Experience Faculty & Research

In the wake of the Great Recession, a contentious debate has erupted over whether fiscal consolidation, less formally known as ‘austerity’, is helpful or harmful for economic growth. One side argues that austerity is expansionary when achieved via spending cuts rather than tax increases. An alternative view, consistent with textbook prescriptions for countercyclical fiscal policy, suggests that fiscal consolidation is harmful to growth when implemented in the midst of a crisis. Both camps, however, ignore the wealth of information inherent in comparing the economic performance of countries that pursue fiscal austerity with those that opt for a different path. Read more

• Biography: Dean Peter Henry
• Department: Economics 

What would you think if you were to open your morning newspaper to find the following headline?

"Congress Closes Down Fed, Takes Over Monetary Policy" Read more

• Biography: Professor Kim Schoenholtz
• Department: Center for Global Economy and Business

The Federal Communications Commission’s recent decision to protect the free flow of content on the Internet will ensure fair competition. Read more

• Biography: Professor Nicholas Economides
• Department: Economics

Monetary policy has become increasingly unconventional in the last six years, with central banks implementing zero-interest-rate policies, quantitative easing, credit easing, forward guidance, and unlimited exchange-rate intervention. But now we have come to the most unconventional policy tool of them all: negative nominal interest rates. Read more

• Biography: Professor Nouriel Roubini
• Department: Economics

The world is facing the prospect of an extended period of weak economic growth. But risk is not fate: The best way to avoid such an outcome is to figure out how to channel large pools of savings into productivity-enhancing public-sector investment. Read more

• Biography: Professor A. Michael Spence
• Department: Economics

It’s long well past time for Deutsche Bank’s long-suffering shareholders to challenge the holy writ of universal banking. The bank’s strategic challenges were made clear in late January when its fourth-quarter results showed return on equity of 2.6%, about 20% of its cost of equity capital. Management said the performance was “encouraging” – but the equity market continues to value the bank’s shares at only half book value. Read more

• Biography: Professors Roy C. Smith and Brad Hintz
• Department: Finance

Fairness is a loaded word, but, whether we like it or not, it is at the heart of the political economy of debt restructuring in Europe. Until we reach some understanding on this issue, the conversation will continue to run in circles. Clearly the odious debt argument does not apply to Greece (Beck 2015). Greece was and is a democracy. Greek citizens elected the governments that ran the reckless fiscal policy that drove Greece into a deep financial crisis. Read more

• Biography: Professor Thomas Philippon
• Department: Finance

A glance at today’s headlines leaves little doubt that we have entered a new era of geopolitical turbulence. Acts of terror and violence, humanitarian crises, and public health emergencies are rarely localized events. Instead, these shocks transcend borders, presenting global challenges. Just as one crisis fades, another rises to take its place. Adding further complexity, today’s enemy (unlike in that previous period of great geopolitical uncertainty, the Cold War) is often unseen or unknown. Read more

Now that the decision has been made in Washington to reset Cuban-American relations, it's a good time for an outside perspective on where things may go from here. Bottom line: Cuba may well become a rising star in the region and an attractive economic partner for the U.S. if things are managed well. In financial terms, Cuba will be a "buy" when the time comes. A recent visit revealed some impressive strengths buried not far below the surface. Read more

• Biography: Professor Ingo Walter
• Department: Finance

With Republicans taking over the Senate this week, many Americans are wondering: What now? Some are hoping for more constructive engagement between Congress and the president, now that the GOP might want to try to show that it, too, can govern. But there's good reason to believe that's wishful thinking. The destructive dynamic of recent years is not the result of one or two factors that can be easily reversed. Rather, it is the result of at least 10 trends that have played out over the past half-century. Here are the most important things to understand about how Washington became so broken. Read more

• Biography: Professor Jonathan Haidt
• Department: Business and Society Program

The stock market knows more than any individual investor, and China's is no exception. The launch of deposit insurance, announced in November and to be implemented in the new year, will effectively reduce the implicit government guarantee of China's high-yielding shadow banking wealth-management products. Read more

• Biography: Professors Jennifer Carpenter & Robert Whitelaw
• Department: Finance

Of all the financial markets that should be resistant to manipulation, foreign exchange surely tops the list. With $5.3 trillion traded daily by thousands of buyers and sellers across the world, this should be one hyper-efficient market. Read more

