Experience Stern | News & Events

The Stern Private Equity Club’s (SPEC) ninth annual conference will be held on February 28. The conference, themed, “Finding Alpha: Navigating Investment Headwinds in Private Equity,” is designed to provide current students, alumni and industry professionals with networking opportunities and panel discussions focusing on trends and issues facing the private equity and venture capital industries.

New York University hosts its third annual NYU Entrepreneurs Festival to celebrate the vibrant and growing start-up culture at the University. The event, co-hosted by the NYU Stern Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, the NYU Entrepreneurs Network and the NYU Entrepreneurial Institute, provides an opportunity for new ventures to seek advice and learn from the experiences of start-up founders, investors and prospective entrepreneurs from the NYU entrepreneurial community.

The 10th Annual NYU/Penn Conference on Law and Finance, jointly sponsored by New York University’s Pollack Center for Law & Business, the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for Law and Economics and Wharton’s Financial Institutions Center, will be held at the University of Pennsylvania Law School on February 28 and March 1.

Excerpt from City AM -- "The networking potential is even greater on collaborative programmes (where two or more schools offer a single programme together), as students could get access to a far wider range of connections. 'It’s another way that students can tailor the programme to suit their needs,' says Zaitseva. Trium – a collaboration between HEC Paris, LSE and NYU Stern – can give students a whole range of skills. 'NYU Stern is based in one of the world’s leading financial centres. HEC Paris will provide key entrepreneurial skills; and LSE focuses on social studies.'”

Excerpt from American Entrepreneurship Today -- "The showcase is part of the annual $200K Entrepreneurs Challenge where entrepreneur teams comprised of NYU alumni, students and staff vy for awards totalling $200k in three venture categories: 'New Venture Competition', 'Social Venture Competition' and 'Technology Venture Competition'. The evening's showcase was for semi-finalists in the Challenge competition that kickoffed in early fall 2013. Teams accepted into the competiton receive training and mentoring over the course of the academic year that culminates in a pitch off contest in late spring 2014."

Excerpt from Voice of America -- "No one really knows why the bitcoin broker shut down. But economics professor Arun Sundararajan says signs point to a security flaw. 'It seems to have been a security breach more than anything else where a lot of the bitcoin was stolen by hackers. And as a consequence, Mt. Gox had to stop trading. And of course this has sort of lowered the value of the bitcoin traded at Mt. Gox considerably,' said Sundararajan."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "New York University finance professor Aswath Damodaran writes: 'I don't think that Facebook's management is doing this deal for defensive reasons or because they have explicit plans for generating value, at least as of now. It is WhatsApp's large, growing and engaged user base that makes it so attractive to Facebook, especially given how much the market is pricing all of those factors. You may find it difficult to believe that someone as smart as Mark Zuckerberg would pay $19 billion without a clear vision of how he plans to make money off the deal, but I don't.'”

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "In 1980, if you were a high school graduate and you compared your average wage that you earned to a college graduate, the college-educated graduate made about 20% more than you did. Today, the college graduate makes almost twice as much as the high school graduate. And as Chair Yellen said, the two forces that drive that, primarily, are globalization and technology. In other words, there's been an increase in the demand for high-skilled workers...So today, if you are a high school educated worker with no post-secondary education and you go into the labor force, 90% of the low-wage jobs are held by people with only a high school education. So the key is, how do you get more people into the high-skill category?"

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "There are some important parallels between JCPenney and companies generally in turnarounds and country turnarounds... So, countries that have turned themselves around, in particular, emerging markets, who, in the last three decades, went from third world countries to emerging markets, did it by doing three things. They were disciplined, they provided clarity, and discipline and clarity produce trust. It's the same thing for corporations."

The Strategy and Operations Club and the Management Consulting Association will co-host the Fourth Annual Strategy Forum, themed “Big Data | Big Results,” on February 27th, 2014.

Excerpt from WalletHub -- “Since a lot of the lobbying is hand-to-hand and among personal contacts, money calculations would be misleading. The Academy has rules about this – a recent case had a movie removed from contention for a violation. Still, you have to believe that if they need these rules, the rules get breached.”

