Experience Stern | News & Events

A sampling of media highlights for the week of September 1, 2020

Excerpt from BNN Bloomberg -- "Rosa Abrantes-Metz, adjunct associate professor, NYU's Stern School of Business discusses the difficulties in preventing and investigating gold spoofing and other forms of precious metals market manipulation."

Excerpt from Business Insider -- "Paul Barrett, the deputy director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, told Business Insider in April that he'd seen an explosion of domestically sourced dis- and misinformation in recent months. Barrett also released a report last year detailing how dis- and misinformation would play a role in the upcoming election. 'In terms of sheer volume, domestically generated disinformation now exceeds malign content from foreign sources and will almost certainly be a factor in the next election,' the report said."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "The global economy faces a risk of a slow recovery or even another slump along the way unless a vaccine is found, according to Nouriel Roubini. Speaking on Bloomberg Television on Friday, Roubini predicted that the shape of the recovery, which some predicted to be V, 'is becoming a U and the U could become a W if we don’t find a vaccine and don’t have enough stimulus.'”

Excerpt from GreenBiz -- "'Consumers want to buy sustainable products and e-commerce retailers can help them do so by sharing environmental and social data on their online platforms,' said Tensie Whelan, professor and director of the NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business, and author of the report’s foreword, in a statement. 'Whether companies choose to jump at this opportunity will determine their ability to cultivate the consumer and remain competitive over the long-run.'"

Excerpt from Yahoo Finance -- "Professor at NYU Stern School of Business and Author of ‘The Sharing Economy' Arun Sundararajan joins Yahoo Finance’s Akiko Fujita to discuss the future of Uber and Lyft in California."

Excerpt from Institutional Investor -- "Researchers from Canada’s University of Waterloo, Tilburg University in the Netherlands, and New York University’s Stern School of Business challenged the 'widespread claims by fund managers, ESG data purveyors, and the financial press' that companies with high ESG scores were better situated in the pandemic. In particular, the authors — Elizabeth Demers, Jurian Hendrikse, Philip Joos, and Bauch Lev — cited reports from BlackRock, Morningstar, and MSCI, which all found that ESG funds outperformed during the crash."

Excerpt from Mashed -- "According to Tom Meyvis, a professor of marketing at New York University's Stern School of Business, the first trick employed by Target to suck you in lies in how they display the massive variety of items for sale (via Refinery29). For example, by placing hot sauce next to Pepto Bismol, customers shopping for one are more likely to leave with both. This process is called cross-selling, and it's surprisingly effective; so the next time you're at Target and not looking to over-stuff your pantry, keep an eye out for these clever but innocuous-looking pairings to ensure you're only purchasing what you really need. Of course, this is just one of the tricks in Target's bag."

Excerpt from Retail Dive -- "'Who is saying, 'Help me plan your wardrobe or your trousseau'?' Anika Sharma, professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, said in an interview last year. 'This is why brands like Stitch Fix are doing well. I would expect something like that from a place like Lord & Taylor, but the store is not doing well because they've taken those people out. They're a depository of other brands, but they don't stand for something.'"

Jihoon Rim, former CEO of Kakao, joined NYU Stern’s Management and Organizations Department as a Visiting Professor of Management Practice. During the 2019-2020 academic year, he served as an Executive-in-Residence for the School’s Fubon Center for Business, Technology and Innovation, while holding an appointment as an adjunct professor in the Technology, Operations, and Statistics Department teaching a course entitled, “Managing a High-Tech Company: The CEO Perspective.” Professor Rim will continue teaching the course along with other tech and entrepreneurship courses.

Excerpt from The Verge -- "Galloway, who in addition to podcasting also serves as a professor of marketing at the New York University Stern School of Business, asked whether Uber is 'ground zero for income inequality,' noting the gap between Uber’s regular employees who earn six-figure salaries and above, and the millions of drivers, some of whom live below the poverty line."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- “'It’s become the new flight to safety,' Aswath Damodaran, a New York University finance professor who studies the stock market, said of investors flocking to Big Tech. Companies that are rich, flexible and digital are benefiting in the pandemic — and that describes the tech Goliaths, he said, adding, 'This crisis has strengthened what was already a strong hand.'”

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "According to a 2012 study by the economists Bryan Bollinger and Kenneth Gillingham, a carbon tax that induced a family to install solar panels could be expected to stimulate a neighbor’s copycat installation within four months, on average. Let another four months pass, and each of these two will have spawned additional installations of their own, for a total of four."

