Prior to the Global Crisis, even an informed observer might have naïvely believed that the CEOs of big financial firms could simply push a button to view the current exposure of their firms to any other firms in the world. Or, if less technologically advanced, they could call their chief risk officers or chief financial officers to obtain end-of-day positions.
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Faculty Awards and Accolades highlighted in the December 2017 issues of Stern's Faculty Research Brief.
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I invited Phil Howard and Gillian Bolsover in November of 2016 to guest edit this special issue of Big Data on “Computational Propaganda.” I am delighted at the collection of academic papers that they have curated on the subject, which is front and center at the moment. Politicians, journalists, and scholars grapple with how and to what extent social-media platforms were used to manipulate the presidential election of the oldest democracy in the world.
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My father is brilliant, but he grew up in a family forced to supplement what little they could earn with subsistence farming in rural Indiana. He graduated from high school two years early, at the top of his class, because he needed a paycheck to help support the family. He never went to college. His parents didn’t think it was unimportant—they just couldn’t afford it.
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It’s the end of the first act of Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s runaway musical smash about the US founding father. The Americans have just won a decisive victory over the British at Yorktown, Virginia, in 1781. Alexander Hamilton and the Marquis de Lafayette meet at centre-stage and say: “We’re immigrants. We get the job done.”
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Economists like me are asked a set of recurring questions that might inform the choices of firms, individuals, and institutions in areas like investment, education, and jobs, as well as their policy expectations. In most cases, there is no definitive answer. But, with sufficient information, one can discern trends, in terms of economies, markets, and technology, and make reasonable guesses.
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History often repeats itself. Is AT&T’s latest dilemma a result of its own miscalculation or is it because of Donald Trump?
In late 1980, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) offered to settle a major antitrust case against AT&T if it agreed to spin off Western Electric, the equipment division of AT&T. But AT&T assumed that the recently elected President Ronald Reagan would eventually drop the suit and rejected the offer. AT&T bet wrong, and Reagan’s DOJ insisted on the break-up of the company.
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Financial inclusion—providing universal access to financial services and encouraging their use—is an important means for promoting economic development. As of 2014, the World Bank estimated that there were still two billion adults without a bank account, and many others with only a tenuous connection to the financial system.
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Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the American politician and sociologist as well as ambassador to India, once said, “If you want to build a world class city, build a great university and wait 200 years.” Within the narrower realm of business schools, India has certainly been building!
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New research from NYU Stern Professor J.P. Eggers and co-author, Joost Rietveld of the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (RSM), finds that the life cycle of a video game console affects the sales of video games for the platform, as the ratio of early to later adopters tips.
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Understanding Indian consumers is a tricky business. Anybody who claims that they know them completely has probably stopped learning. Indian consumers are bafflingly diverse and constantly changing. To make Indian markets and behaviour even more complex, there is aggressive marketing by new competition including start-up companies, technology which dictates change, governmental legislation and nudging (e.g. digitization, adoption of solar power, movement to electric vehicles), and even judicial decisions (e.g. the ban on liquor shops along state and national highways).
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On paper, the project seemed like it would be a hit: The investment by the mining company would bring jobs and 21st-century technology to an economically poor area and tax revenues to the government. So why were citizens blocking the roads and protesting in the streets, drawing considerable attention from NGOs and the media and delaying the project?
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After multiple failed attempts to “repeal and replace” the 2010 Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), US President Donald Trump’s administration now hopes to achieve its first legislative victory with a massive tax giveaway that it has wrapped in the language of “tax reform.” To that end, Republicans in the US Congress have just unveiled a bill that, if enacted, could vastly widen the deficit and increase the public debt by as much as $4 trillion over the next decade.
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A new study from the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights entitled "Harmful Content: The Role of Internet Platform Companies In Fighting Terrorist Incitement and Politically Motivated Disinformation" examines what Google, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft need to do to fight terrorist incitement and politically motivated disinformation. Written and published by the Center, the report grows out of discussions among members of the World Economic Forum Global Future Council on Human Rights, which is co-chaired by Professor Michael Posner, the Center’s director.
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On Monday, 19 October 1987, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 22.6%, nearly twice the next largest drop (the 12.8% Great Crash on 28 October 1929 that heralded the Great Depression).
What stands out is not the scale of the decline – it is far smaller than the 90% peak-to-trough drop of the early 1930s – but its extraordinary speed. A range of financial market and institutional dislocations accompanied the rapid plunge, threatening not just stocks and related instruments (domestically and globally), but also the US supply of credit and the payments system. As a result, Black Monday has been labelled “the first contemporary global financial crisis” (Bernhardt and Eckbald 1987). A new book, A First-Class Catastrophe, narrates the tense human drama that it created for market and government officials (Henriques 2017).The manipulation of the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) began more than a decade ago, when employees of leading global firms began to submit false reports to the British Banking Association (BBA). At first they did this to influence the value of LIBOR-linked derivatives, but later, during the financial crisis, they did it to conceal the deterioration of their employers’ creditworthiness. US and European regulators reported many of the details in 2012 when they penalised Barclays, the first of a dozen financial firms that collectively paid fines of more than $9 billion (Commodities Futures Trading Commission 2015, New York Times 2016). As well as having to settle claims from aggrieved clients, these firms face enduring reputational damage. In some cases, management was forced out, and in others, individuals received jail terms.
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