Left: Panagiotis Iperiotis; right: Aninyda Ghose

Ghose and Ipeirotis Garner NSF Awards

Anindya Ghose and Panagiotis (Panos) Ipeirotis, assistant professors of information, operations and management sciences (IOMS), have been awarded the highly prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development Awards (CAREER). Each will receive $500,000 over the next five years to support their research. Recipients are selected on the basis of creative, career-development plans that effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their institutions.

Ghose's research will identify and measure the economic value of online information and contribute to an understanding of the economic impact of new kinds of information content on the Internet. His work, which straddles several disciplinary boundaries, will be integrated into his teaching through a combination of new course materials, datasets, and interactive learning modules.

Ipeirotis' research examines Internet searches, specifically how to provide Internet users the power and tools to quickly process the vast amount of available data and receive answers to complex questions. This research will enable businesses to answer these complex questions and to determine the economic impact of the available information.

The NSF grant is one of several recent honors awarded to Ghose and Ipeirotis. The duo received the 2006 Microsoft Live Labs Award, and each has received NET (Networks, Electronic Commerce and Telecommunications) Institute grants. In addition, Ghose received the 2005 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) SIGMIS Doctoral Dissertation Award, and Ipeirotis received the 2006 ACM SIGMOD best paper award.

 

 

Left: Robert Engle; right: Nouriel Roubini

Engle and Roubini in Davos

Nobel Laureate and Michael Armellino Professor of Finance Robert Engle and Professor of Economics and International Business Nouriel Roubini were among the more than 2,200 business leaders, politicians, academics, and thought leaders who attended the 37th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January.

Themed “The Shifting Power Equation,” the conference addressed the growing prominence of emerging economies, the increasing leverage of commodity suppliers, the enhanced voice of individuals or small groups over institutions, and the stronger role of consumers over producers.

Engle gave three presentations focused on regulation and financial market competition, hedge funds, and a Nobel talk addressing the conference's theme. Roubini attended the forum's opening seminar on the state of the global economy with economist Lawrence Summers, as well as six other panels discussing the global economic outlook, risks in the financial system, competitiveness issues, and the shifting power equation.

 

 

NYU and Berkley Center Receive Kauffman Foundation Grant

William Baumol

In December 2006, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation awarded New York University a $1 million grant to make entrepreneurship education a common and accessible campus-wide opportunity. Under this initiative, NYU will raise $5 million to match the Kauffman funds. NYU will use the funds to create the Kauffman Entrepreneurial Campus Program, led by NYU Stern's Berkley Center for Entrepreneurial Studies.

NYU was one of a select number of colleges and universities that received grants as part of the Kauffman Foundation's Kauffman Campuses Initiative, launched in 2003 to foster the creation of interdisciplinary entrepreneurship education programs in American higher education.

William Baumol, Harold Price Professor of Entrepreneurship and academic director of the Berkley Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at NYU Stern, will lead this pan-campus initiative, which will focus on the preparation and effective training of both innovative entrepreneurs, as well as social entrepreneurs, while working as a catalyst for enhanced entrepreneurial activity throughout the University.

“With the Kauffman Entrepreneurial Campus at NYU, we have an unprecedented opportunity to bridge the gap between replicative entrepreneurship – the creation of new enterprise that duplicates an abundance of preexistent establishments – and innovative and social entrepreneurship – which are critical for economic growth and the reduction of social ills, but for which no teaching program whose effectiveness is based on evidence currently exists,” said Baumol. “Our goal is to create a model program at NYU through collaboration with our University partners – one that can serve as a model for educational institutions around the world.”

