Glucksman Institute Awards its Faculty Research Prizes for 2007-2008

NYU Stern's Glucksman Institute for Research in Securities Markets awarded its annual prizes to three teams of researchers in February. These awards, recognizing and promoting excellence in financial research, are given to the best research papers that have been submitted to an academic journal. First prize, which comes with $5,000, was awarded to Assistant Professors of Finance Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh and Otto Van Hemert for their paper, “Mortgage Timing,” co-authored with Ralph S. J. Koijen. Their study explores how the term structure of interest rates relates to mortgage choice and finds that the bulk of the time variation in both aggregate and loan-level mortgage choice can be explained by time variation in the bond risk premium.

Associate Professor of Finance Xavier Gabaix, with Sumit Agrawal, John Driscoll, and David Laibson, was awarded the second-place prize of $2,500 for his paper, “The Age of Reason: Financial Decisions over the Life Cycle.” His research argues that financial sophistication rises and then falls with age, peaking around age 53.

Assistant Professor of Finance Daniel Wolfenzon, Associate Professor of Finance Alexander Ljungqvist, and Professor of Finance Matthew Richardson were given honorable mention and $1,000 for their paper entitled, “The Investment Behavior of Buyout Funds: Theory and Evidence,” which analyzes the determinants of buyout funds’ investment decisions.

Eleven papers, representing the research output of 33 authors, were submitted for consideration in this year's competition.

 

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Sinan Aral, assistant professor of information, operations and management sciences, was awarded the ACM-SIGMIS Award for the best dissertation in the field of information systems for his thesis entitled, “Information, Technology, and Information Worker Productivity.” The award was given by the Association of Computing Machinery at the International Conference on Information Systems in Montreal in mid-December.

Anindya Ghose, assistant professor of information, operations, and management sciences, was nominated for the best overall conference paper and for the best paper in the Web Based Information Systems Track at the 2007 International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), the most prestigious gathering of information systems academics and research-oriented practitioners in the world. His paper, “Estimating Menu Costs in Electronic Markets,” was selected from 60 Web Based Systems Track submissions and 674 conference submissions overall.

A second paper by Professor Ghose,“Internet Exchanges for Used Books: An Empirical Analysis of Product Cannibalization and Social Welfare,” was awarded the runner-up for the best published paper appearing in 2006 in Information Systems Research (ISR), the flagship journal of the Information Systems Society.

Assistant Professor of Finance and Charles Schaefer Family Fellow Thomas Philippon's book, Le capitalisme d'heritiers, about management and labor relations in France, received the prize for best management book from the French Association of Human Resource Managers.

Jeffrey Simonoff, professor of statistics and Robert Stansky Research Faculty Fellow, and Batia Wiesenfeld, associate professor of management and organizations and Daniel P. Paduano Faculty Fellow, are co-principal investigators under a $125,456 grant recently awarded by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation for “Understanding the Relationship between Higher Education and Innovative Entrepreneurship.” This grant constitutes the pilot phase of an anticipated multiyear, multinational, multi-institutional, longitudinal study that is part of an effort by NYU Stern's Berkley Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, led by Center Director Professor William Baumol, to improve the production of innovative entrepreneurs at Stern, in the US, and around the world.

Robert Salomon, assistant professor of management and organizations, in 2007 published his first book, Learning from Exporting: New Insights, New Perspectives. The book analyzes the relationship between exports and productivity. In addition, Professor Salomon's paper, “Learning, Knowledge Transfer, and Technology Implementation Performance: A Study of Time-to-Build in the Global Semiconductor Industry,” is forthcoming in Management Science.

The second edition of Associate Professor of Accounting and Peat Marwick Faculty Fellow Stephen Ryan's book, Financial Instruments and Institutions: Accounting and Disclosure Rules, was released in April 2007. Professor Ryan also spoke about accounting in and for the subprime crisis, which he covered in his book, at the Financial Accounting Standards Board this past March.

