Experience Faculty & Research

Excerpt from The Washington Post -- "Lisa Leslie, a professor at New York University, looked at the highest-paid executives in S&P 1500 companies and found what might be called a 'diversity premium,' in which women at the top earn more than men in these top-paid positions at big companies. The reason, Leslie told the Harvard Business Review, is that companies that have adopted organizational diversity goals — something common at the largest companies — are more likely to pay extra for high-potential women." Read more

Excerpt from Project Syndicate -- "Another explanation is that the 2008 crisis is lingering in our minds, in the form of heightened fear that rare but consequential 'black swan' events could be imminent, despite moderately strong consumer-confidence measures and relatively low financial-market volatility (with some exceptions). A recent paper by New York University’s Julian Kozlowski, Laura Veldkamp, and Venky Venkateswaran argues that it is rational to harbor such fears, because once a formerly unthinkable event actually occurs, one is justified in not forgetting it." Read more

Excerpt from Fast Company -- "Research on student debt and its potential effects on the economy abounds, but it tends to focus on millennials. 'Students in Distress,' an excellent study on default-related labor market shocks from NYU Stern’s Holger Mueller and Constantine Yannelis, is one recent example." Read more

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "[President Trump] is thus the all-time record-holder of the Dunning-Kruger effect, the phenomenon in which the incompetent person is too incompetent to understand his own incompetence." Read more

Excerpt from Reuters -- "They found that the investment gap is driven by firms in sectors with less competition which elect to prioritize financial engineering and share buybacks over investment. Interestingly, these firms tend to be owned by institutional shareholders which shadow the equity indices, and who perhaps prefer short-term management, in line with their own career risk, over long-term investment." Read more

Excerpt from The Atlantic -- "Sarah Labowitz and Dorothée Baumann-Pauly, the authors of the study, found that of the 3,425 inspections that took place in Bangladesh in the wake of the Rana Plaza collapse, only eight factories have fixed enough of their violations to pass a final inspection, despite the fact that brands, nonprofits, and other organizations have poured more than $280 million into safety-improvement efforts. Labowitz and Baumann-Pauly estimated that the two 2013 safety initiatives still left out more than half of the country’s 5.1 million garment-factory workers." Read more

Excerpt from Factor Daily -- "...this theory, proposed by psychologists Nira Lieberman and Yaacov Trope, suggests that this construal level is a function of another concept called psychological distance. ...research by Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer has shown that using hard-to-read fonts in a message or advertising can manipulate the mind into a higher construal level, while easy-to-read fonts can lead to lower construal levels." Read more

Excerpt from The Washington Post -- "This is how the Beverly Hills Waldorf Astoria ended up as an EB-5 funded project, with $150 million in foreign investment by 300 investors at $500,000 each, according to a report by Friedland for the NYU Stern Center for Real Estate Finance Research. ... 'The original intent was to establish an incentive for immigrants to invest in areas that can’t otherwise attract conventional capital,' Friedland said. 'Instead, virtually all projects qualify. It’s merely serving to enhance the returns for those developers.'"

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Excerpt from AdExchanger -- "A lot of my book talks about the conundrum of consumers getting overwhelmed with ads and offers. The reason is that, as astonishing as it may sound, companies today still don’t have enough data about our preferences. The data exists, but it exists in silos. Someone has to come and stitch the consumer profile together. In the absence of that, brands send us an overwhelming amount of ads because they don’t have enough information about my preferences." Read more

Excerpt from The Washington Post -- "'The U.S. tax code is filled with all kinds of ornaments' that help the oil and gas industry, said Damodaran. A decades-old depletion allowance, for example, allows companies to deduct money as a natural resource is produced and sold. This comes on top of other deductions for various expenses." Read more

Excerpt from Forbes -- "Enter important new research, released last summer, which shows that companies that instill a sense of purpose reap meaningful financial benefits. 'Ultimately, our study suggests that purpose does, in fact, matter,' write two of the study’s co-authors, George Serafeim and Claudine Gartenberg, in the Harvard Business Review." Read more

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "Thomas Philippon, an economist at New York University, has published papers on the financial service industry’s share of the nation’s gross domestic product, or G.D.P. In the 1920s, finance’s share of G.D.P. doubled, with most of the growth taking place in the second half of the decade." Read more

Excerpt from Yahoo Finance -- “Baker, Wurgler and Yu Yuan, authors of the May 2012 study, ‘Global, Local, and Contagious Investor Sentiment,’ were the first to investigate the effect of global and local components of investor sentiment on major stock markets, at the level of both the country average and the time series of the cross-section of stock returns.” Read more

Excerpt from New York Magazine -- "In one study led by the NYU marketing professor Justin Kruger, Epley and his colleagues asked participants to write pairs of sentences — one serious, one sarcastic — on various topics and email them to another subject, who would guess which was which. Senders estimated the sarcastic sentence would be misidentified only 3 percent of the time. Instead, recipients got it wrong five times as often." Read more

Excerpt from Fast Co.Design -- "Segall and Labowitz spent 18 months compiling their report, published this week by the Center for Business and Human Rights at NYU’s Stern School of Business. They spoke with workers, recruitment agents, contractors, clients, and more. What they uncovered was a startling globe-crossing network in which poor workers actually end up paying to be recruited, and more." Read more

Excerpt from MarketWatch -- "Mueller and Yannelis’ research indicates that the policies the government offers to help borrowers avoid this outcome are somewhat effective. Federal student loan borrowers have the ability to pay back their loans according to their income. These plans also offer borrowers the opportunity to discharge their loans after at least 20 years of repayment. Mueller and Yannelis’ research indicates that these plans are at least partially successful at protecting borrowers from the income and employment shocks that can come from falling home prices -- as long as borrowers sign up for them." Read more

