Experience Stern | News & Events

Excerpt from The Economist -- "Healthcare expenditure in America is growing at a disturbing rate: in 1960 it was just over 5% of GDP, in 2011 almost 18%. By 2105 the number could reach 60%, according to William Baumol of New York University’s Stern School of Business. Incredible? It is simply the result of extrapolating the impact of a phenomenon Mr Baumol has become famous for identifying: 'cost disease'. His new book gives a nuanced diagnosis, offerings both a vision of a high-cost future and a large dose of optimism. The cost disease may be incurable, but it is also survivable—if treated correctly."

Excerpt from NPR -- "Sinan Aral is a scientist who teaches at New York University's Stern School of Business. He speaks about his specialty, influence and susceptibility in social networks, often. 'Typically in talks I ask people to raise their hand if they follow Ashton Kutcher on Twitter or know who Ashton Kutcher is,' Aral says. 'Everyone raises their hand. I have them put their hands down and then I ask, 'Who in the room has ever done anything Ashton Kutcher asked them to do?' And typically one sheepish person will raise their hand.'"

Excerpt from NPR -- "...they will be followed less by Wall Street and investors because they're not in the Dow."

Excerpt from The Boston Globe -- "A professor of economics and the academic director of the Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at New York University, Baumol argues in "The Cost Disease" that it is inevitable that cost increases in labor- intensive industries will outpace inflation but that they will be offset by productivity gains in manufacturing and agriculture, which ensure "a cornucopia of desirable services and abundant products" in the future."

Excerpt from New York Post -- "Health-care costs are huge, and still rising. Based on current trends, in 2105 US health care will consume 62% of our national income. And this is nothing to worry about. How can this be? Relying primarily on simple logic and storytelling, NYU economist William J. Baumol lays out the answer in his new book, “The Cost Disease: Why Computers Get Cheaper and Health Care Doesn’t” (Yale University Press), by making us think about several other paradoxes."

Excerpt from The Daily -- "Arun Sundararajan, a digital strategy professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, said Kindle sales were probably a low-margin business for Walmart, though the shift had deeper strategy behind it. 'It’s not surprising,' he said. 'Every time Walmart sells a Kindle, it benefits Amazon far more than it benefits Walmart.'"

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "People who feel duped are more angry and less likely to return to the offending company, according to research by Vicki Morwitz, a marketing professor at New York University Stern School of Business who has studied consumer responses to what’s known as drip pricing by airlines and rental car agencies. 'You can’t win over a consumer by misleading a consumer,' she said. 'You’re going to lose by negative word of mouth.'"

Excerpt from Fast Company -- "In Disrupt, Luke Williams writes about the importance of identifying “tension points,” moments when life-as-usual conflicts with the idiosyncrasies of a product or service. The challenge for the designer is to find them, even though people tend not to mention them or even notice them. They show up as patterns: repeated comments and observations, often off-hand. The customer simply accepts them as part of the inherent frustration of the activity."

Excerpt from Forbes -- "Public companies also invest 'in a way that is considerably less responsive to changes in investment opportunities, especially in industries in which stock prices are quite sensitive to earnings news,' write John Asker, associate professor of economics at New York University’s Stern School of Business, Joan Farre-Mensa, assistant professor at Harvard Business School, and Alexander Ljungqvist, NYU professor of finance and entrepreneurship."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "Inflation is ancient history to most Americans, like some medieval curse, but the risk of resurgence in a world of fiat currency demands vigilance. Volcker worries that the international financial system is especially vulnerable now, 'when foreign countries own trillions of our dollars, when we are dependent on borrowing still more abroad, and when the whole world counts on the dollar's maintaining its purchasing power.'"

Excerpt from CNBC -- “We were relying on the one growth engine in the world, which was the emerging economies coming out of the crisis, and now they've slowed down because of the hit they've taken primarily from Europe,”

Excerpt from The New York Times Campaign Stops blog -- "America is not united and it is getting less and less unitable with each passing decade. You can see us coming apart in three simple graphs."

