Experience Stern | News & Events

Excerpt from LiveMint -- "Aswath Damodaran of the Stern School of Business, in his paper titled The Value of Transparency and the Cost of Complexity, argues investors give a higher discount to a complex business model over a simpler one."

Excerpt from NPR -- "It may have started out as something that was on the fringes, but the sharing economy is definitely going mainstream."

Excerpt from VoxEU -- "Many central banks have recently employed unprecedented expansionary monetary policy, keeping interest rates at near-zero levels for an extended period of time since the crisis of 2007-08. Quantitative easing interventions have been employed to affect asset prices directly, most notably in government-bond and mortgage markets, in order to keep sovereign and mortgage borrowing costs low. These interventions may have the beneficial aspect of generating wealth transfers to borrowers, notably banks and households with negative home equities. But they may also be stoking asset-price inflation, often in unexpected fashion, by inducing a ‘search for yield’ among savers and intermediaries who manage their savings."

Excerpt from Bloomberg TV -- "These are huge polar opposite deals. Michael Dell wants to completely scrap the existing business and recreate the entire company from the ground up and Icahn wants to basically just milk the existing core PC business down to the last drop and they're so different and so distinct that the money kind of balancing becomes the big issue."

Excerpt from NASDAQ -- "Altman's Z-Score gives one simple number that tells you how a retailer is faring. Any reading above 3.0 implies good health in terms of balance sheet strength and profit results."

Excerpt from BBC -- "I think Americans have accepted that when you watch a TV program, you're going to see somebody selling something in the context of the TV show. There's no doubt about that...with the number of digital video recorders that are here and the penetration rate around 50%, advertisers are looking for nontraditional ways of trying to show their brands being used in context because people are skipping ads, and that's why the market, in fact, is growing here rapidly: because of the ad-skipping that's going on."

Excerpt from Le Monde -- "Baumol's cost disease" has since been diagnosed in many fields, including education and healthcare. In a recent book on the continuing relevance of his discovery, Baumol says that the quantity of labour required to produce these services is difficult to reduce. He distinguishes two sectors. In the first, goods and services can be easily automated, and as machines have replaced humans, the amount of labour required to produce each additional unit has fallen."

Excerpt from Project Syndicate -- "Leaders in developed and developing countries alike must deepen their commitment to economic reform and integration. But only by giving emerging economies a real voice in global governance – thereby reducing the trust deficit and restoring legitimacy to multilateral institutions – can the global economy reach its potential."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- “'This is part of a greater trend — not only in the business world, but in our world generally — toward transparency,' said Mr. Posner, who helped draft the requirements while at the State Department. 'I think it’s a very healthy trend.'”

Excerpt from Project Syndicate -- "A new period of uncertainty and volatility has begun, and it seems likely to lead to choppy economies and choppy markets. Indeed, a broader de-risking cycle for financial markets could be at hand."

Excerpt from New York Daily News -- "Retailers 'don't want anything that can possibly tarnish their brand because they've worked so hard at it,' Sam Craig, a marketing professor at NYU, told the Daily News. 'There are a number of taboo topics, and if you cross the line on those, you become a liability rather than an asset.'"

Excerpt from BBC Capital -- “'[Investors] get a lot of exposure to currency indirectly by buying equities and bonds,' said Richard Levich, professor of finance and international business at New York University’s Stern School of Business."

Excerpt from Washington Post -- "The laws of evolution and the experiences of daily life suggest that humans have an inherent desire to contribute to others. Organizations that take this side of human nature into account may well function better than those whose single goal is profit. And the people in those corporations, using both sides of their natures, will also lead more fulfilling lives."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- “'The U.S. decision sends a very strong signal to the government of Bangladesh that they have to do things differently, that there’s a consequence to the way they’ve been operating,' said Michael H. Posner, a former assistant secretary of state of human and labor rights in the Obama administration."

