Experience Stern | News & Events

Neil Blumenthal, co-founder and co-CEO of Warby Parker, joined Langone MBA students for a 2013-2014 Langone Speaker Series event. Professor Charlie Murphy moderated the discussion, beginning with a one-on-one interview and followed by an open Q&A session with students.

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "Andrea Frazzini, one of the study's authors, a finance professor at New York University and a vice president at AQR, said the Berkshire portfolio has, on average, been leveraged to a similar extent through Mr. Buffett's career."

Excerpt from MarketWatch -- "The financial sector is actually less efficient than it was before ATMs and online trading and collateralized debt obligations, Philippon has found. In real terms, financial services cost more now than they did when J.P. Morgan’s clerks filled in the ledger by hand."

Excerpt from The Economist -- "In 2014, the non-jihadist opposition in Syria will recognise that without active international support, there is little choice but to negotiate with an Assad regime that is beginning to reconsolidate control in Syria. We won’t see a formal end to the conflict in 2014, but violence is likely to lessen as the balance of force swings heavily to the government."

Excerpt from TheWorkBuzz -- "In 'The Talent Equation,' a new book I authored with Lorin Hitt (Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania) and Prasanna Tambe (Stern School, New York University), we examine what employers can do to change the hiring environment and why education is fundamental to strengthening our labor force. Even in today’s recovering economy, education has retained its high value and is still the strongest step you can take in your career."

The Urbanization Project’s Brown Bag Discussion Series brings together students, scholars, and practitioners from NYU and NYC to talk with featured guests about their ongoing urban-related work.

Excerpt from Financial News -- "The 'open for business' speech delivered by Bank of England Governor Mark Carney at the end of October was a new milepost in the policy of lending of last resort (LOLR). Authorities around the world have now conceded that central banks will, in times of stress, provide abundant liquidity to any or all systemically important institutions. Unfortunately, guaranteed liquidity enables and encourages firms to take excessive risks. Well aware of this 'moral hazard' effect, authorities have responded with stricter regulations and new resolution powers. We are skeptical, however, that a new regulatory regime—even if an improvement over previous ones—can close off all channels of excessive risk and leverage."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "Our main problem is that we don't have enough aggregate demand and what our economy is doing is restoring some of the domestic demand slowly and accessing some of the external demand because we're becoming more competitive."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "Research by Jennie Bai, Professor Philippon and Alexi Savov shows that even as the differential between buying and selling stocks and bonds has fallen, prices aren’t better. Prices have displayed the same ability to forecast corporate futures steadily for the last 50 years."

Excerpt from ERE.net -- "If you’re familiar at all with HR trends of the past few years, you’ve likely heard the employment branding topic come up countless times in conversation, trade publications, and the HR blogosphere. But even after years in the spotlight, most people involved with the hiring process claim they don’t think their companies have an employment brand or aren’t sure they have a definable employment brand — that includes 74 percent of hiring managers and 48 percent of HR managers, according to a 2011 CareerBuilder survey. However, everyone has an employment brand whether they know it or not. Employers and workers contribute to its creation, as do the job seekers who receive the recruitment content and form perceptions of a company."

Excerpt from Fox Business -- "Grass is not going to grow in the streets of America, but at the same time, this is not a good rule. It makes these activities even more expensive or just impossible and drives them either offshore or into shadows somewhere. It's just not a sensible way to proceed."

Excerpt from The New Yorker -- "Easterners are puzzled by the Western preoccupation with the number thirteen, but many people in China, Taiwan, Singapore, and other East Asian countries similarly fear the number four. One analysis, to be published late next year, found that U.S. copper, cotton, and soybeans experience lower commodities-market returns on the fourth day of each month, when superstitious Chinese brokers prefer to postpone their trading decisions. Both Samsung and Nokia avoid cell phone-model numbers containing the digit four, and Nokia’s S60 software platform released its fifth edition immediately after its third edition."

Excerpt from iVillage -- "Anindya Ghose, an NYU professor who studies consumer reviews, said Vine members might review things more positively than people who had to pay for their stuff. 'As humans we are hard-wired to give in to this sort of enticement where if you continuously get things for free, then you're more likely to be biased positively than biased negatively,' he said."

Excerpt from BDLive -- "'Interacting with investors is not only about giving information,' says Lev. 'Information flows both ways: executives can learn from investors. Stock price movements around earnings announcements reveal a lot about investors’ growth expectations and their perceptions of management’s credibility.'"

Excerpt from Reuters -- "The air zone declaration and its aftermath make it clear that China intends for its security position to win out in the East China Sea, and expects it to be a faster process, given the shift of the regional security and economic power balance in its favor."

As a part of the Conversations on Urbanization series held by NYU Stern’s Urbanization Project, Senior Research Scholar Shlomo (Solly) Angel spoke with Dr. Joan Clos, United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of UN-Habitat and former mayor of Barcelona, in a public presentation on December 9.

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "The Volcker rule will certainly usher in change on Wall Street. As William Silber, a New York University professor and author of 'Volcker: The Triumph of Persistence,' a biography of Mr. Volcker, says: 'If a firm like Goldman Sachs, which is now a bank, can’t speculate, then the pendulum will swing.'"

Excerpt from Bloomberg TV -- "If you become more data-driven, you start thinking about a younger consumer, you understand emerging technologies and platforms...those kinds of skills lend themselves well to all kinds of things in addition to ecommerce. So what we're seeing is the firms that are really committing to strong digital have this sort of rising-tide effect across the entire enterprise and we're seeing it linked to greater shareholder returns. So digital is moving to the center and firms are really thinking about, 'How do we make this part of our culture?'"

Excerpt from CBN -- "2013 CBN Financial Books of the Year 'Big Winner' goes to: Volcker: The Triumph of Persistence, by William L. Silber."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "A paper by two economists, Xavier Gabaix of New York University and David Laibson of Harvard, provides an explanation. When people are choosing a product or service, they don’t pay close attention to all of its features. When I signed up for cable, I wasn’t thinking about the headaches of canceling down the road."

Excerpt from Motley Fool -- "After analyzing the universe of stocks that traded publicly for at least 30 years between 1926 and 2011, the authors concluded that Berkshire Hathaway, under Buffett's stewardship, had the highest Sharpe ratio (which measures risk-adjusted performance) of them all. On top of this, the authors found that Buffett had a higher Sharpe ratio than 'all U.S. mutual funds that have been around for more than 30 years.'"

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- “'Buffett’s performance appears not to be luck, but an expression that value and quality investing can be implemented,' said Andrea Frazzini and David Kabiller of AQR Capital Management LLC and Lasse H. Pedersen of Copenhagen Business School. 'If you travel back in time and pick one stock in 1976, Berkshire would be your pick.'”

Three teams of first-year MBA students went head-to-head, pitching their ideas for future business endeavors in the finals of Amazon’s 2013 Innovation Competition.

Excerpt from Poets & Quants -- "New York University’s Stern School, whose fortunes are also somewhat tied to Wall Street, had its best MBA placement year in the past four years, with 96.0% of this year’s class with job offers three months after commencement."