Excerpt from Business of Fashion -- “'The more digital the school year is going to be, the more difficult it is going to be for retail,' said Steven Marotta, managing director of research and equity at C.L. King & Associates. … 'We do think that there is a significant business still to be had, even if it's not as promising as previous years.” Whether they are staying home or not, kids are going to be active. … Alixandra Barasch, a marketing professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business who studies consumer trends, said she sees an opportunity for brands to sell statement pieces and accessories to kids this season."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "'Covid was the perfect positive storm for these guys,' said Thomas Philippon, a professor of finance at New York University. The companies’ deeper encroachment into American lives can be seen in web traffic numbers for Alphabet, Facebook and Amazon, which own the four most visited sites in the country. The traffic on these sites was immense before the pandemic, but daily visits increased sharply in March, when stay-at-home orders began, with Facebook up 15 percent and YouTube 10 percent, according to SimilarWeb, an online data provider."

Excerpt from Vogue Australia -- "As one of the most fashionable figures in politics, Obama was also credited with having a rather large economic impact within the fashion industry. In fact, a 2010 study conducted by Professor David Yermack from New York University’s Stern School of Business found that, when the former First Lady stepped out in a particular style, the value of the label she was wearing jumped up approximately US$14 million."

Excerpt from MarketWatch -- “'There’s an inverse monotonic relationship between privacy and value,' Vasant Dhar, a professor in the NYU Stern School of Business, where he is director of the Center for Data Science, told MarketWatch in an email message. 'The more someone knows about you (less privacy), the more value to them. CCPA introduces friction (you now have to DEAL with being ACCOUNTABLE etc compared to the Wild West days, so that’s a cost), and it makes it harder to link data which is where a lot of value lies.'"

Excerpt from Vanity Fair -- "Futurist Amy Webb fact checks futuristic scenes from movies including 'Blade Runner 2049,' 'Gattaca,' 'The Matrix,' 'Ex Machina,' 'WALL-E,' ‘2001: A Space Odyssey,’ ‘Total Recall’ and analyzes their probability, craft, and execution."

Excerpt from The Toronto Star -- "Most teenagers are checking their phones 150 times per day—that is, once every six minutes. Add it all up and they’re spending more than seven hours a day looking at their smartphones—and that’s outside of school or homework! As New York University marketing professor Adam Alter points out, this means that over the course of their lives our kids are going to spend at least seven years immersed in their phones."

Excerpt from Reuters -- "But in the end, alternatives exist, said Nicholas Economides, a New York University economics professor who studies online marketplaces.'Having other options definitely makes it a bit harder to say something is anticompetitive,' Economides said, speaking generally about app stores."

Excerpt from BNN Bloomberg -- “'Sensorium looks like one the best funded VR-related experiments out there,' said Joost van Dreunen, an adjunct assistant professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, adding it’s a risky bet given how early-days the industry is. 'We have to ask the question: If Covid-19 benefitted every other aspect of gaming in recent months, where is the evidence that consumer adoption of VR has accelerated?'”

Excerpt from Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) News -- "There are plenty of aggressively confident people out there, but it doesn't mean they always know what they're talking about. Last year, a former governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, even criticised the current generation of policymakers for failing to acknowledge how much the world had changed since the global financial crisis. He also wanted to know why they were so resistant to new ways of thinking."

Excerpt from Interesting Engineering -- "It is time to talk about our addiction to technology. We might not have a Walking Dead-style zombie apocalypse to deal with, but we do have plenty of technology zombies walking around. NYU professor Adam Alter thinks this is really happening. In his book Irresistible, Dr. Alter discusses the addictive perils of modern technology, and gives some eye-opening statistics, like how an average millennial picks up their phone 150 times a day."

Excerpt from Barron's -- "Critics point out that there’s no guarantee that a stock’s value will continue to rise after the split. They also take issue with the expanded-ownership argument. Average trading volume—measured by dollar amounts traded—don’t change much post-split, according to a widely cited academic paper by Josef Lakonishok and Baruch Lev."

Excerpt from Moneycontrol -- "I am extremely surprised that something that we built 50 years ago is popular even today. I think the secret to its longevity is three factors: first, it is a simple analytical tool involving five commonly found financial measures which helped distinguish between healthy and unhealthy companies. Second, it continues to be quite accurate, ranging between 80 to 90 percent accuracy for large companies. And third, it is free. Anyone can use it, test it, and if they do not like it, throw it out."