Peter Blair Henry Named Dean of NYU Stern

In July, NYU President John Sexton and Provost David McLaughlin named Peter Blair Henry, the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of International Economics at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, as dean of NYU Stern. Henry will assume the deanship on January 15, 2010.

Henry led the Obama Transition Team’s review of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and other international lending agencies and has served as an economic advisor to governments from the Caribbean to Africa. He was recently appointed by President Obama to the Presidential Commission on White House Fellows.
The author of numerous articles and book chapters, Henry has focused his research on the impact of economic reform on emerging economies, and is perhaps best known for a series of publications in the three flagship journals of the American Economic Association that overturn conventional wisdom on the topics of debt relief, international capital flows, and the role of institutions in economic growth. He is currently writing a book for Oxford University Press.

A Rhodes Scholar, Henry is also the John and Cynthia Fry Gunn Faculty Scholar and Associate Director of the Center for Global Business and the Economy at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, where he was first appointed an assistant professor of economics in 1997. He is also Senior Fellow of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and the Stanford Center for International Development, Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Nonresident Senior Fellow of the Brookings Institution, president of the National Economic Association, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Henry received a BA in economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1991, a BA in mathematics from Oxford University in 1993, and a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1997.

 

 

shorttakes

Michael Armellino Professor of Finance and Nobel Laureate Robert Engle was awarded the Hofstra University Presidential Medal in recognition of outstanding career achievement and scholarly excellence for his influential work in the field of econometrics and his Nobel-prize-winning research on financial market volatility.

Lawrence White

Lawrence White, Arthur E. Imperatore Professor of Economics, testified in June before the Committee on Financial Services of the US House of Representatives Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Insurance, and Government Sponsored Enterprises, arguing that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae should be fully privatized. Also, in April, White testified before the US Securities and Exchange Commission at a roundtable related to the agency’s oversight of credit rating agencies.

In December, Edward Altman, Max L. Heine Professor of Finance, testified before the US House Financial Services Committee, providing expert commentary on a plan to bail out the big three American automobile makers. About two dozen media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Bloomberg, covered Professor Altman’s testimony.

Research Professor Ralph Gomory testified before the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission in March, arguing that China’s foreign investment incentives have contributed to the trade imbalance between China and the US.

Associate Professor of Finance Stijn Van Niewerburgh was elected to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Economic Fluctuations and Growth group.

Assistant Professor of Finance Marcin Kacperczyk was appointed Faculty Research Fellow in the Asset Pricing program at NBER.

Professor of Finance Viral Acharya was recently appointed Research Associate of NBER in Corporate Finance and of the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI).

Lasse Pedersen, John A. Paulson Professor of Finance and Alternative Investments, joined the Liquidity Working Group at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Tülin Erdem, Leonard N. Stern Professor of Business and professor of marketing, was named editor of the Journal of Marketing Research, the first woman to hold this position.

Professor of Marketing Priya Raghubir has been selected by the editor of the Journal of Consumer Psychology as one of the “Top 10 Reviewers” in 2008-2009.

Research Professor of Marketing Vicki Morwitz was appointed as an area editor for the Journal of Consumer Psychology.

Associate Professor of Information Systems Natalia Levina was elected Division Representative-at-large at the Academy of Management, Organizational Communications, and Information Systems (OCIS).

 

New Scholars Join NYU Stern

In fall 2009, NYU Stern welcomed 11 new tenured and tenure-track faculty members to its ranks. Stanley Zin joined the economics department as the William R. Berkley Professor of Economics and Business. Zin’s research interests lie at the intersection of decision theory, dynamic asset valuation, macroeconomics, and econometrics. In 1994, the Econometric Society awarded Zin, along with his co-author Larry Epstein, the prestigious Frisch Medal for their “Epstein-Zin Utility Function,” which has gained wide acceptance as a basic tool of dynamic decision models and now forms the cornerstone for structural economic models that incorporate psychological/behavioral aspects of decision-making under uncertainty. Prior to joining Stern, Zin was the Richard M. Cyert and Morris H. DeGroot Professor of Economics and Statistics at the David A. Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University.

Assistant Professors of Economics Robin Lee and Michael Waugh also joined the department. Lee, who earned his PhD in business economics from Harvard University, researches industrial organization and microeconomic theory, and his focus in platform and two-sided markets have applications in hardware-software industries, content distribution, and the healthcare sector. Having previously worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and as a consultant to the World Bank, Waugh focuses his research on international trade and economic growth and development, specifically examining trade barriers between rich and poor countries. He was the recipient of several fellowships and awards, including the Seashore Dissertation Year Fellowship at the University of Iowa in 2007-2008.

Four assistant professors are new to the finance department: Itamar Drechsler, Samuel Lee, Thomas Mertens, and Emiliano Pagnotta. Coming from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, Drechsler studies how learning and uncertainty affect financial markets and how investors’ perceptions of macroeconomic and financial risks are reflected in derivatives prices. Lee’s primary research includes financial market liquidity, corporate finance, and corporate governance, and he is currently looking at the role of social preferences in corporate governance. Having earned his PhD in economics from Harvard University, Mertens’s main research interests include asset pricing, macroeconomics, and computational finance. His most recent studies explore origins and consequences of excess volatility in stock markets and analyze the effects of stabilization policy. Pagnotta studies the intersection of information economics and the empirical analysis of financial markets data. He has recently examined the effects of stock markets’ institutional trading rules on investors’ strategic trading interaction and market outcomes.

