Experience Stern | News & Events

In a new study, NYU Stern Professor Adam Alter and his co-authors, Stern alumnus Eesha Sharma (PhD '13) of Dartmouth College, Dan Ariely of Duke University and Nina Mazar of the University of Toronto, find that people believe financial constraints should not excuse immoral conduct. However, when people actually feel worse off financially, they loosen their own moral standards to redress the perceived unfairness of their situation.

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "[Druckenmiller] and Canada are simply convinced that only a Vietnam-war-scale movement by the young can break through the web of special interests to force politicians to put in place the reforms that would actually secure both today’s seniors and future seniors, today’s middle class and the wanna-be middle class. (Watch their N.Y.U. presentation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbgIiAnpcPc)."

Excerpt from VentureBeat -- “[The layer design] is not confusing. We all now expect bright colors. We are increasingly addicted to more stimulation, gradation, nuances. Everything has temporariness to it, short shelf life. We’re not looking for anything fixed [or] stable. We came to terms with instability… [It feels like] sometimes it’s there, sometimes not. It’s not committed. It’s reflective of the times.”

Excerpt from Institute for New Economic Thinking -- "If Congress and the White House fail to raise the debt ceiling this week and the United States defaults on its debt, what can we expect and how can we protect ourselves against these events?"

Excerpt from Bloomberg TV -- "In developed markets, who drives luxury? Affluent people. In emerging markets, it's actually middle-class consumers. The average luxury consumer in the U.S. has $175,000 in income, she's 53 and it is a she. She spends $3,000 a year on handbags. The average luxury consumer in China makes $17,000, is 33 and spends $2,000 on handbags. The emerging middle class in these developing markets loves luxury."

Excerpt from Crain's New York -- "'The role of elite business schools should be to identify those big issues that have material relevance in the world,' said Mr. Henry, 44. 'If you have a deep interest in finance, we can make you a far more effective allocator of capital and a more impactful professional.'"

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "JPMorgan has been singled out by regulators with 'unprecedented aggressiveness,' NYU’s Smith said in an e-mail. 'Most of these settlements either would not have been necessary or would have been for much lesser amounts in Weill’s time.'”

Excerpt from Forbes -- "[Baumols' Cost Disease] is the idea that it’s much easier to improve productivity in some areas than it is in others. Specifically, Baumol is addressing the difficulty of improving labour productivity in services as against the ease with which it can be increased in manufacturing. It is this which tells us that we should expect health care and college costs to rise faster than general inflation because these are largely services provided by human labour."

Excerpt from CNBC -- "'If there is not an agreement, the resulting financial damage could even tip us into a recession,' especially because the economy is growing at a relatively paltry rate of 1.5 to 2 percent, the New York University economist said."

Excerpt from The Chicago Tribune -- "NYU's Sundararajan said consumers have clearly seen value in online services like Airbnb and Uber and regulators should create space for them. 'I'm not arguing that we should not have any regulation at all,' he said. 'But these are clearly things that people want and things that aren't inherently unsafe. So let's create a simple framework.'"

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "My advice for women early in their careers is to establish themselves as a brand that can evolve over time. Figure out what your brand stands for and how your brand can adapt as you grow in your career."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "Aswath Damodaran, a professor of finance at the Stern School of Business at New York University, is among those who think that too many companies rely too heavily on the performance of their shares when computing executive compensation. 'I’m a great believer in markets, but sometimes we need more attention paid to what did this management do to the value of the company and less to what did this management do to the price of the stock,' he said. 'I would like to see compensation systems where managers are rewarded based on what kind of projects they are working on and how big their returns on invested capital are.'”

Excerpt from Forbes -- "To explore the new implications of this vastly improved evolutionary theory for business, we recently organized a one-day symposium at Stern titled 'Darwin’s Business: New Evolutionary Thinking About Cooperation, Groups, Firms and Societies.' The conference featured an international roster of experts on evolution, economics, and human nature."

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "We find that a significant determinant of an optimal asymptotic government debt or government debt-GDP ratio is how interest rate risks are correlated with risks to fundamentals that threaten to widen or narrow inequality in after-tax and after-transfer incomes."

In honor of the 40th anniversary of the celebrated paper, "Theory of Rational Option Pricing," Myron Scholes, Robert Merton and Steve Ross will join some of the most active and influential researchers in the field today to discuss how derivatives theory and practice have developed since 1973 and where they are headed.

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "I strongly recommend that the G.A.O. study the work of Professors Warburton, Anginer and Acharya and of Professors Kelly, Lustig and Van Nieuwerburgh carefully, while assessing the industry arguments with a great deal of skepticism."

Excerpt from Forbes -- "Haidt argues that the six intuitive foundations of morality are caring, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority and sanctity. The traits of caring, fairness and liberty resonate with both liberals and conservatives. But liberals are ambivalent about notions of loyalty, authority and sanctity. One could argue this ambivalence undermines solid, decisive leadership and thus truly holds back societal progress."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- “'Why live in cities?' Mr. Florida asked Wednesday at NYU’s Stern School of Business, where he interviewed venture capitalist Fred Wilson, managing partner of Union Square Ventures and Flatiron Partners. As an investor in firms such as Twitter Inc., MongoDB Inc., Tumblr, Foursquare, Kickstarter and Zynga, Mr. Wilson has played a key role in the emergence of New York City as a tech hub, and also in San Francisco’s rise as an alternative to the startup scene in neighboring Silicon Valley."

As a part of the Conversations on Urbanization series held by NYU Stern’s Urbanization Project, NYU Global Research Professor Richard Florida spoke with Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures in a public presentation on October 9.

Excerpt from Marketplace -- "White says Bernanke’s daring moves kept the economy from going off a cliff. At the same time, he says, Bernanke broke with convention to change the culture of the notoriously cryptic Fed, making it 'a more open, less mysterious place.'”

Excerpt from Scientific American -- "'A pervasive problem around the world is that city governments are not strong enough,' Romer said, citing the example of New York City seizing land from private property owners in 1811 to construct the present street grid. 'Very few city governments in the world can do what New York City did in 1811, and that's what is holding us back.'"

Excerpt from CNBC -- "Twitter's valuation is in the eye of the beholder, Aswath Damodaran of the New York University Stern School of Business said Tuesday. 'I really think it depends on what you call yourself. If you're a trader, then all bets are off. You're betting on price,' he said. 'If you're an investor and you think about value, I think at $20 billion, an awful lot has to go right for that $20 billion to be a break-even, forget about making money.'"

Excerpt from Slate -- "Curbing interest rates for certain classes of popular credit products could save consumers money (cheap credit) or it could merely lead people to be unable to access credit (like when price controls create supply shortages). Sumit Agarwal, Souphala Chomsisengphet, Neale Mahoney, and Johannes Stroebel look at one such regulation—the 2009 Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure (CARD) Act—and find that it's saved people lots of money..."

Ellen Seidman, the 2013-2014 Citi Leadership & Ethics Distinguished Fellow and former director of the US Treasury Department’s Office of Thrift Supervision, met with students and faculty this month.

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "It is easy to be skeptical about disclosure requirements of this kind. Will consumers pay any attention? It turns out that many of them do so. Sumit Agarwal of the National University of Singapore (along with co-authors from the University of Chicago, New York University and the U.S. Treasury Department) finds that the consequence of the nudge was to reduce interest payments by $74 million a year."