Excerpt from CNBC -- "'I think in a sense you've got to play the cycles, commodity-price cycles and economic cycles, so I would go to commodity companies and cyclical companies,' he said. 'Not all of them are cheap, but I think your best chance of finding bargains are in those segments.'"

Excerpt from Charlie Rose -- "After the global financial crisis, somepeople like Mohamed El-Erian, who is the co-CEO of PIMCO, said we are entering the new normal, a period of time where economic growth in advanced economies would be low, anemic, sub-par and so on...Our point is that this situation is one that is not a stable equilibrium. It is not even a stable disequilibirium. It is an unstable disequilibrium. Take for example the eurozone. You can't have just a monetary union without banking, political, economic, fiscal union. Either you move towards more integration, or you are going to have fragmentation disintegration."

Excerpt from Mashable -- "'We saw a huge opportunity for the installed base of cars,' Jamyn Edis, co-founder and CEO of Dash, told Mashable in an interview. 'We've only scratched the surface around what you can do with all that data.' Edis described Dash as being like a 'Fitbit for cars,' and said it aims to help people drive more safely through real-time feedback, and to better track the wear and tear on their car, so they know when to bring it in for repairs."

Excerpt from Bloomberg TV -- "It feels like in this instance it's one of the few environments you look at where transparency doesn't help because they can never be fully transparent. And people start, there's sort of this kabuki dance where everyone is interpreting it a different way so it feels to me like you need one voice and that voice should probably be Bernanke and then we can all interpret it how we want. But my sense is we spent a lot of time staring at our navel trying to figure out every single piece of information and interpret it and it doesn't really add to the dialogue."

Excerpt from Bloomberg TV -- "American violations of privacy were usually about the bad guys and it was going to be used against us. Now, the bottom line is, Americans have their privacy violated every day and they're fine with it as long as they get a coupon at the end of the violation or they feel more secure. Americans have been forced to signal what are their priorities. They've put security well ahead of privacy."

Excerpt from China Economic Review -- "In Asia, risk is increasing, and has been increasing for a decade. The financial crisis did not show up very much in Asian banks, but they look substantially riskier today than they did five years ago. And in China, the rate of increase is very high. Its banking sector is taking on a risk at a very rapid rate. This is by publicly available accounting numbers. So, my feeling is, at the moment, that China is big enough, strong enough that they could recapitalize the banks."

Excerpt from TIME -- "'These are new models, and they don't fit into the old boxes,' says Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business who studies the sharing economy."

Excerpt from the Economist -- "A 2011 paper by Xavier Gabaix of New York University explains how diversification works when firms are independent and their sizes follow a regular “bell-shaped” distribution. Imagine an economy where one firm produces everything: its volatility of earnings determines volatility in GDP. But as the number of firms grows GDP volatility shrinks, because firms’ shocks cancel out. With 100 firms, volatility falls to a tenth of the level in a one-firm economy; with 1m firms, it falls to a thousandth. Since there are more firms than this, company-specific shocks disappear."

Excerpt from Big Think -- "So after a hurricane comes through, if it’s a damaging hurricane there will be considerable attempts to raise funds. So what you find is that people are much more likely to give to hurricane aid when the hurricane happens to share their initial."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "Bryan Bollinger, who also worked on that study, drew my attention to something else in it. For the most part, Starbucks customers ordering sugary, creamy coffee beverages kept on doing so, seemingly because they had already figured that the drinks were fattening and had made a flabby peace with that. But customers indeed adjusted their food orders upon realizing that a pastry could easily exceed 400 calories. They hadn’t bargained on, or planned for, that. 'What really matters is what your prior beliefs are,' said Bollinger, who teaches marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business."

Excerpt from Outlook India -- "According to Damodaran, an investment philosophy 'is a core set of beliefs about markets, a behavioural set of assumptions about how markets work, how they fail to work, and how to take advantage of common mistakes made by investors in the markets. This is as opposed to an investment strategy, such as buying low price to earnings stocks or going contrarian.'"