Excerpt from Forbes -- "Researchers Uma R. Karmarkar and Bryan Bollinger report their preliminary findings in their working paper BYOB: How Bringing Your Own Shopping Bags Leads to Treating Yourself, and the Environment."

Excerpt from The Huffington Post -- "If you count libertarians as conservatives ... that's going to really dilute your conservatives. What we're talking about are social conservatives. To say that you're an economic conservative isn't really important psychologically. The psychological variable here ... is really about social conservatives. It's really important that libertarians be left out [of the 'conservative' classification]."

On February 25, the Center for Real Estate Finance Research partnered with two student organizations, the Stern Real Estate Club and Stern Women in Business, to host an Executives-in-Residence Day.

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- “'This is one of those companies where you do a traditional cash-flow valuation of the business and it is really tough to justify the valuation that they’re at,' Mr. Damodaran said in an interview. 'But there are a lot of people who have tried to sell short who are getting steam rolled.'”

Excerpt from The Huffington Post -- "Limited individual acts of kindness, according to Jonathan Haidt, a University of Virginia psychologist and author of The Happiness Hypothesis may not be fulfilling. He notes that 'If you do a random act of kindness for a stranger and it's a one-shot deal, there's much less likelihood that you're going to see any benefit.'"

Excerpt from Reuters -- "...Bitcoin isn't well understood right now. And so when something like this happens on what used to be the largest exchange, investor faith in Bitcoin goes down. And this hurts Bitcoin investors around the world even if there were no problems with their exchanges."

In research that is forthcoming in the journal, Management Science, NYU Stern Professor Deepak Hegde and his co-author, Justin Tumlinson of the IFO Institute at the University of Munich, found that US venture capitalists (VCs) were more likely to invest in start-ups led by executives of the same ethnic origin, particularly when the probability of the start-ups’ success appears low.

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- “'I would use more aggressive monetary policy to weaken the currency,' Roubini said at a lunchtime event at the Toronto Hilton, referring to the Canadian dollar. 'That’s what I would do. More than fiscal stimulus I would say a commitment to keep rates low for longer, or having an easing bias, something along those lines.'”

Excerpt from Reuters -- "Canada's housing market is at risk of a meaningful correction, Nouriel Roubini said on Monday, though the economist known as 'Dr. Doom' for his often gloomy forecasts said he was not predicting a crash."

Excerpt from TopMBA -- “'The changes that have occurred,' explains Chernoff, 'come about because many industries have been basing their decision making on intuition and experience. Companies realize now they need managers with higher level analytic skill, being able to work with big data that companies are amassing. It’s not sufficient to just be able to run Excel.' MBA students are alive to this, he says, having spent time in industry, and it is the MBA community in which supply chain expertise is really being cultivated."

Excerpt from Livemint -- "The Chinese stimulus of the past five years has been a big driver of the global rebound from the abyss of fall 2008. As the stimulus subsides and the Chinese government looks for a shift from investment-driven growth to consumption-driven growth, the rest of the world cannot escape a difficult adjustment."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "In practice, however, winner-take-all effects still appear to dominate. Long-tail proponents predict that the least-popular offerings should be capturing market share from the most popular. But as Anita Elberse, a professor at the Harvard Business School, recounts in her 2013 book 'Blockbusters,' the entertainment industry’s experience has been the reverse. Digital song titles selling more than one million copies, for example, accounted for 15 percent of sales in 2011, up from 7 percent in 2007. The publishing and film industries experienced similar trends."

Excerpt from PsychCentral -- "The researchers, Uma R. Karmarkar, Ph.D., assistant professor of business administration at HBS, and Bryan Bollinger, Ph.D., assistant professor of marketing at New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business, were surprised to find that the influential effects linked to reusable bags were not causal, but seemed to worked in tandem, pushing shoppers in seemingly opposite directions at the same time."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "In a paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, economist David Yermack said that Bitcoin shifts too much to be a unit of account or a store of value."