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "Millions of dollars of capital for the project came from Chinese investors hoping to qualify for visas through the immigrant investment program known as EB-5, an initiative that enables wealthy foreign investors to put themselves on a path to United States citizenship." Read more

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "Mr. Brenner, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business who helped develop the first volatility index, now is focused on what he believes will be an actionable gauge of the kind of fear now pervading the markets. 'The VIX is low because it doesn’t measure ambiguity. The uncertainty is much bigger than that,' Mr. Brenner said. 'I believe that’s what ambiguity is going to capture.'" Read more

Excerpt from Business Insider -- "This overestimation is called the Dunning-Kruger effect. It is the cognitive bias that makes less competent people overestimate their own skills while underestimating the competence of others. The term was coined in 1999 in the publication of David Dunning and Justin Kruger. The psychologists had noticed in prior studies that in areas like reading comprehension, playing chess or driving a car, ignorance leads to confidence more often than knowledge does." Read more

Excerpt from CIO -- "Rosa Abrantes-Metz, managing director of Global Economics Group, adjunct associate professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University, and a co-author of papers on price fixing involving gold, silver and LIBOR prices, said that 'with respect to gold and silver, the structure of these fixings and the empirical evidence were very telling in supporting collusion and manipulation.'" Read more

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "The health of the job market and the public’s expectation of future price increases may not have as strong an influence on price inflation as many now believe, according to a new paper written by a group of prominent economists." Read more

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "So why don’t the high profits attract competitors to build new companies—or expand existing companies into new lines of business—for less than the cost of buying stock in existing companies? The problem is longstanding, according to research by Germán Gutiérrez and Thomas Philippon at New York’s Stern School of Business. They show that the previous link between valuation and corporate investment weakened from the early 2000s, and as a result corporates have invested about 10% less than they otherwise would have done." Read more

Excerpt from Reuters -- "'We find a weak relationship between pay and performance, but a strong relationship between pay and size, measured as fee revenue,' Markus Ibert of the Stockholm School of Economics, Ron Kaniel of Rochester University, Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh of New York University and Roine Vestman of Stockholm University write." Read more

Excerpt from the Harvard Business Review -- "A classic finding in the psychology literature is the Dunning-Kruger effect (named after David Dunning and Justin Kruger, who first described it): Poor performers in a domain are more prone to overestimate their ability than good performers. Why? Poor performers are unaware of the many elements that go into expert performance, and thus they are overly confident in their ability to carry out all of the tasks necessary to succeed." Read more

Excerpt from Psychology Today -- "Research suggests that being generous often increases a person’s status within a group. But, does high status make people generous? This question was explored in a paper in the January, 2017 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by Nicholas Hays and Steven Blader." Read more

Excerpt from Fast Company -- "Behavioral scientists have also found that just asking people about their future decisions significantly influences those decisions, a phenomenon known as the 'mere measurement effect.' Back in 1993, social scientists Vicki Morwitz, Eric Johnson, and David Schmittlein conducted a study with more than 40,000 participants that revealed that simply asking someone if people were going to purchase a new car within six months increased their purchase rates by 35%." Read more

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "Paul Romer is a highly regarded macroeconomist who recently became chief economist at the World Bank. (It was Romer who is credited with having coined, in 2004, the famous slogan that 'a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.') Last winter he, too, issued a lacerating critique of his field, titled 'The Trouble With Macroeconomics.' His argument focuses on the question of 'identification,' which is shorthand in the field for how economists identify the cause of an event." Read more

Excerpt from RealClearPolitics -- "Zipf’s Law itself is interesting and important, but the mechanics behind it are what really help explain the persistent split we see in mega-urban/rest-of-the-U.S. population. Harvard Professor Xavier Gabaix has written that Zipf’s Law will hold if every city, irrespective of its size, follows roughly the same random growth processes." Read more

Excerpt from Forbes -- "[Philippon] makes the argument that over the course of a century, the financial services industry has gotten much bigger but also much less efficient. Amazingly, the financial sector of today is much less efficient than the financial sector of the past which provided the capital to support the development of the country’s railroad, steel, and chemical industries!" Read more

Excerpt from the Harvard Business Review -- "Stripped to its essentials, the Spence signaling model simply requires that there be a link between a desirable yet hidden attribute and the cost of doing something. And that something can be anything, as long as everyone knows it’s cheap for the smart and virtuous to do it, and difficult for anyone else." Read more

Excerpt from Innovation Hub -- "The arrival of a German immigrant, or any immigrant, has two opposing effects. One is if there is now an immigrant, I have to compete with that immigrant, so I may not be able to publish my papers, for example. Another one is that I can now learn from this new person and I can work with them. So what we find is that second effect dominated overall, so that American inventors became more productive after the German-Jewish immigrants arrived in the United States." Read more

Excerpt from CityLab -- "...as Friedland and Jeanne Calderon explain in a report for the Stern Center, in EB-5 deals, the developer often serves as both lender and borrower, setting terms for the loan it both generates and receives. 'The fraud uncovered to date spans all parts of the nation,' Friedland and Calderon write." Read more

Excerpt from US News & World Report -- "'Some people may find it surprising that runners actually pick one and another out [to try to beat] at these kind of races, but my experiences speaking with them suggests they indeed do,' said lead author Gavin Kilduff..." Read more