Experience Stern | News & Events

Excerpt from WEF Blog -- "The COVID-19 pandemic has effectively kicked off a new era in our working lives. Instead of assembling in offices, more fortunate members of the workforce gather virtually, via conferencing software. Our days, seemingly shortened by the freedom from commuting to and from offices, now include juggling personal obligations and catching up on workloads as we can, when we can. Conditions are unlikely to reset to “normal” when the pandemic has passed. This means that, since human cultural norms are established by observation and socialization, corporate culture is certain to become less tangible in this new, remote work environment. Welcome to the age of the intangible company."

Excerpt from CNBC -- "Should it go public or seek additional funding, Coupang would likely field questions from new investors who are nervous about SoftBank’s involvement and whether its recent growth, as well as its unicorn valuation, is sustainable. 'It makes it very difficult to go public if your primary funding has come from someone that the market doesn’t trust,' said NYU Stern professor Aswath Damodaran. 'At the moment, fairly or unfairly, that’s where SoftBank is, and I think it kind of contaminates every company it’s invested in.'”

Excerpt from Barron's -- "While the May numbers will be better than April’s as local economies are showing signs of recovery and people are returning to work, 'many behavior changes and channel shifts will be permanent,' says New York University business-school professor Arun Sundararajan. 'The Covid shutdown has accelerated the ascent and eventual dominance of the e-commerce channel,” Sundararajan says, predicting that when it comes to apparel, U.S. online sales will exceed in-store sales in 2020 for the first time."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "'It tastes awful, but it works,' she says. 'Sometimes you really do need the skill set, and sometimes the nice person is not going to give it to you.' Prof. Shea is a co-author of the March paper and a fellow researcher in the six studies cited, along with Julia Hur, assistant professor of management and organizations at NYU Shanghai, and Rachel Ruttan, an assistant professor of organizational behavior and human resources at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "It isn’t necessarily that product quality is getting worse, says Tulin Erdem, chair of the marketing department at New York University’s Stern School of Business. What is happening instead, she suggests, is that consumers are becoming more savvy, and that in turn is leading them to assess products on a much more critical scale than in the past."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "Most important, understand that social status isn’t static. As Nathan Pettit, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, and Jennifer Carson Marr, a professor at the University of Maryland, recently showed, social status changes over time—hierarchies at work are constantly shifting. So don’t despair: There’s a chance your boss will be back in the black again."

Excerpt from Fast Company -- "Despite the billions of dollars U.S. companies spend on diversity programs each year, current strategies will not necessarily achieve their goals, according to an Academy of Management Review article.

'Staying the course with regard to how diversity initiatives are currently implemented is unlikely to result in substantial progress toward diversity goals,'" Lisa M. Leslie of New York University wrote in 'Diversity Initiative Effectiveness: A Typological Theory of Unintended Consequences.'"

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "Finance students at NYU Stern School of Business learn about environmental, social and governance (ESG) investment with the help of hard cash as well as lectures. They invest real money through a teaching fund that is at the heart of an experiential learning course. But setting up an ESG portfolio proved to be an education for staff as well as students. An array of ESG standards and metrics made the launch a time consuming process. 'Even once we’d started the fund and put the money in it, it took us at least a month before we bought our first stock,' says Anthony Marciano, a clinical finance professor at Stern, in New York City. Prof Marciano teaches the course based on management of the Michael Price Student Investment Fund, a family of funds with a value of about $2m. 'The other funds started from the get-go. With a value fund it’s easy to pick your benchmark,' Prof Marciano says. 'But we ran into a lot of complexities [with the ESG fund] that we wouldn’t have had with the other funds.'”

Excerpt from Business Insider -- When it comes to scaling your company, 'there is not a one-size-fits-all approach.' That's according to Deepak Hegde, associate professor of management and organizations at New York University. Hegde also directs Endless Frontier Labs, which helps technology and science startups scale. (One alum is Analytical Flavor Systems, a machine-learning and artificial-intelligence platform that predicts individual taste profiles that's now being leveraged to design boutique bread flavors.) For one startup, Hegde said, scaling might mean locating a large-scale manufacturing facility to get a product out to wider markets. For another startup, scaling might mean hiring a sales team.

Excerpt from Poets & Quants -- "In my experience, students at Stern have the benefit of choosing to spend their time between a strong MBA community and the New York City community. If you thrive in a socially dynamic environment, you’d probably enjoy having the flexibility to choose to spend your time with classmates at Stern or with new friends you’ve made in the city. It’s the best of both worlds."

Excerpt from Business Insider -- "We witness border skirmishes between big tech firms on a regular basis. This year, one or more will erupt into a shooting war. Just as most wars are not a function of ideology but economics, the armies of search, handsets, and performative posts will begin landing paratroopers behind enemy lines and initiate heavy equipment assaults. Yes, I watch too much History Channel."

