Experience Faculty & Research

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "... Universities are these amazing things going all the way back to Plato's academy outside of Athens with different norms -- norms of truth-seeking. And what's happening is, as American society is getting much more polarized, and the cross-partisan hatred is ramping up and ripping apart some institutions, because universities lean left, as many institutions lean one way or the other, there's ever more pressure on left-leaning views and the quality of thinking suffers."  Read more

Excerpt from the Financial Times -- "In a paper presented at the Brookings Institution last week, Germán Gutiérrez and Thomas Philippon show how investment has fallen relative to profitability."    Read more

Excerpt from Travel + Leisure -- "'Consumers do not just focus on individual experiences. Instead, they categorize and manage experiences... For positive experiences, consumers are reluctant to eliminate categories, while the opposite is true for negative experiences because eliminating categories makes it feel like more of the experience has passed,' write authors Anuj K. Shah (University of Chicago Booth School of Business) and Adam L. Alter (New York University)." Read more

Excerpt from Benefit News -- "There’s other research by Lisa Leslie and Colleen Manchester that didn’t look at gender or parental status, but looked at what does your manager assume the reason for your flexible work arrangement is. If the manager believes that you’re working at home for some productivity reason, then that’s viewed positively. If the manager assumes you’re working at home for a family reason, then that’s judged negatively." Read more

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "Across an entire city, those costs outweigh the benefits of foreign investment, according to two finance professors, Jack Favilukis of the University of British Columbia and Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh of New York University. They modeled what happens when a market like New York City is shocked by an inflow of absentee out-of-town buyers. ... 'And then there are costs that are harder to quantify,' Professor Van Nieuwerburgh said. 'The texture of the city, the socioeconomic makeup of the city, is changing.'" Read more

Excerpt from MetroMBA -- "Barasch explains how her group’s research could impact business, consumers and educators down the road. 'If you want to retain more information from a guided tour, for example, you may be better served to put the camera away. Similarly, teachers may ask students to take photos on a non-narrated museum visit to aid their visual memories.'"
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Excerpt from Credit.com -- "Research from NYU professor Priya Raghubir and University of Maryland professor Joydeep Srivastava shows that using physical cash makes people less likely to overspend because they “feel the outflow of money” more directly. Spending too much on a credit card can also lead to high interest charges if you don’t pay the balance in time." Read more

Excerpt from Quartz -- "...in our study, we found that having digital photos was not as effective as physical photos. In fact, the ease of instantaneously sharing digital photos may inhibit how often we talk about our experiences. Back in the old days, we’d wait until we finished a roll of film and then bring it to the store to get printed. So waiting for the pictures kept the experience top of mind. Then, we’d take the pictures around to our friends one by one (or group by group) and get to share our experience over and over again. Now, we simply post it on social media once and we’re done." Read more

Excerpt from the World Trademark Review -- “The research … casts serious doubt on the validity of the best evidence we have that trademark dilution actually exists. What has been reported as (and assumed to be) evidence of trademark dilution may actually be merely the result of nothing more than the subjects being surprised by seeing ads such as those for MERCEDES and INFINITI toothpaste employed in our studies. We are forced to reconsider the question the title of this paper: is dilution a unicorn?” Read more

Excerpt from Bloomberg View -- "In an influential 2014 paper, Thomas Philippon speculated that financial industry profits and salaries rose spectacularly since 1980 because banks, securities firms and fund-management companies found new methods for extracting rent." Read more

Excerpt from The Australian -- "Claudine Gartenberg, Andrea Prat and George Serafeim analysed responses from 456,666 employees in 429 firms over six years and across a broad range of industries. In their paper, Corporate Purpose and Financial Performance (hbswk.hbs.edu/item/corporate-purpose-and-financial-performance), published by Harvard Business School last year, the trio found that 'firms exhibiting both high purpose and clarity have systematically higher future accounting and stock market performance'." Read more

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "For example, a 2014 paper by John Asker, Joan Farre-Mensa and Alexander Ljungqvist found that 'compared to private firms, public firms invest substantially less and are less responsive to changes in investment opportunities.' Also, there’s evidence that founder-led companies tend to outperform." Read more

Excerpt from Bloomberg View -- "We find that funds with greater investment by insiders outperform funds with less 'skin in the game' on a factor-adjusted basis; exhibit greater return persistence; and feature lower fund flow-performance sensitivities. These results suggest that managers earn outsize rents by operating trading strategies further from their capacity constraints when managing their own money." Read more

Excerpt from Niche Hunt -- "With the rapidly growing amount of visual brand-related content consumers create on social media, images are a promising tools for marketers and brand managers to track their brands‘ performance.The study, Visual Listening In: Extracting Brand Image Portrayed on Social Media, published in SSRN by Professor Natalie Mizik of University of Washington, Liu Liu and Professor Daria Dzyabura of NYU Stern School of Business, proposes an approach to leveraging image data by extracting scores of brand perceptual attributes expressed in the images." Read more

Excerpt from CBS News -- "The paper's authors -- NYU professors Theresa Kuchler and Johannes Stroebel; Ruiqing Cao, a graduate student at Harvard, and Michael Bailey, an economist at Facebook -- reached their conclusions by analyzing more than 1,200 Facebook accounts in Los Angeles County, noting their interactions with far-flung friends and matching those users, on an anonymized basis, to property transaction records." Read more

Excerpt from Psychology Today -- "No, research has found that firing a CEO is the last thing a board should do. Instead, they should hit them where it hurts, in the pocket. Instead, the board of British Airways should draw on insights from our recent study from behavioral science by keeping the executives but asking them to deposit part of their salary and bonus for paying for the losses—that is, BA’s estimated £150 million compensation bill. (Study authors include Chengwei Liu, Ivo Vlaev, Christina Fang, Jerker Denrell and Nick Chater.)" Read more

Excerpt from EPFL Magazine -- "The ARCH model is sort of a fundamental tool, the most commonly used tool for short-run risk measure by financial institutions, hedge funds, pension funds, banks — all sorts of institutions use this measure and I think it helps provide some measure of security and discipline to managing risk. But more broadly, ARCH is a tool that helps finance people do better statistics." Read more

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "A 2016 study by Ethan Mollick of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and Jason Greenberg of New York University’s Stern School on crowdfunding campaigns showed that potential male funders didn’t care whether a project was created by a man or women. Two-thirds of women thought a project was better when told it was created by a man than the project created by a woman, even when it was exactly the same project." Read more

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