Experience Stern | News & Events

Professor Thomas Philippon has been awarded the 2013 Bernácer Prize, which is given annually to a European economist under the age of 40 who has made outstanding contributions in the fields of macroeconomics and finance.

Excerpt from Harvard Business Review -- "The index is compiled by Pankaj Ghemawat, a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business and the IESE Business School in Barcelona, and Steven Altman, a lecturer at IESE. Ghemawat, a frequent HBR contributor, began arguing in 2007, with the book Redefining Global Strategy, that the world isn’t nearly as flat as Tom Friedman said it was."

Excerpt from The Huffington Post -- "Mortgage subsidies through federal agencies are the modern-day version of the Homestead Act. But unlike the land grants of the 19th century, government loan subsidies have proven to be a rather bad idea. They drive up prices and increase the size of the average house, at the same time that they encourage people with little savings and highly variable incomes to purchase homes and shoulder the risks of house price fluctuations. The result -- as we saw in the 'subprime crisis' -- was ruinous for the borrowers, the lenders and the economy as a whole."

Excerpt from Slate -- "First buy her the book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt. Hand it to her and say since you’re both in a book club, you thought that this would speak to the problem you two are having about your differing political views. Then say that you would appreciate if she would stop bringing up politics and denigrating your husband. Explain that Haidt shows how people can look across this divide and understand each other better."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "Perhaps [globalization] was never quite what people thought it was a few years ago, because I think a few years ago, the rhetoric was about whether distance was dead, the world was flat, et cetera, and now the rhetoric has shifted to, is globalization over? And what our study points out is both extremes are probably missing the mark. Globalization never was complete, but it did show an uptick last year."

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "In Global Perspectives on Enterprise Systems, an NYU elective led by Prof George Smith, our class examined Wedgwood’s life story and the lessons it offered. The course looks to answer some very important questions: why have Britain, the US, Germany and Japan been so prosperous over recent centuries? Why did these countries modernise their economies before their respective peers? Why did their reforms work and what lessons can we draw for other nations today?"

Excerpt from Strategy + Business -- "Forecasts aside, the results to date are unequivocal: The challenges of doing business abroad are daunting and will remain so. However, business leaders should not be too gloomy. Large untapped opportunities to create value across national borders still exist. In a world of semi-globalization, where markets are only partially integrated, smart strategies can still create big profits by scaling business across borders and arbitraging across international differences, especially when those efforts are coupled with appropriate adaptation to local and national contexts."

Excerpt from The New Yorker -- "The brute fact is that most mergers don’t work. Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at N.Y.U., has said, 'More value is destroyed by acquisitions than by any other single action taken by companies.'"

NYU Stern alumni, faculty, corporate partners and guests convened for the launch of the School’s new Center for the Globalization of Education & Management (CGEM), which Professor Pankaj Ghemawat, who joined Stern’s faculty full time this September, is leading.

Excerpt from The Economist -- "[Family businesses] also tend to have better labour relations, according to studies by Holger Mueller and Thomas Philippon of New York University’s Stern business school. This may be because workers are readier to believe promises that they will be rewarded for delivering in the long run, if such pledges are made by founding families rather than outsider bosses who may be gone in a few years."

Excerpt from Fox Business -- "My question is, what are you doing at the centralized account level above and beyond just listing all the stuff they've saved and they want to purchase? Are you helping them make better decisions? Are you adding value there?"

Excerpt from Project Syndicate -- "So the question is whether and for how long the global economy can remain aloft on a single engine. Weakness in the rest of the world implies a stronger dollar, which will invariably weaken US growth. The deeper the slowdown in other countries and the higher the dollar rises, the less the US will be able to decouple from the funk everywhere else, even if domestic demand seems robust."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "Amazon.com Inc. would have to overcome a decade’s worth of falling profitability during the next 10 years to justify its share price, according to Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at New York University. ...'If the operating margin stays at 7.5 percent or lower, you cannot get above the current stock price' in calculating Amazon’s value in a decade, Damodaran wrote on his Musings on Markets blog."

