -- "Right now, the American economy is growing at, let's call it 2%, its potential is probably 3.5. It's all private sector. The economy's flexible, dynamic and restructuring, but the thing is still fiscally constrained, although I think the fiscal drag is coming off. And on a longer-term basis, the American economy, the American government, has been under-investing. Governments make complimentary investments in human capital and infrastructure and things like that in all economies, including developing ones, and we're under-investing. So as long as we continue that pattern, I think the growth will be below the potential and it's very hard to break that pattern when you've got high unemployment and people who are feeling stressed."

Excerpt from The Huffington Post -- "Some may believe I am obsessed with collaboration. In my work and in my life I encourage CEOs, companies, organizations and individuals to come together to collaborate for the best results. Books like Co-opetition (Adam Brandenburger) and The Death of Competition (James F. Moore), as well as my own book Link Out report that when competitors work together, innovation results."

Excerpt from Business News Network -- "[The foreign exchange market] is pretty much an unregulated market for the most part. There are some national regulations, but if you ask who is the global policeman for the foreign exchange market, there is none. So this is the problem -- I think this is the same problem, or a similar problem, in the case of the LIBOR scandal. There is no clear policeman, although, nominally, the Bank of England and other British regulators, UK regulators, have been in charge, but they haven't really been following the details. So there is really no one in charge."

Excerpt from Forbes -- "Employers often complain that it’s tough to find qualified candidates not simply because there’s a lack of degrees, but because many jobs now require a hybrid mix of higher-order skills – even in areas that didn’t always require them years ago. As Ferguson, Hitt, and Tambe found in a big data study for The Talent Equation, just a small increase in the number of employees with college degrees in certain areas can have a considerable return on investment."

Excerpt from The Weather Channel -- "'Our research suggests to rely less on end-of-world scenarios and to emphasize instead the various ways in which our country – and our planet – has a rich and long history that deserves to be preserved,' said NYU Stern researcher Hal Hershfield, Ph.D., in a press release. 'By highlighting the shadow of the past, we may actually help illuminate the path to an environmentally sustainable future.'"

Excerpt from Bloomberg TV -- "The top 20% of income-earning households control 80% of the wealth. And, effectively, Apple controls those people from a technology standpoint. So while everyone's talking about Apple pricing too high and how Android has taken a ton of market share away, the reality is almost everyone that matters, at least economically, is carrying an Apple product. And also, moving to the tablet, three-quarters of the sales done off the iOS platform were done off of tablets, specifically Apple tablets."

Excerpt from Barron's -- "'What we are witnessing in many countries looks like a slow-motion replay of the last housing-market train wreck,' Roubini concludes. 'And, like last time, the bigger the bubbles become, the nastier the collision with reality will be..'"

Excerpt from Business Insider -- "'Indeed, a new NBER paper via Counterparties shows that 'Buffett's returns appear to be neither luck nor magic, but, rather, reward for the use of leverage [combined] with a focus on cheap, safe, quality stocks.' In other words, he buys boring stocks that offer steady, low returns, but he amplifies those returns by betting with borrowed money. 'We estimate that Buffett's leverage is about 1.6-to-1 on average,' write authors Andrea Frazzini, David Kabiller and Lasse H. Pedersen."

Excerpt from Strategy + Business -- "As Nobel prize–winning economist A. Michael Spence pointed out in his book The Next Convergence: The Future of Economic Growth in a Multispeed World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)—selected by strategy+business as one of the best business books of 2011—we are living in the middle of a century-long journey during which the rest of the world will catch up with the developed economies of the West."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "Putting sell ratings on stocks can make an analyst's job tougher, said Aswath Damodaran, professor of finance at NYU's Leonard N. Stern School of Business. 'You're given this small group of companies to track, and the very little edge you have comes from the access you have to the company,' he said. 'If you put a sell recommendation on the stock, you're burning bridges.'"

Excerpt from Forbes India -- "China is the second-largest economy in the world. Chinese companies are becoming larger so it’s only natural that they would want to expand out of the country. It’s a process of evolution. But there is a major challenge in going from a domestic market to an international market. The domestic market has a lot of fixed variables such as government policies and economic policies for competition. But when you globalize, you have to get used to the dynamics of the global marketplace, a lot of moving parts, and it’s very hard to do that."

Excerpt from Financial News -- "Libor rate-setting rules are being revised, as they should be. The FX investigation may discover individuals that need to be punished, and maybe some market conduct rules that should be changed. But that does not mean that the FX investigations should be allowed to turn into another instance of vengeance against banks to be settled by a round of multibillion-dollar fines paid by their shareholders."

Excerpt from Association for Computing Machinery -- "Data science might therefore imply a focus involving data and, by extension, statistics, or the systematic study of the organization, properties, and analysis of data and its role in inference, including our confidence in the inference. Why then do we need a new term like data science when we have had statistics for centuries? The fact that we now have huge amounts of data should not in and of itself justify the need for a new term. The short answer is data science is different from statistics and other existing disciplines in several important ways."

Excerpt from International Monetary Fund -- “'There is a whole host of problems that are fundamentally global in nature, but that require the additional tools of business to be applied with a broader lens,' Henry says. 'What role does finance play in helping us figure out how to allocate capital efficiently around the world? What role does marketing play in helping us think about how we reach poor consumers through digital media? How do we think about luxury consumers as not just high-income people in the United States and Europe, but also newly salaried female entrepreneurs in Nigeria and Indonesia?'”

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "We all value freedom. But while classical economics encourages the complaint that safety regulations violate workers’ freedom, that complaint is misguided. It is little different from complaining that helmet rules violate athletes’ freedom. Of course they do — but with athletes as with workers, that’s precisely what people wanted."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- [Speaking of direct investing] "'You have to ask yourself, "Do I want to be a mini venture-capital firm?" and if the answer is no, then you're biting off more than you can chew,' says Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at New York University."

Excerpt from Project Syndicate -- "Signs that home prices are entering bubble territory in these economies include fast-rising home prices, high and rising price-to-income ratios, and high levels of mortgage debt as a share of household debt. In most advanced economies, bubbles are being inflated by very low short- and long-term interest rates. Given anemic GDP growth, high unemployment, and low inflation, the wall of liquidity generated by conventional and unconventional monetary easing is driving up asset prices, starting with home prices."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "Silber’s account of Volcker’s indispensable role in economic history shows how he retained his integrity in the face of relentless political pressure."

Excerpt from CFO -- "In a 2010 study of risk management, Aswath Damodaran, a professor of finance at New York University’s Stern School of Business, breaks risk down into three categories: risks that firms can pass through to investors, risks they can avoid or hedge, and risks they can exploit more effectively than their competitors can. 'Successful firms, over time, can attribute their successes not to avoiding risk but to seeking out and taking the ‘right risks,’ writes Damodaran."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "Perhaps the marriage was doomed from the start. The partners had marriage rings  —  a common currency  —  but they did not have the common values of marital behavior. Historically, successful monetary unions also include a banking union with common deposit insurance and rules for bailing out banks; a fiscal union in which rich regions transfer resources to poor ones and where revenue and spending are pooled; an economic union with a single market, with policies in place to ensure convergence of economic growth rates; and a political union to give democratic legitimacy to the central fiscal and economic management."