Experience Stern | News & Events

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."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- “'You can connect a brand to a product,' he said, 'but branding today is a lot more about emotional attachment.'”

Excerpt from The New Yorker -- "When you remind people that they’re deprived, they become drawn to whatever happens to be scarce nearby, as though possessing a scarce object corrects the imbalance. Of course, nature also plays a role in determining how people respond to scarcity, as do a number of other factors. Yet a lifetime of waiting also appears to teach you to snatch fleeting opportunities that other people might ignore."

Excerpt from Reuters -- "Nouriel Roubini, chairman of Roubini Global Economics and an economics professor at New York University's Stern School of Business said that at this stage, the sanctions lifted would not make a big difference. 'It will still be an economy severely constrained by the fact that most of the most important sanctions are still there and, rightly, the U.S. and great powers are cautious,' he said on the sidelines of a financial conference in Dubai."

Excerpt from NPR -- "Our thinking is that the countries who have a longer past are better able to see farther forward into the future and think about extending the time period that they've already been around into the distant future. And that might make them care a bit more about how environmental outcomes are going to play out down the line."

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "Transparency generally benefits employees and the company. Management sets norms and expectations through its actions. If management establishes a record of being fair and honest, and consistently shows consideration by sharing information, employees will respond in kind, exhibiting similar behaviours in dealings with suppliers, customers, co-workers, etc."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- “'There is a huge incentive for these banks to try and influence where the benchmark is set depending on their trading positions, and there is almost no scrutiny,' she said. Abrantes-Metz said the gold fix should be replaced with a benchmark calculated by taking a snapshot of trading in a market where $19.6 trillion of the precious metal circulated last year, according to CPM Group, a New York-based research company."

Excerpt from World Financial Review -- "In contrast to what you might think, discipline in the context of economic reform does not mean adopting harsh or extreme positions, such as insisting on fiscal austerity. Nor does it mean seizing on any one particular malady and demanding that it become the central focus of economic policy. Rather, discipline in this context means: a sustained commitment to a pragmatic growth strategy, executed with a combination of temperance, vigilance, and flexibility that values the long-term prosperity of the entire population over the short-term enrichment of any particular group of individuals."

Excerpt from Nightly Business Report -- "I think he's got the right portfolio of skills... he's been being groomed for a long period of time. They've gotten him into a number of different roles. They've had him in the international, they've had him in Sam's Club, he's been very involved in merchandising and store operations. As far as what they need to do, they really need to manage international growth effectively because they can very easily figure out how to fix things in same-store sales in the US, but figuring out how to open the new stores, get into those new countries and build up the new systems is a big piece of the plan going forward."

Excerpt from Lifehacker -- "The study, conducted by Gavin J. Kilduff of New York University and Adam D. Galinsky of Columbia University, found that people who were feeling happy after writing about a happy experience were rated higher by teammates than those who joined without being made to feel happy before introductions."

Excerpt from American Banker -- "No doubt the vast majority of bankers meet the implied fitness and properness requisites. But more than a few evidently do not. Taken together, the record suggests there's a significant subgroup that is attracted to the banking industry as a unique fast-track route to exceptional income and wealth, one that is rarely open to peers in engineering, medicine and (except for a infinitesimally small cohort) science and technology. Unlike these high-performance professions, some parts of banking have enabled large and immediate personal rewards that effectively derive from wealth-redistribution rather than wealth-creation."

Excerpt from Reuters -- “'I do think the system that (Mandis) suggested is pretty close to what they have at Goldman right now,' said Smith, a former Goldman Sachs partner himself, who cited that under the bank’s current compensation plan, partner-managing directors are paid a bonus amount equal to 1 percent of pre-tax earnings. In addition, should the bank suffer regulatory fines, they are also liable for part of the payment."

Excerpt from Pittsburgh-Tribune Review -- "Generally speaking, small businesses should be cognizant of what they do better than their competition whether it is other small businesses or large chains,' said Jason Greenberg, an assistant professor in New York University's Leonard N. Stern School of Business. 'This might include having a more convenient location, better service or a layout that is more intuitive and easier to navigate than competitors. It may also be the case that small businesses carry products that larger retailers do not.'”

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "Indeed, [the wealthy] even handled the crisis of 2008 somewhat worse than the average investor. That is the message from a study of the portfolios of 115 wealthy US households, with an average net worth of $90m, from 2000 to 2009, carried out by a group of academics including Enrichetta Ravina of Columbia Business School, Luis Viceira of Harvard University and Ingo Walter of New York University’s Stern School of Business."

Excerpt from Marketplace -- “'Some of these products, DVD players for $9.99, certain video games and so forth, those attract the right kind of people, so that’s where the competition is,' says Vishal Singh, marketing professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Singh says shopper data show people pick up other things along with those video games, making up for the markdowns. Price combat takes a toll on companies. But there’s a key difference from real war. Civilian bystanders in price wars do well."