Experience Stern | News & Events

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "Amazon.com Inc. would have to overcome a decade’s worth of falling profitability during the next 10 years to justify its share price, according to Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at New York University. ...'If the operating margin stays at 7.5 percent or lower, you cannot get above the current stock price' in calculating Amazon’s value in a decade, Damodaran wrote on his Musings on Markets blog."

Excerpt from Project Syndicate -- "Scientific evidence has eliminated legitimate doubts about the scale of the risks that climate change poses. Now, the Global Commission’s analysis has largely refuted the economic arguments for inaction. Add to that growing public concern about climate change, and the conditions for decisive action may have arrived."

On October 31, AHBBS hosted NYU Stern's first Diversity Case Competition, in association with MCA, GFA, OutClass, SWIB and SIMR.

Excerpt from Policy Network -- "Governments need to understand and embrace this ongoing transition rather than impeding it, realizing that society’s interests are best served if they wield regulatory power to proactively partner with or delegate responsibility to the platforms. In tandem, forward-looking platforms should embrace their new responsibilities, rather than resisting them: participating in the provision of the social safety net is smart capitalism in the long run."

Excerpt from The New Yorker -- "The topics that social psychologists chose to study and how they chose to study them, he argued, suffered from homogeneity. The effect was limited, Haidt was quick to point out, to areas that concerned political ideology and politicized notions, like race, gender, stereotyping, and power and inequality. 'It’s not like the whole field is undercut, but when it comes to research on controversial topics, the effect is most pronounced,' he later told me. (Haidt has now put his remarks in more formal terms, complete with data, in a paper forthcoming this winter in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.)"

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "On October 27, Professors Viral Acharya and Sascha Steffen published an alternative estimate, using a different methodology, for 39 publicly listed eurozone banks with a combined balance sheet of €12.5tn (a subset of the banks in the EBA stress test and the ECB’s AQR). They calculated a shortfall of €450bn at the end of 2013 – about 3.6 per cent of assets."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "Kim Schoenholtz, an economics professor at New York University, said the Fed’s bond purchases were particularly effective and important in stabilizing the financial system and stimulating the broader economy in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis. But he said that the impact of the purchases had diminished as conditions improved, and that it now made sense to end the program. 'I applaud the Fed’s willingness to be aggressive, especially early on in the crisis, and it has made sense for the Fed to run a very accommodative policy,' Mr. Schoenholtz said. 'But we should not be surprised that monetary policy has diminishing returns.'"

Excerpt from The Huffington Post -- "The many benefits of mindfulness, namely meditation, are staggering. Studies show that maintaining a mindful practice like meditation can reduce stress, extend life, boost your academic abilities, and even increase your overall happiness. Mindfulness can even make you a better leader. Not surprisingly many companies like General Mills and schools like the NYU Stern School of Business have developed initiatives to cultivate and promote mindful wellbeing, scholarship, and leadership among employees and students."

Excerpt from Forbes -- "It’s brilliant work by economists from the Stern School of Business and Harvard Business School, Alexander Ljungqvist, Joan Farre-Mensa, and John Asker, in an article entitled 'Corporate Investment and Stock Market Listing: A Puzzle?' which compares the investment patterns of public companies and privately held firms. It turns out that the lag in investment is a phenomenon of the public companies more than the privately held firms."

Excerpt from The Daily Star -- "Knowing how the apparel supply chain really operates is the first step toward fixing it. And while this information on its own will not make factories safer, more transparency is a necessary predicate to developing the kind of comprehensive action plan that is urgently needed in Bangladesh."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "I think that what's going to happen is, you end QE and then the question is when do you start lifting rates, and that could be pushed further in the future depending on the data. ... essentially, policy action depends on growth, unemployment, inflation and also global headwinds. And the dollar."

Excerpt from The Washington Post -- "When the facts conflict with...sacred values, almost everyone finds a way to stick with their values and reject the evidence. On the left, including the academic left, the most sacred issues involve race and gender. So that's where you find the most direct and I'd say flagrant denial of evidence. I think the results of this study do clearly show that political concerns influence the willingness of sociologists to consider a major class of causal factors in human behavior."

Excerpt from The Baffler -- "Serdari suggests that it is actually the increasing popularity of lower- and mid-level bags that now drives up the cost of higher-level bags. And there’s still a market for them, even at a 150 percent mark-up. Serdari says that, just as existing brands are hiking up their costs to distinguish themselves from the rest, a newly reinvented fashion brand (like Céline) might today choose to produce bags with the most marked increase (at, say, $2,500—up from $1,000 ten years ago)."

