Experience Stern | News & Events

Excerpt from CNNMoney -- "Aswath Damodaran, a professor of finance at NYU, thinks Congress's latest deliberations over the debt ceiling didn't change anything for the dollar or U.S. bonds."

Excerpt from Project Syndicate -- "The global economy faces tremendous trials in the coming years: growth, employment, and distributional challenges in many advanced and developing countries; far-reaching institutional reform in Europe; the complex middle-income transition in China; and the continuing need to reduce poverty worldwide. Managing them effectively requires designing a system of global governance in which one country’s internal politics cannot jeopardize all countries’ prospects."

Excerpt from AP TV -- "If it just kicks the problem down the road a week, that's a little bit of a relief, but at least we didn't go over the cliff this week, but gee, now we have to worry about next week."

Excerpt from Stern Opportunity -- "Will universities fight or embrace the sea change coming to higher education? I hope they will embrace the change. Of course, the skeptic will say: 'Wouldn’t universities, in this case, be acting against their own self-interest?' I think not. It is surely the smart bet to be a part of a revolution that will bring affordable education to more and more of the planet. Opportunities to make a living from such a grand enterprise will surely emerge – and it will surely be much harder to take advantage of these opportunities from the sidelines."

Excerpt from CNBC -- "Here's what I think is the key thing. Angela Ahrendts has always been ahead of the curve in redefining things. She took Burberry from a $2 billion market capitalization company to a $7 billion market capitalization company through innovation. And so I think you have to assume that somebody as smart as she is knows what she's doing this and in her view is a new challenge. She's breaking the mold yet again."

Excerpt from VentureBeat -- “[The layer design] is not confusing. We all now expect bright colors. We are increasingly addicted to more stimulation, gradation, nuances. Everything has temporariness to it, short shelf life. We’re not looking for anything fixed [or] stable. We came to terms with instability… [It feels like] sometimes it’s there, sometimes not. It’s not committed. It’s reflective of the times.”

Excerpt from Institute for New Economic Thinking -- "If Congress and the White House fail to raise the debt ceiling this week and the United States defaults on its debt, what can we expect and how can we protect ourselves against these events?"

Excerpt from Bloomberg TV -- "In developed markets, who drives luxury? Affluent people. In emerging markets, it's actually middle-class consumers. The average luxury consumer in the U.S. has $175,000 in income, she's 53 and it is a she. She spends $3,000 a year on handbags. The average luxury consumer in China makes $17,000, is 33 and spends $2,000 on handbags. The emerging middle class in these developing markets loves luxury."

Excerpt from Crain's New York -- "'The role of elite business schools should be to identify those big issues that have material relevance in the world,' said Mr. Henry, 44. 'If you have a deep interest in finance, we can make you a far more effective allocator of capital and a more impactful professional.'"

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "JPMorgan has been singled out by regulators with 'unprecedented aggressiveness,' NYU’s Smith said in an e-mail. 'Most of these settlements either would not have been necessary or would have been for much lesser amounts in Weill’s time.'”

Excerpt from Forbes -- "[Baumols' Cost Disease] is the idea that it’s much easier to improve productivity in some areas than it is in others. Specifically, Baumol is addressing the difficulty of improving labour productivity in services as against the ease with which it can be increased in manufacturing. It is this which tells us that we should expect health care and college costs to rise faster than general inflation because these are largely services provided by human labour."

Excerpt from CNBC -- "'If there is not an agreement, the resulting financial damage could even tip us into a recession,' especially because the economy is growing at a relatively paltry rate of 1.5 to 2 percent, the New York University economist said."

Excerpt from The Chicago Tribune -- "NYU's Sundararajan said consumers have clearly seen value in online services like Airbnb and Uber and regulators should create space for them. 'I'm not arguing that we should not have any regulation at all,' he said. 'But these are clearly things that people want and things that aren't inherently unsafe. So let's create a simple framework.'"

