Experience Stern | Faculty & Research

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...

The antitrust concerns for Google and Facebook are similar. Both companies allow free access to their respective service in return for the user granting free access to his/her personal information. This information includes IP address, cookies, location, search history (and possibly parsing of emails) for Google and user posting and user “likes” history for Facebook. Data collection by the companies occurs with “no questions asked” since the default is to opt-in in the collection processes of both companies. The default opt-in and the zero price in data collection constitute a market failure. That is, the market between the user and company on acquisition of data does not function properly as a market, and everyone is giving their personal data for free. If the default were opt-out rather than opt-in and the market for data acquisition was properly functioning, users would receive various amounts of monetary compensation from the companies depending on each user’s features. 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...

If we continue the STEM conversation as it stands, the U.S. is staring down a bleak future. Well intended as they are, the educational initiatives currently in place meant to equip our kids today and our country tomorrow with the ability to compete and win globally simply can’t get us there. 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...

Puerto Rico's debt restructuring is pitting pension beneficiaries against bondholders, and based on recent news, it seems pensioners are going to come out ahead. While the commonwealth is a unique entity with debilitating fiscal issues, it has lessons for those states and municipalities with seriously underfunded pension plans. Pension benefits are well-protected by law and kicking the can down the road is not a solution. Now may be a good time to act to ensure these plans remain solvent. 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...

In September 2015, Mark Carney gave a speech in which he argued that: "[T]he combination of the weight of scientific evidence and the dynamics of the financial system suggest that, in the fullness of time, climate change will threaten financial resilience and longer-term prosperity.” 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...