Excerpt from Fast Co.Exist -- "'What we've been able to show is that there's been unbelievable expansion,' says Shlomo 'Solly' Angel, a senior researcher at the NYU Stern Urbanization Project. 'This gives planners and policymakers an idea of by how much cities are going to grow. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, cities are going to grow seven or eight times between now and 2040.'"

Excerpt from CNC World -- "I think we should expect China to grow at a six or seven percent for the next five to ten years or so, and I think that's a new normal. When you grow for ten percent a year for three decades, it's only natural that you'll slow down. It's important to realize that the slowdown is a sign of success not weakness. Every successful economy, as it gets wealthier, transitions from ten percent growth to seven percent growth for a decade or two, to five percent growth and then eventually you are wealthy and you grow at a two to three percent that we see amongst all fully-developed countries."

On October 27, 2014, Peter Blair Henry, Dean of New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business gave the inaugural address, an enlightening and thought-provoking discussion on his book Turnaround: Third World Lessons for First World Growth, at opening of the Shanghai-Pudong Forum on Economics, Business, and Finance.

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "...applying the leverage ratio may reveal a yawning hole at European banks, according to an analysis by Sascha Steffen, an associate professor at ESMT European School of Management and Technology in Berlin, and Viral V. Acharya, a professor of economics at New York University. They first assumed European banks had to write off all the nonperforming loans that are not covered by reserves. Then they calculated how much equity capital the banks would then need so that their equity capital equaled 4 percent of total assets. In that situation, the banks in the sample would have a theoretical capital shortfall of nearly $350 billion."

Excerpt from Al Jazeera -- "Apple's new system uses something called tokenization, which basically does not let the retailers get access to the credit card number and that's the premise on which Apple is basically pushing its system... that we will protect your data. To consumers, they're saying, we'll give you more convenience, we'll give you added security because of tokenization so that retailers don't know your credit card data. Now, for consumers, this is great. For retailers, this is not so good because, for years, they've always mined the credit card data to put in their offline and online transactions together and create a profile... they can use that to also target us with real-time advertisements when we're in the store. Now, with Apple Pay, they can't do that easily anymore."

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "Using his methodology, which he calls SRISK, Mr Acharya found that in a crisis French financial institutions would have a capital shortfall of almost $400bn, worse than the US and UK despite their much bigger financial sectors. Looking just at the French banks tested in the ECB stress tests, which found zero capital shortfall, SRISK came up with €189bn."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "The nature of work itself is dramatically changing due to the concept of an ‘on-demand’ workforce. Studies have predicted that up to 40% of the U.S. workforce population will be part of this ‘on-demand’ labor pool (contractors, freelancers and temp workers) within the next six years. The primary motivation for companies to crowdsource, whether for labor, design, ideas or funding, is to reduce costs in a challenging economic environment, as well as to harness the skills, collective knowledge and wisdom of the crowds to complement the skills of their employees."

Excerpt from WWD -- "'It’s legitimate that customers have been very disappointed with large brands and their customer relationships. Someone has had to come in,' said Thomaï Serdari, brand strategist and adjunct professor of marketing at New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business. 'The customers felt quite alienated or disconnected and didn’t feel that brands spoke to them. That is what initiated this.'"

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "'This act by CVS and Rite Aid heralds the advent of the imminent battle in the mobile pay system,' Anindya Ghose, a marketing and information-technology professor at New York University, said yesterday in an e-mail."

Excerpt from USA Today -- "Matthew Statler, a faculty mentor and director of business ethics and social impact programming at NYU’s Stern School of Business, believes Transfernation has immense potential to combat hunger locally and internationally. 'Food waste is a huge problem, but (Dehradunwala and Goel) have identified a unique and compelling angle of approach,' Statler says. 'They have made great strides developing the venture over the past year, and… can really make a difference in the years to come.'"

On Friday, October 24, the Luxury & Retail Club held its 8th Annual Luxury & Retail Conference, themed "The Future of Retail."

Excerpt from Marketplace -- "Historically, they were big, well-known companies, often in consumer goods, like Procter & Gamble, General Motors, General Electric and General Mills, says Lawrence White, an economics professor at the N.Y.U. Stern School of Business... But even blue chips can fall, says White, recalling General Motors' bankruptcy. 'The stock holders of the old General Motors came out with nothing,' he says."