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "Aswath Damodaran, a professor of finance at the Stern School of Business at New York University, is among those who think that too many companies rely too heavily on the performance of their shares when computing executive compensation. 'I’m a great believer in markets, but sometimes we need more attention paid to what did this management do to the value of the company and less to what did this management do to the price of the stock,' he said. 'I would like to see compensation systems where managers are rewarded based on what kind of projects they are working on and how big their returns on invested capital are.'”

Excerpt from Forbes -- "To explore the new implications of this vastly improved evolutionary theory for business, we recently organized a one-day symposium at Stern titled 'Darwin’s Business: New Evolutionary Thinking About Cooperation, Groups, Firms and Societies.' The conference featured an international roster of experts on evolution, economics, and human nature."

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "We find that a significant determinant of an optimal asymptotic government debt or government debt-GDP ratio is how interest rate risks are correlated with risks to fundamentals that threaten to widen or narrow inequality in after-tax and after-transfer incomes."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "I strongly recommend that the G.A.O. study the work of Professors Warburton, Anginer and Acharya and of Professors Kelly, Lustig and Van Nieuwerburgh carefully, while assessing the industry arguments with a great deal of skepticism."

Excerpt from Forbes -- "Haidt argues that the six intuitive foundations of morality are caring, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority and sanctity. The traits of caring, fairness and liberty resonate with both liberals and conservatives. But liberals are ambivalent about notions of loyalty, authority and sanctity. One could argue this ambivalence undermines solid, decisive leadership and thus truly holds back societal progress."

Excerpt from Marketplace -- "White says Bernanke’s daring moves kept the economy from going off a cliff. At the same time, he says, Bernanke broke with convention to change the culture of the notoriously cryptic Fed, making it 'a more open, less mysterious place.'”

Excerpt from Scientific American -- "'A pervasive problem around the world is that city governments are not strong enough,' Romer said, citing the example of New York City seizing land from private property owners in 1811 to construct the present street grid. 'Very few city governments in the world can do what New York City did in 1811, and that's what is holding us back.'"

Excerpt from CNBC -- "Twitter's valuation is in the eye of the beholder, Aswath Damodaran of the New York University Stern School of Business said Tuesday. 'I really think it depends on what you call yourself. If you're a trader, then all bets are off. You're betting on price,' he said. 'If you're an investor and you think about value, I think at $20 billion, an awful lot has to go right for that $20 billion to be a break-even, forget about making money.'"

Excerpt from Slate -- "Curbing interest rates for certain classes of popular credit products could save consumers money (cheap credit) or it could merely lead people to be unable to access credit (like when price controls create supply shortages). Sumit Agarwal, Souphala Chomsisengphet, Neale Mahoney, and Johannes Stroebel look at one such regulation—the 2009 Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure (CARD) Act—and find that it's saved people lots of money..."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "It is easy to be skeptical about disclosure requirements of this kind. Will consumers pay any attention? It turns out that many of them do so. Sumit Agarwal of the National University of Singapore (along with co-authors from the University of Chicago, New York University and the U.S. Treasury Department) finds that the consequence of the nudge was to reduce interest payments by $74 million a year."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "Executives in the class will identify and challenge conceptual frameworks about products and pricing that have restricted their creativity and have kept them thinking about business the same way for years. For example, if a cellphone doesn't work, a traditional assumption would be that its battery needs to be recharged. Mr. Williams wants his students to reject traditional assumptions and think in terms of 'unreasonable provocation'—thoughts that will get creative juices flowing. A better question, he says, could be why a cellphone needs a battery at all."

Excerpt from Bloomberg TV -- "There's only really been one platform that I would argue has the most robust revenue model that's been able to charge their users, and that's LinkedIn. LinkedIn gets 53% of their revenue from the tools that recruiters use, 20% from people like you and me who want to InMail more people, and then 23% from advertising, so they're really the only platform that's been able to charge users."