Experience Stern | News

Excerpt from Bloomberg Businessweek -- No one expected a lovefest when Meera Joshi, the chairwoman of New York’s Taxi and Limousine Commission, and David Estrada, the vice president of government relations for ride-sharing startup Lyft, sat on a panel to discuss 'Regulation and New Business Models' at a recent conference at New York University. Lyft would love to operate in New York City, but city regulations prohibit the startup’s version of a taxi service, in which nonprofessionals use private vehicles to shuttle passengers. This is exactly the kind of regulatory obstructionism that infuriates proponents of the so-called sharing economy, but an audience expecting fireworks was disappointed. The mutual affection was so thick that several times the moderator apologetically noted his inability to create any contentiousness."

Excerpt from Harvard Business Review -- "Boeing’s decision to minimize its assets was made with Wall Street in mind. RONA is used by financial analysts to judge managers and companies, and the fixation on this kind of metric has influenced the choices of many firms. In fact, research by the economists John Asker, Joan Farre-Mensa, and Alexander Ljungqvist shows that a desire to maximize short-term share price leads publicly held companies to invest only about half as much in assets as their privately held counterparts do."

Excerpt from make it better -- "'Makeup is a very crowded category and it's tough to get noticed,' Craig says, so movie branding is one way to stand out. And even though many of the branded cosmetics are available for only a fleeting time, it may be long enough to spur a sale to a new customer.…

Excerpt from Project Syndicate -- "The main causes of these trends are clear. Anemic economic recovery has provided an opening for populist parties, promoting protectionist policies, to blame foreign trade and foreign workers for the prolonged malaise. Add to this the rise in income and wealth inequality in most countries, and it is no wonder that the perception of a winner-take-all economy that benefits only elites and distorts the political system has become widespread. Nowadays, both advanced economies (like the United States, where unlimited financing of elected officials by financially powerful business interests is simply legalized corruption) and emerging markets (where oligarchs often dominate the economy and the political system) seem to be run for the few."

Excerpt from CNBC-TV18 -- "Nobel laureate and an acknowledged authority on growth and policy in developing countries, Spence feels that on policy side, the government should have an open approach. 'The potential in India is enormous. The human capital, the talent and so on, it’s just a matter of getting the obstacles out of the way,' he told CNBC-TV18’s Latha Venkatesh."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "Psychologists have long known that different cultures tend to think differently. In China and Japan, people think more communally, in terms of relationships. By contrast, people are more individualistic in what psychologist Joseph Henrich, in commenting on the new paper, calls 'WEIRD cultures.' WEIRD stands for Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic. Dr. Henrich's point is that cultures like these are actually a tiny minority of all human societies, both geographically and historically. But almost all psychologists study only these WEIRD folks."

Excerpt from CNBC -- "Everyone is worried about the economy, but overall you have to take the GDP numbers, you have to take the more macroeconomic factors as more of a 10,000-foot level and... in making specific investments, you have to narrow it down more to a company-specific investment and that's what I do in investing. That's what we do at Stern as well. I work in the student Michael Price investment fund and we're always looking at stocks. We're always evaluating different positions and poking holes in different theses..."

Excerpt from CCTV -- "Now that China's become the world's largest investor – investing twice as much as the US last year in real terms, so it's really the largest investor by a wide margin – the efficiency of China's investment is a matter of global concern. And China's financial system will largely determine the efficiency of that investment because it's the financial system that decides which projects get financed. And China's financial system has been dominated by its banking sector, while the stock market's been a bit of a side show. But what our research is finding is that China's stock market is actually doing quite well and probably deserves more attention and more capital."

Excerpt from The Huffington Post -- "We have learned a lot about the nature of humankind since the 1950s. In his best-selling book "The Righteous Mind," social psychologist Jonathan Haidt likens the human mind to a rider (reason) on an elephant (intuition). Back in the 1950s we thought that the rider was in charge, or ought to be. Evidence is accumulating from several fields that this view is wrong; the elephant is in charge and the rider is a much better rationalizer in hindsight than a reasoner in prospect. It seems that, with our limited conscious mental capacity, our minds have evolved to make fast 'good enough' decisions under pressure of time and conditions of uncertainty. Sometimes, especially in evolutionarily unfamiliar contexts, these intuitions play us false, but most of the time they work just fine and we couldn’t live without them."

Excerpt from CNBC -- "'I think the central bank is making occasional interventions to make traders understand that this [the yuan] can go up or down. It does look like tactical maneuvering more than anything else,' Michael Spence, professor of economics, at the NYU Stern School of Business, said on CNBC, with regards to whether the central bank was deliberately guiding the yuan lower in order to support the economy."