Excerpt from Project Syndicate -- "Scientific evidence has eliminated legitimate doubts about the scale of the risks that climate change poses. Now, the Global Commission’s analysis has largely refuted the economic arguments for inaction. Add to that growing public concern about climate change, and the conditions for decisive action may have arrived."

On October 31, AHBBS hosted NYU Stern's first Diversity Case Competition, in association with MCA, GFA, OutClass, SWIB and SIMR.

Excerpt from Policy Network -- "Governments need to understand and embrace this ongoing transition rather than impeding it, realizing that society’s interests are best served if they wield regulatory power to proactively partner with or delegate responsibility to the platforms. In tandem, forward-looking platforms should embrace their new responsibilities, rather than resisting them: participating in the provision of the social safety net is smart capitalism in the long run."

Excerpt from The New Yorker -- "The topics that social psychologists chose to study and how they chose to study them, he argued, suffered from homogeneity. The effect was limited, Haidt was quick to point out, to areas that concerned political ideology and politicized notions, like race, gender, stereotyping, and power and inequality. 'It’s not like the whole field is undercut, but when it comes to research on controversial topics, the effect is most pronounced,' he later told me. (Haidt has now put his remarks in more formal terms, complete with data, in a paper forthcoming this winter in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.)"

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "On October 27, Professors Viral Acharya and Sascha Steffen published an alternative estimate, using a different methodology, for 39 publicly listed eurozone banks with a combined balance sheet of €12.5tn (a subset of the banks in the EBA stress test and the ECB’s AQR). They calculated a shortfall of €450bn at the end of 2013 – about 3.6 per cent of assets."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "Kim Schoenholtz, an economics professor at New York University, said the Fed’s bond purchases were particularly effective and important in stabilizing the financial system and stimulating the broader economy in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis. But he said that the impact of the purchases had diminished as conditions improved, and that it now made sense to end the program. 'I applaud the Fed’s willingness to be aggressive, especially early on in the crisis, and it has made sense for the Fed to run a very accommodative policy,' Mr. Schoenholtz said. 'But we should not be surprised that monetary policy has diminishing returns.'"

Excerpt from The Huffington Post -- "The many benefits of mindfulness, namely meditation, are staggering. Studies show that maintaining a mindful practice like meditation can reduce stress, extend life, boost your academic abilities, and even increase your overall happiness. Mindfulness can even make you a better leader. Not surprisingly many companies like General Mills and schools like the NYU Stern School of Business have developed initiatives to cultivate and promote mindful wellbeing, scholarship, and leadership among employees and students."

Excerpt from Forbes -- "It’s brilliant work by economists from the Stern School of Business and Harvard Business School, Alexander Ljungqvist, Joan Farre-Mensa, and John Asker, in an article entitled 'Corporate Investment and Stock Market Listing: A Puzzle?' which compares the investment patterns of public companies and privately held firms. It turns out that the lag in investment is a phenomenon of the public companies more than the privately held firms."

Excerpt from The Daily Star -- "Knowing how the apparel supply chain really operates is the first step toward fixing it. And while this information on its own will not make factories safer, more transparency is a necessary predicate to developing the kind of comprehensive action plan that is urgently needed in Bangladesh."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "I think that what's going to happen is, you end QE and then the question is when do you start lifting rates, and that could be pushed further in the future depending on the data. ... essentially, policy action depends on growth, unemployment, inflation and also global headwinds. And the dollar."

Excerpt from The Washington Post -- "When the facts conflict with...sacred values, almost everyone finds a way to stick with their values and reject the evidence. On the left, including the academic left, the most sacred issues involve race and gender. So that's where you find the most direct and I'd say flagrant denial of evidence. I think the results of this study do clearly show that political concerns influence the willingness of sociologists to consider a major class of causal factors in human behavior."