Excerpt from Reuters -- "There are a number of ways employers can offer such a benefit, including a single lump-sum payment or regular monthly payments for a finite or indefinite period. “With these contributions, employees will see an instant boost to their bottom line,” explains Alex Dontoh, a professor of accounting at New York University’s Stern School of Business. 'According to Federal Reserve statistics, the monthly average student loan payment is $393. A monthly loan payment of $393 is quite a large amount considering that the average before-tax salary of a college graduate in the U.S. is about $50,000,'"

At the conclusion of a nine-month competition, NYU’s most promising innovators received startup funding and pro-bono services valued at more than $350,000 at NYU Stern’s annual Entrepreneurs Challenge, organized by the School’s Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship.

Excerpt from Express -- "U.S. economist Nouriel Roubini, lecturer New York University's Stern School of Business, said the package was smaller than Italy, Spain and Greece had hoped. Mr Roubini has warned 'the danger comes from Italy' if the ECB is unable to help surface the county’s debt through bonds."

Excerpt from HBR France -- "Research shows that highly indebted companies are particularly vulnerable in the event of a recession. In a 2017 study, Xavier Giroud (then at the Sloan School of Management at MIT) and Holger Mueller (Stern School of Business at NYU) examined the relationship between business closings, related unemployment and falling prices for real estate in different American counties. Overall, the more property prices fell, the more consumer demand fell, leading to higher business closings and unemployment."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "The case for today’s valuations is that corporate profits will snap back as the economy reopens and that the Fed will continue to keep interest rates low, spurring growth and making stocks look attractive in relation to interest-earning securities such as Treasury bonds. NYU’s Damodaran says the S&P 500 is probably fairly valued at 2,900 to 3,000 based on projected earnings, interest rates, and other factors, but its current level of about 3,200 is 'not so wildly inconsistent where you’d say it makes no sense.'”

Read the excerpts in Clear Admit here. 

Read the full statement here. 

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "Besides drawing down credit lines Acharya and Steffen (2020) show that firms also raised cash by accessing bond markets, but this started later. New bond issuance was muted until mid-March but accelerated after the Fed announced its corporate bond purchase programs through which it can purchase investment-grade rated corporate bonds (including ‘fallen angels’) and ETFs."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "Edward Altman said he expects a record number of mega-bankruptcies this year, surpassing the previous high of 49 in 2009 for companies with liabilities greater than $1 billion. Defaults on junk bonds also will spike, the professor emeritus at NYU’S Stern School added. 'It’s not only the impact of Covid-19, which is of course the primary reason, but also the enormous amount of debt that had been building up in the economy prior to it,' said Altman, who developed a widely used method called the Altman-Z-Score for predicting business failures."

Excerpt from CNBC -- “'Moderation is messy because there are very few absolute standards that govern what’s acceptable,' says Professor Arun Sundararajan from New York University’s Stern School of Business. He adds that Facebook may open 'a Pandora’s box in many ways' in possibly redefining its responsibilities for moderating online content, as its founder Mark Zuckerberg deals with widespread backlash over alleged inaction on U.S. President Donald Trump’s posts."

Excerpt from The Washington Post -- "That’s being blamed for a variety of economic ills. In his 2019 book 'The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets,' Thomas Philippon, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, argues that a lack of competition leads to lower wages, less business investment and slower economic growth.

Excerpt from CNBC -- "A report published on Monday by New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights called on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter to stop outsourcing content moderation. 'The widespread practice of relying on third-party vendors for content review amounts to an outsourcing of responsibility for the safety of major social media platforms and their billions of users,' said Paul Barrett, deputy director of the center and author of the report."

Excerpt from US News -- "In a 2019 New York University-Harvard study, business school students said they'd be OK with getting poorer quality health care as long as it was provided by a human instead of AI. People resisted AI, the study authors found, because they felt it would not take their "idiosyncratic characteristics and circumstances" into account."

Excerpt from WIRED -- "In addition to the public health emergency, Covid-19 has also spurred a severe employment crisis, and Lieberman sees rental companies as poised to flourish, because people are cautious about spending. This is a view shared by New York University marketing professor Tom Meyvis, who studies consumer behavior. Because people tend to be more careful with money during economic downturns, Meyvis suspects people may choose renting certain goods and services over owning them to avoid the steep price tags of big-ticket purchases. 'They may be more reluctant to pay high up-front costs, even if they're able to do so,” he says.'"

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "Are things at work, in fact, eventually going to go back to something like they were before coronavirus? Humans overestimate the long-term impact of the things we are living through; what futurist and NYU Stern Business School professor Amy Webb calls 'the paradox of the present'. She suggests we learn to overcome it by becoming more comfortable with uncertainty."