Experience Stern | News & Events

Xavier Gabaix, NYU Stern Professor of Finance, was awarded the 2012 Lagrange-CRT Foundation Prize for his research in complex systems, in particular for his work on power laws in financial markets and macroeconomics. Each year, the international Prize is awarded to a scientist or scientists under the age of 50 for their achievements, theoretical and experimental, relevant to the progress, applications and dissemination of complexity science.

Excerpt from MSNBC -- "'A bank’s board can only defend you to the death for a short time,' Smith said. 'After that, the board will say it’s you or us, and so they’ll undercut you. Boards tends to get very skittish when their reputation is at risk.'"

Excerpt from Bloomberg Businessweek -- "The estimate comes from a paper Frederic Schweikhard and Zoe Tsesmelidakis presented in late May to an NYU Stern School of Business conference on credit risk. The pair, both PhD candidates at Goethe University Frankfurt, relied on a time-proven tool of finance – the Merton model of pricing corporate debt–to come up with their estimate."

Excerpt from Journal of Applied IT and Investment Management -- "Today’s global financial problems are probably as severe as those faced in the early 1930s. Time will tell. But the top tier of global financial institutions are far bigger than they were back then."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "What’s important now is how the health care sector will evolve under the new framework. And here, there are grounds for optimism. While the effects of the court’s Medicaid restrictions aren’t entirely clear, the law will certainly extend coverage to tens of millions who now lack it."

Excerpt from The Japan Times -- "'What we have come to realize is that the world is changing too fast and that globalization means that no competitive advantage is sustainable in the long run,' [Wiesenfeld] said. 'We are now trying to teach organizations how to be ambidextrous, which in the context of innovation means to both cut costs and be efficient and deliver quality on one hand, and at the same time be constantly exploring and looking for new ideas and innovations on the other.'"

Excerpt from The Economist -- "Research led by Alexander Ljungqvist of New York University’s Stern School of Business has shown that VC firms in influential network positions perform better, as they have more opportunity to take part in syndications. The moral seems to be that investors should make friends easily, but not invest for friendship’s sake alone."

Excerpt from CFO Magazine -- "As Aswath Damodaran, professor of New York University defines it, the ERP is the 'extra return that investors collectively demand for investing their money in stocks instead of holding it in a riskless or close-to-riskless investment.'"

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "Nobody who engages in political argument, and who isn't a moron, hasn't had to recognize the fact that decent, honest, intelligent people can come to opposite conclusions on public issues. Jonathan Haidt, in an eye-opening and deceptively ambitious best seller, tells us why. The reason is evolution."

Excerpt from Forbes -- "Our updated bottom-up results through the end of 2011 are startling and highly indicative of the profound deterioration of all European nations in just one year, with Italy and France 'leading the way' down."

Excerpt from Bloomberg Businessweek -- "'Clearly, the bigger you get, the harder it is to generate alpha,' says Jim Liew, a professor of hedge fund strategies at New York University’s Stern School of Business."

Excerpt from Europe Central Bank -- "Without doubt, Lasse Pedersen has been one of the leading minds that have re-shaped our thinking about financial markets, as his contributions during the past decade have greatly improved our understanding of the driving forces behind systemic financial crises and the propagation of liquidity shocks across markets and throughout the economy."

Excerpt from Bloomberg TV -- "This isn't a great business but even to call it a split is somewhat generous to the print company. This is more like a shedding because if you look at the likely market cap of the print co it's probably going to be somewhere in the range of about 3 billion which is about half of what Rupert paid for just the Wall Street Journal a few years ago."

Excerpt from CNBC Squawk Box -- "Facebook knows more about people than anyone else. People have provided that data voluntarily so that's a tremendous resource that they can monetize."

Excerpt from Bloomberg TV -- "At some point the Germans are going to decide, do I take the credit risk of backstopping Italian and Spanish debt in exchange for some loss of national fiscal sovereignty by Italy and Spain in which case the Eurozone has a chance to survive or otherwise this thing may be dissolved in the next few months."

Excerpt from Poets & Quants -- "A four-credit program beginning June 11th for non-business majors, Stern Foundations, the program is composed of four mini-courses in the key business disciplines of accounting, finance, management and marketing. And then there is New York City, a wide open laboratory for all things business and cultural."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "'It’s been clear to the bigger banks that public policy is not looking favorably upon bigness,' said Lawrence White, an economics professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. 'If they’re shrinking, that means they’re going to be doing less stuff, including making fewer loans.'"

Excerpt from The New Yorker -- "Jonathan Haidt, a professor of psychology at New York University’s business school, argues in a new book, 'The Righteous Mind,' that to understand human beings, and their politics, you need to understand that we are descended from ancestors who would not have survived if they hadn’t been very good at belonging to groups."

Excerpt from The New Yorker -- "[Sargent] doesn’t venture to make prescriptions for Europe. 'It seems a lot of the advice I see in the press is naïve,' he said. 'Many of the recommendations would require that institutions violate the rules and laws under which they were created and are run.' The European Central Bank is legally constrained in what it can do."

Excerpt from Reuters -- "In the 1980s, U.S. savings-and-loans were felled by such a rate squeeze, as well as risky investments they made, said Lawrence White, an economics professor at New York University's Stern School of Business and a former savings and loans regulator. Wells can hedge this risk and has a much more diversified balance sheet than the savings-and-loans had, White said."

Excerpt from CBS News -- "Recently, there have been several papers focusing on what is called "investor sentiment" -- the propensity of individuals to trade on "noise" and emotions rather than facts. ... Two researchers, Malcolm Baker and Jeffrey Wurgler, have constructed an investor sentiment index based on the six measures."

Excerpt from Forbes India -- "A key differentiator of Aral’s and Walker’s study is that it avoids known biases in current methods. The jargon for this is ‘Homophily bias’. ... 'Our method solves this problem and other estimation challenges using randomization,' says Aral."

In a new paper, published today in Science, Sinan Aral, NYU Stern Assistant Professor of Information, Operations and Management Sciences, and his co-author Dylan Walker, a research scientist at Stern, present a new method to measure influence and susceptibility in social networks.

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "The eurozone is going to stand or fall on the reform programs, Tom and Sarah, in Spain and in Italy and those reforms need time to take effect and get done and so there this issue of yield that was just discussed on the program a moment ago and basically we need intervention by the eurozone core institutions and the IMF to keep these yields under control while the reform programs work. And in order to do that they're going to have to do something that's similar to buying the bonds."

Excerpt from New Scientist -- "Random selection of who gets the message allowed the researchers to avoid common pitfalls in measuring influence, such as homophily bias – the principle that we tend to make friends with people like ourselves. 'If two friends adopt a product one after the other, current methods have a hard time distinguishing whether it is because of peer influence, or rather that the friends simply have similar preferences,' explains Aral."