Experience Faculty & Research

This month, the Business Roundtable, a group comprising the CEO’s of America’s largest and most powerful corporations, formally abandoned the view that maximizing shareholder value should be a company’s primary objective. The implication is that shareholders will no longer always take precedence over other stakeholders such as customers, employees, suppliers, and the communities in which firms operate. In its statement justifying the move, the organization cites the need to pay fair wages, provide more benefits, and invest in training to help employees navigate a rapidly changing economy. Read More...

There are three negative supply shocks that could trigger a global recession by 2020. All of them reflect political factors affecting international relations, two involve China, and the United States is at the center of each. Moreover, none of them is amenable to the traditional tools of countercyclical macroeconomic policy. Read More...

The Business Roundtable this week released a statement announcing a new focus on creating value for all stakeholders, not just shareholders. But what does it mean, and how can the 200 executives who signed the statement follow through? What do Bechtel Group, American Express, Chubb, Target, Carlyle Group, JPMorgan and Tishman Speyer have in common? Their CEOs were just six of the nearly 200 executives who signed the Business Roundtable’s new “Statement on the Purpose of the Corporation,” taking out a full two-page ad in the Wall Street Journal on August 19 to explain the need to move on from the idea that “corporations exist principally to serve their shareholders.” As a customer or an employee of a company, we have all at one time or another experienced the challenge of feeling that the company is putting profits before customer experience or employee benefits or the community. Read More...

Why it’s not as easy to see as you might think, and how you can make everyday changes to reduce your plastic use. This spring I was on a cruise off Bermuda, some 650-plus miles off the mainland United States. The sea was azure—the color of the sky on a clear blue day. The water was crystal clear other than a few golden strands of sargassum seaweed. I was on the boat with an intrepid group of major plastic producers and users (Dow Chemical, Clorox, Nestlé Waters, Coca-Cola), nonprofit organizations (Greenpeace, WWF), social entrepreneurs, investors, funders and academics like me. We were gathered by SoulBuffalo, our host, to experience the ocean plastics challenge firsthand and to use our time confined together at sea to determine what we might do about it. And there was horror lurking beneath. Read More...

Something is going badly wrong for American teenagers, as we can see in the statistics on depression, anxiety, and suicide. Something is going very wrong on many college campuses, as we can see in the rise in efforts to disinvite or shout down visiting speakers, and in changing norms about speech, including a recent tendency to evaluate speech in terms of safety and danger. This new culture of “safetyism” is bad for students and bad for universities. Read More...

Two stories involving the news media broke this week. One received much more attention than it deserved--an awkward New York Times headline that liberals said went too easy on President Donald Trump, while the other, an ominous merger of the nation’s two largest newspaper chains, was buried in the business pages. The more significant and troubling story described the merger of Gannett GateHouse Media, a combination likely to hasten the demise of local news coverage throughout the United States. Read More...

The mass shootings in Texas and Ohio last weekend have rekindled the decades-old debate about gun regulation. While the role of the National Rifle Association is central to the debate, far too little attention is being paid to the gun industry itself and its relationship to the NRA. A closer look at the business model of the gun industry and the role that gun manufacturers play in thwarting meaningful restrictions on gun ownership and gun violence is long overdue. Read More...

The eighteenth-century British economist Adam Smith has long been revered as the founder of modern economics, a thinker who, in his great works The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, discerned critical aspects of how market economies function. But the insights that earned Smith his exalted reputation are not nearly as unassailable as they once seemed. Read More...

When I was 9 years old, the New York Times published a picture of me looking at one of the moon rocks brought back by the astronauts. The year was 1969, and my father worked at the Museum of Natural History; the paper wanted a shot with a kid looking at a symbol of our future in space. So I got to see up close what everyone else had to view inside a large box (not that it looked different than an ordinary backyard rock). Fast forward 50 years, and what do we have going on in space now? In the United States, NASA has retired its space shuttles, ceding the ground to billionaires taking space exploration private—Elon Musk with SpaceX, Jeff Bezos with Blue Origin and Richard Branson with Virgin Galactic are the most well-known. Read More...

In a recent column Raghuram Rajan, the former governor of the Reserve Bank of India made the case for why the Budget decision to issue foreign currency debt has no real benefit and poses enormous risks (bit.ly/2YWNmW0). While some of Rajan’s arguments are worth pondering, others are simply invalid. It is important, therefore, to subject these arguments to close scrutiny. Read More...

This week, the U.S. government imposed historic sanctions on Myanmar’s top military leader, General Min Aung Hlaing, and three other senior generals.These sanctions were applied in response to the military’s brutal attacks against the Rohingya Muslim population, which the United Nations has labeled a genocide. The military still wields supreme authority in Myanmar, but now the U.S. has called out its most powerful officials and held them personally accountable. The Trump administration has mostly moved backward on human rights, but the Myanmar sanctions deserve praise. Read More...

There is a good reason why every civilized country in the world tightly regulates its financial system. The 2008 global financial crisis, after all, was largely the result of rolling back financial regulation. Crooks, criminals, and grifters are a fact of life, and no financial system can serve its proper purpose unless investors are protected from them. Read More...

Driving my youngest son to and from college outside Albany, N.Y., the past few years has been a trip down memory lane. I grew up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, so upstate to me has always been the great outdoors: canoeing on the Delaware River, hiking the Appalachian Trail, and skiing in the Adirondacks. Motoring along the New York Thruway these days, not much seems to have changed since the 1970s, including the “I Love New York” highway signs and the giant dude-ranch billboard by Exit 18 at New Paltz. Like Rip Van Winkle, the economy of upstate New York has gone to sleep for the past few decades. Read More...

Democracy, it is often said, began in Greece — but lately Athens has been struggling to make its invention work well. At elections last Sunday, voters ejected the left-leaning Syriza government led by Alexis Tsipras and turned to Kyriakos Mitsotakis and his conservative New Democracy. Unfortunately, further disappointment seems all too likely. The new leader inherits problems that will be extremely difficult to solve — and that raise questions for Europe as a whole. Read More...