Alexander Nezlobin, who received his PhD in business administration from Stanford University, has become an assistant professor in the accounting department. His primary research interests include accounting valuation theory, managerial performance measurement, and monopoly regulation. His current work examines how the knowledge of accounting treatments that a firm adopts may be used in the valuation process.

Having earned an MBA from Yale School of Management and a PhD from University of California, Berkley, Robert Seamans is a new assistant professor of management and organizations. His research looks at the actions that established firms take when threatened by new entrants to the market, and he is particularly interested in how these actions affect the diffusion of new technology.

The marketing department added Adam Alter as an assistant professor. Alter, who also has an affiliated appointment with NYU’s psychology department, focuses his research on judgment and decision-making and social psychology, with a particular interest in understanding the sometimes surprising effects on human cognition and behavior of subtle cues in the environment. He received his MA and PhD in psychology from Princeton University, where he held the Charlotte Elizabeth Procter Honorific Dissertation Fellowship and a fellowship in the Woodrow Wilson Society of Scholars.

 

Xavier Gabaix

 

Glucksman Institute Awards Research Prizes to Stern Faculty

Vasiliki Skreta

When NYU Stern’s Glucksman Institute for Research in Securities Markets awarded its annual prizes for excellence in financial research in February, the first-place prize of $5,000 went to Professor of Finance Xavier Gabaix for his co-authored paper, “Tractability and Detail-Neutrality in Incentive Contracting.” The paper develops a contract for CEO incentives that is proven mathematically better than options and stock.

Professor of Finance David Yermack, Daniel P. Paduano Faculty Fellow and Yamaichi Faculty Fellow, took second place and $2,500 for “Deducto Ad Absurdum: CEOs Donating Their Own Stock to Their Own Family Foundations.” The study shows that when corporate chiefs donated shares of their companies’ stock to their private charitable foundations, the donations were timed to maximize the CEOs’ personal income tax benefits.

Honorable mention and $1,000 went to Assistant Professor of Economics Vasiliki Skreta and Associate Professor of Economics Laura Veldkamp for “Ratings Shopping and Asset Complexity: A Theory of Ratings Inflation.” They show that the increased complexity of assets triggered ratings bias, which ups the incentive for companies to shop for the best rating. That, in turn, leads them to develop even more highly complex assets to get even higher ratings.

 

Vicki Morwitz

researchroundup

Marketing Professors Eric Greenleaf, Geeta Menon, Tom Meyvis, and Vicki Morwitz, with principal investigator David Heeger, a professor in NYU’s Department of Psychology and Center for Neural Science, and Uri Hasson, an assistant professor of psychology at Princeton, were awarded a two-year, $1.1 million grant by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Drug Abuse to support their research project entitled, “The Neural Correlates of Effective Drug Prevention Messages.” By combining methods from marketing research with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and eye movement data, the project will assess the effectiveness of anti-drug television ads in deterring drug use.

Vasant Dhar

Assistant Professor of Information, Operations, and Management Sciences Anindya Ghose and Professor of Information Systems Vasant Dhar, with Keith W. Ross at NYU-Poly, were awarded one of the first 15 competitive grants given by NYU and NYU-Poly for research collaborations between the two affiliated institutions. They received $73,500 in seed funding for their research proposal, “The Economics of User-Generated Content in Online Social Media,” in which they explore the monetization of user-generated content through online advertising.

Associate Professor of Marketing Amitav Chakravarti won the inaugural 2009 Google and WPP Marketing Research Awards, which include an unrestricted gift of $50,000 to study online and offline media interactions. Professor Chakravarti’s research proposal for Google was based on his co-authored research paper, “The Neglect of Prescreening Information,” that was published in the Journal of Marketing Research. The research examines how exposure to online information affects offline buying behavior.

Aimée Kane

Sinan Aral, assistant professor of Information, Operations, and Management Sciences, was given the 2009 IBM faculty award, a $40,000 cash grant, to support his research, “Unlocking the Business Value of Information in Large Dynamic Social Networks.” The research aims to understand how the movement of information in massive social networks affects the productivity of information workers and population level product adoption and demand patterns.

Professor of Accounting Stephen Ryan’s article “Accounting in and for the Subprime Crisis,” published in Accounting Review, was selected as one of the 50 best articles published in 2008 in management, winning an Emerald Management Reviews Citation of Excellence.

Associate Professor of Information Systems Natalia Levina and Assistant Professor of Management and Organizations Aimée Kane won the best paper award at the International Workshop on Intercultural Collaboration for “Immigrant Managers as Boundary Spanners on Offshored Software Development Projects: Partners or Bosses?”

William H. Joyce Professor of Marketing Russell Winer’s 1999 Management Science paper, “Endogeneity in Brand Choice Models,” with Miguel Villas-Boas, won the inaugural INFORMS Society for Marketing Long-Term Impact Award at the Marketing Science Conference in June.