Edward J. Lincoln, clinical professor of economics and director of the Center for Japan-US Business and Economic Studies at NYU Stern, authored the new book, Winners Without Losers: Why Americans Should Care More About Global Economic Policy, in which he contends that the best chance the US has of ensuring peace and prosperity for itself and the rest of the world is by focusing on foreign trade policy instead of military power.

Vijay Vaitheeswaran, executive-in-residence at NYU Stern and award-winning correspondent for The Economist, recently co-authored the book, Zoom: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future, which was chosen as one of five finalists for the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award for 2007.

shorttakes

Celebrating the inaugural Paduano Fellows (from left to right): Bruce Buchanan of the Markets, Ethics and Law Program, Foster Provost, Batia Wiesenfeld, Doug Guthrie, Dean Thomas F. Cooley, Daniel P. Paduano, David Yermack, and Edwin Hartman of the Markets, Ethics and Law Program.

In January, Nouriel Roubini, professor of economics and international business, served as a panelist during several discussions on the economic outlook for 2008 at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. He painted a grim picture for the US and, subsequently, the world markets. Also in January, Professor Roubini and Lawrence White, Arthur E. Imperatore Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies and deputy chair of the economics department, participated in a panel discussion on the subprime mortgage meltdown at the Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association in New Orleans. Professor White also testified, as part of a panel including the chairman of the SEC and senior executives from Moody's Investors Service and Standard & Poor's, in a US Senate hearing of the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee on the role of credit rating agencies in the subprime crisis.

Professors Doug Guthrie and Batia Wiesenfeld from management, Foster Provost from information systems, and David Yermack from finance were recently appointed NYU Stern's first four Fellows of the Daniel P. Paduano Faculty Symposium on Business Ethics, which was established in 2007 through the generous support of alumnus Daniel P. Paduano (MBA '69) to build and sustain a vibrant community of faculty across disciplines who conduct research in business ethics and related fields. These Fellows, chosen both for their records of research excellence and for their potential to integrate ethical theories and issues into their scholarly activities, will participate in regular seminars taught primarily by the leading scholars in the field of business ethics. Invited participants include faculty from other NYU departments such as philosophy, psychology, and sociology, faculty from other universities in the New York area, and some select leading practitioners.

Beginning in June, Paul Zarowin, associate professor of accounting and Charlotte Lindner MacDowell Faculty Fellow, will be an editor of The Accounting Review, the American Accounting Association's top academic journal.

Professors Martin Gruber (right) and Edwin Elton at the naming celebration of the Martin J. Gruber Conference Room.

Robert Salomon, assistant professor of management and organizations, serves on the editorial boards of the Academy of Management Journal and the Journal of International Business Studies. He was recently elected to the executive committee of the technology and innovation management group of the Academy of Management.

Jeffrey Simonoff, professor of statistics and Robert Stansky Research Faculty Fellow, is the co-editor of the journal, Statistical Modelling: An International Journal.

This past March in Beijing, William Greene, Toyota Motor Corporation Term Professor of Economics and Jules I. Backman Faculty Fellow, presented his paper on econometrics, entitled, “A Statistical Model for Credit Scoring,” at the prestigious 2008 Peking University International Experts Conference on Personal Credit Reporting in China. He was one of only two Americans who spoke at the conference.

Last October, Baruch Lev, Philip Bardes Professor of Accounting and Finance and the director of the Vincent C. Ross Institute of Accounting Research at NYU Stern, presented the keynote address at the 2007 NYU Stern Board of Overseers Dinner, held at The Harold Pratt House. Lev discussed how corporate managers should interact, actively or passively, with capital markets.

In November, through the generous support of NYU Stern alumni, faculty, and friends, the finance department conference room was named after Nomura Professor of Finance Martin Gruber, who chaired the finance department from 1989 to 1997 and who, with Nomura Professor of Finance Edwin Elton, has co-authored approximately 100 journal articles and three books, including the best-selling finance textbook, Modern Portfolio Theory and Investment Analysis.