• Biography: Professors Roy Smith and Ingo Walter
• Department: Finance

Chinese Internet Czar Lu Wei's high profile visit to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's office this week is just the latest signal that China is engaging Western tech firms, but on its own terms. Read more

• Biography: Professor Joe Foudy
• Department: Economics

Last week, as Uber battled a media firestorm after a senior executive talked of investigating unfriendly journalists and a company manager actually used its “God View” feature to track the comings and goings of a reporter, Airbnb welcomed more than 1,500 of its most productive providers to its first-ever host convention, an immersive celebration one expert attendee likened to a Mary Kay event. Read more

• Biography: Professor Arun Sundararajan
• Department: IOMS

In November 2014, the ECB published its asset quality review (AQR) and comprehensive assessment (ECB 2014), as well as capital shortfall estimates based on its stress test. These results differed widely from our earlier assessment (Acharya and Steffen 2014). Indeed, the two shortfall estimates are negatively correlated. Read more

• Biography: Professor Viral Acharya
• Department: Finance

In every major movement for greater democracy and the protection of human rights, university students have played a central role. From Tiananmen in China to Tahrir in Egypt, student movements have elevated public discourse on human rights. On some human-rights issues that affect universities themselves, such as in addressing global sweatshop practices, student groups have served as catalysts, prompting colleges and universities to assume a leadership role in our society. Read more

• Biography: Professor Michael Posner
• Department: Center for Business and Human Rights

Kerala to me is a magical place characterized by strong women, intermingling cultures, and an infallible dedication to education. I’d like to talk about each of these themes a little bit. Read more

• Biography: Dean Geeta Menon
• Department: Marketing

Digging into some big data—everything from Google searches to the tone of news stories—might be able to tell us whether this market is headed for a correction. Proponents of "wisdom of the crowds" contend that such data may contain within it some key insights about specific variables of interest. So can we find any evidence of this wisdom in big data?  Read more

• Biography: Professor Vasant Dhar
• Department: IOMS

The first thing I learned in law school is that law school is not for learning the law. My decorated professor explained that we would spend twenty hours each week reading and discussing cases—and that very few of those cases would ever again figure in our lives as lawyers. Those hours were not wasted, but it was not because they filled our heads with legal content that they were useful. Read more

• Biography: Professor Adam Alter
• Department: Marketing

Why did Jean Tirole win the Nobel Prize in Economics? Not for the highly-regarded work on competition between small numbers of firms with which his career began more than thirty years ago but for more recent work on how carefully structured regulation can improve performance relative to unbridled market forces. This is a reminder that serious students of market performance take market failures seriously. Read more

• Biography: Professor Pankaj Ghemawat
• Department: Management and Organizations

The challenges of converting the "made in China" brand into a quality brand are immense, but so are the rewards. A national quality improvement initiative is the pathway to transform China from a low-cost to high-value economy, points out Eitan Zemel in a speech given at the 17th Annual Business Forum in Shanghai. Read more

• Biography: Professor Eitan Zemel
• Department: Information, Operations, and Management Sciences

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.  Read more

• Biography: Professor Anindya Ghose
• Department: IOMS

I have to admit that I never really gave the number of women in data science much thought until recently. Maybe it was because, by some lucky accident, my NYU faculty advisor’s two other PhD students also happened to be female. And about half of my predictive modeling group peers at IBM Research were female. And half of the PhDs here at Dstillery are female. Read more

In his blog last week, Alan Roberts, executive director international operations at the Accord on Fire and Building Safety, outlined the progress made by the Accord so far. Read more

• Biography: Sarah Labowitz
• Department: Center for Business and Human Rights

A previously obscure nonprofit corporation that essentially governs the Internet — the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) — has featured prominently in recent news stories due to the U.S. Department of Commerce's plan to relinquish its key oversight role. Details of this transition will be high on the agenda as ICANN stakeholders meet in Los Angeles this week. Many observers fear that ICANN could soon be subject to the heavy-handed influences of governments that do not share the values that have led to the innovation, flexibility and openness that has hitherto characterized the Internet. Read more

• Biography: Professor Lawrence White
• Department: Economics

The idea that "Climate science is settled" runs through today's popular and policy discussions. Unfortunately, that claim is misguided. It has not only distorted our public and policy debates on issues related to energy, greenhouse-gas emissions and the environment.  Read more

• Biography: Professor Steven Koonin
• Department: IOMS