Excerpt from NBCNews.com -- "Since 2004 they're going for the base. Outrage them and get them to the polls. That tends to suppress participation in the center, but it brings up turnout on the extremes and this contributes to the polarization. This is where we're stuck now."

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "This kind of puzzle – call it the hotel mini-bar problem – was explored a few years ago by economists Xavier Gabaix and David Laibson. The question is, is there some more transparent pricing scheme that aims for the same level of profitability as the companies which prefer to spring surprises on their customers? The answer is: no."

Excerpt from Project Syndicate -- "To the extent that this is true of other advanced economies, the global economy faces an extended multi-year period of low growth, with residual downside risk coming from policy gridlock and mistakes in Europe, the US and elsewhere. That scenario implies slower growth – possibly 1-1.5 percentage points slower – in developing countries, including China, again with a preponderance of downside risk."

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "The seven judges chose the shortlist – including Volcker, William Silber’s newly published life of Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman, and Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson’s account of the life and work of the late chief executive of Apple – from 17 longlisted titles. Lionel Barber, the FT’s editor, called it “the strongest list in terms of quality” since the prize was launched in 2005."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "'There is a common-law right to be in the banking business,' ... In 1916, he said there were 4,046 private banks in the U.S., but they fell out of favor after the Great Depression and with the advent of deposit insurance. Only a handful are left, said Mr. Sylla. 'It's not because they're illegal, but most people are going to prefer to deposit their money in an incorporated bank with deposit insurance,' he said. 'It's going to be more complicated for a private bank to get private insurance.'"

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "If Germany could credibly assure financial markets that the euro zone will not break up, then sovereign differentials would be reduced, bank balance sheets would be improved and prospects for future growth would rise. How could Germany convince financial markets? One way would be by committing to back eurobonds or similar forms of debt mutualization. If $2 trillion of eurobonds were authorized to recapitalize the banks—and the first tranches sold and used to rescue the weakest banks—then confidence in the market would do the rest."

Excerpt from Project Syndicate -- "Ineffective governments with weak leadership are at the root of the problem. In democracies, repeated elections lead to short-term policy choices. In autocracies like China and Russia, leaders resist the radical reforms that would reduce the power of entrenched lobbies and interests, thereby fueling social unrest as resentment against corruption and rent-seeking boils over into protest."

Excerpt from Science News -- “'Prior work on political mobilization and motivation for voting has been focused on the individual,' says information economist Sinan Aral of New York University. 'This paper presents really nice large-scale evidence that political mobilization is a peer-to-peer activity.'”

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "I think logically, everyone thinks it's headed towards a mobile web HTML 5 but so far people seem to like their apps and apps have maintained huge share."

Excerpt from Slate -- The research team—Romana Khan of Ozyegin University in Istanbul, Kanishka Misra of the London Business School, and Vishal Singh of NYU—collected scanner data from over 1,700 supermarkets for 2001 to 2006 to examine how milk-buying patterns differ around the country depending on whether lower-fat varieties of milk are cheaper than whole milk or exactly the same price.

Excerpt from NetworkWorld -- "It's too early to tell whether the gamification trend has long-term potential, Sundararajan says. 'But there are a couple of reasons why I think it's promising.' The first is that employees are increasingly expecting to have technology at work that resembles what they use at home. 'They want the stuff that they see at work to be like Facebook, like Foursquare, like the iPhone,' he says. 'This is very different from 10 or 15 years ago, when there wasn't much technology developed just for the consumer.' And the trend is only accelerating, he adds."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- “'It makes no sense to ascribe intentions to a robot,' said an author of the study, Robert H. Frank, an economics professor at Cornell. 'But it appears we have certain postures and gestures that we interpret in certain ways. When we see them, whether it’s a robot or a human, we’re affected by it, because of the pattern it evokes in our brain responses.'”

Excerpt from Reuters -- "The important policy question to ask now is which structural reforms and investments in human capital can make our longer-term growth options better. If we focus on quick monetary or stimulus fixes rather than those questions, then we can’t expect anything better than this slow, painful recovery."