 

 

researchroundup

Several scholars associated with NYU Stern received honorable mention in the 2006 Moskowitz Price for Socially Responsible Investing. Hosted by the University of California at Berkeley's Haas School of Business Center for Responsible Business, the annual prize was created by the Social Investment Forum to recognize the best quantitative study of socially responsible investing. Baruch Lev, Philip Bardes Professor of Accounting and Finance; Christine Petrovits, assistant professor of accounting; and Suresh Radhakrishnan (PhD '91) of the University of Texas at Dallas, received honorable mention for their working paper, “Is Doing Good Good for You? Yes, Charitable Contributions Enhance Revenue Growth,” which investigated the relationship between companies' charitable giving and growth dynamics. Harrison Hong, professor of economics at Princeton and a visiting professor at NYU Stern, and Marcin Kacperczyk of the University of British Columbia, won honorable mention for their paper, “The Price of Sin: The Effects on Social Norms on Markets,” which reviewed the performance of tobacco stocks since the 1920s.

Sinan Aral, assistant professor of information, operations and management sciences, won the best paper award at the Association for Information Systems' 2006 International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS). The paper, entitled: “Information, Technology and Information Worker Productivity: Task Level Evidence,” presents some of the first evidence measuring the economic productivity of information and knowledge workers. A second paper by Aral, “Which Came First, IT or Productivity? The Virtuous Cycle of Investment and Use in Enterprise Systems,” won the award for best paper in the IT Business Value Estimation track.

Assistant Professor of Operations Management Mor Armony and co-author Itay Gurvich of Columbia University received the 2006 Junior Faculty Interest Group (JFIG) best paper award this fall at the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences' (INFORMS) national meeting in Pittsburgh for their research paper entitled, “When Promotions Meet Operations: Cross-Selling and Its Effect on Call-Center Performance.”

At a marketing event in September, Luís Cabral, professor of economics, presented findings from his research on how some Internet-based services, introduced as free services, switch to pay modes. Conference on Data Engineering.

shorttakes

Nomura Professors of Finance Martin J. Gruber and Edwin J. Elton have been named fellows by the Institute for Quantitative Research and Finance, known as the “The Q-Group.” Gruber and Elton, who have collaborated on many research studies over the years on topics such as portfolio theory and management, mutual funds structure and performance, and corporate bond prices, join six other fellows of The Q-Group, four of whom are Nobel laureates.

In October, David Yermack, professor of finance and Yamaichi Faculty Fellow at NYU Stern and adjunct professor at the NYU School of Law, presented the keynote address at the 2006 NYU Stern Board of Overseers Dinner, held at The St. Regis Hotel. Yermack discussed his study on stock options, “Good Timing: CEO Stock Option Awards and Company News Announcements,” which illustrated the favorable timing of executive stock option awards. Published in the Journal of Finance in 1997, this study led to further research in the field that has culminated in recent government prosecutions for options backdating.

Also in October, David Backus, Heinz Riehl Professor of Economics, and Nouriel Roubini, professor of economics and international business, presented opposing viewpoints on the heated issue of global imbalances. In a paper delivered at the 24th meeting of the Latin American Network of Central Banks and Finance Ministries in Washington, Backus took a positive view of the US current account deficit, arguing that the US is “on the comfortable path to ruin.” He noted that financial capital is flowing out of high-saving countries, such as Japan and Germany, and into the US.

In remarks given at the International Monetary Fund's annual meeting, Roubini argued that if the US continues to run current account deficits of 7 percent or more of GDP, its external liabilities will eventually become unsustainably large, triggering a collapse of the dollar and a global recession. He argued that while the global imbalances are dangerous, they can only be safely unwound if several countries take action.

Lawrence White, Arthur E. Imperatore Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies and deputy chair of the economics department, and Paul Brown, professor of accounting and academic director of the TRIUM Global Executive MBA Program, led sessions for the US Department of State's International Visitors Leadership Program, which was mandated to facilitate US exposure to leaders of emerging economies. The professors spoke to mid-level executives in trade and industry from around the world, including Thailand, Maldives, Oman, Pakistan, and Panama.

Last fall, George Smith, clinical professor of economics and international business, testified at the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) joint hearings on Section 2 of the Sherman Act. Smith discussed his work on the history of the aluminum industry and the Alcoa antitrust ruling of 1945, commented on other historical cases in antitrust law, and described the frequently unforeseen, sometimes counterproductive consequences of antitrust remedies.