National Science Foundation Awards Xavier Gabaix $400,000 to Study Rare Disasters and Exchange Rates
Associate Professor of Finance Xavier Gabaix – recently recognized by The Economist as one of the top eight best young economists in the world – received a $402,342 grant from the National Science Foundation to study rare disasters and exchange rates. The project, a joint effort with Emmanuel Farhi, assistant professor of economics at Harvard University, proposes a new model of exchange rates that combines the possibility of rare economic disasters and an asset view of the exchange rate. The proposed research offers a potential way to understand the impact of exchange rate pegging and also explains how to detect the impact of large disasters in asset prices, which can help avert future disasters.
“Although our project began before the current US market meltdown, the financial crisis shows that the possibility of rare disasters is actually very real,” noted Gabaix. “And while the crisis is unfortunate, it provides an opportunity for conducting useful research.”
Environmental Defense Fund’s Fred Krupp Anchors Stern’s Citi Leadership and Ethics Program
Fred Krupp, head of the Environmental Defense Fund, was recently appointed the sixth Distinguished Citi Fellow in Leadership and Ethics at NYU Stern. Stern’s Citi Leadership and Ethics Program is made possible through the generous support of the Citi Foundation and managed by Stern’s Markets, Ethics, and Law Program. It represents a comprehensive effort to extend the School’s longstanding commitment to the practice of professionally responsible business and supports the development of curricular and research innovations in the area of leadership and ethics. This year the program is focusing on the use of market-based approaches to address environmental challenges. Krupp keynoted the annual conference in March with a discussion on the economics and politics of “cap and trade” and how to leverage entrepreneurship to achieve environmental goals.
Krupp is widely recognized as the foremost champion of harnessing market forces for environmental ends. He was the architect of the market-based acid rain reduction plan in the 1990 Clean Air Act – The Economist’s “greatest green success story of the past decade,” and now the model for current congressional proposals to address climate change. Krupp has broken new ground with strategic corporate partnerships, and helped launch the US Climate Action Partnership, whose Fortune 500 members have called for strict limits on global warming pollution.
shorttakes
Professor of Finance Edward Altman was inducted in October into the inaugural class of the Turnaround Management Association’s Turnaround, Restructuring and Distressed Investing Industry Hall of Fame, which honors those whose outstanding individual contributions have made a lasting positive impact on an industry dedicated to stabilizing underperforming companies, rebuilding corporate value, and retaining jobs.
Associate Professor of Marketing Vishal Singh has been named a Marketing Science Institute Young Scholar for his leadership of the next generation of marketing academics.
Robert Engle, professor of finance and Nobel Laureate, and Nouriel Roubini, professor of economics and international business, spoke on several panels regarding the economy and financial institutions at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January. The conference addressed the financial crisis and ways to stabilize and relaunch the global economy, as well as a number of interrelated global risks, including climate change, food, and water security.
Professor of Marketing Geeta Menon was elected president of the Association for Consumer Research (ACR). In January, she began a three-year term on the ACR Board of Directors.
Associate Professor of Management and Organizations Robert Salomon was elected to the board (as representative-at-large) of the Strategic Management Society, the largest academic society dedicated to the advancement of strategic management research.
Professor of Finance Viral V. Acharya was recently named to the research advisory board of the British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association.
Assistant Professor of Economics Laura Veldkamp was made an associate editor for the Journal of Monetary Economics in January.
Assistant Professor of Information, Operations, and Management Sciences Anindya Ghose was recently appointed an associate editor at Information Systems Research and Management Science; both are journals of the IS Society.
Professor of Management and Organizations Elizabeth Morrison is currently an associate editor at the Academy of Management Journal and was elected to a five-year term as an officer of the Organizational Behavior Division of the Academy of Management, the largest division of the Academy. She will be the division’s president from 2011-2012.
Professor of Marketing Tülin Erdem has been appointed the next editor of the Journal of Marketing Research.
Assistant Professor of Accounting Daniel Cohen joined the editorial board of the Journal of Accounting and Economics and has been appointed as an associate editor for 2009-2011.
Professor of Finance Martin Gruber has been elected to the executive committee of the board of directors of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
researchroundup
Professor of Marketing Susan Douglas received the Global Marketing Award from the American Marketing Association’s Marketing Special Interest Group for her “lifelong dedication to global marketing” and “significant contributions to global marketing knowledge.” Having started in the 1970s, she was one of the earliest researchers in international marketing.
Clinical Associate Professor of Economics Robert Wright’s book, One Nation Under Debt: Hamilton, Jefferson, and the History of What We Owe, published by McGraw-Hill in 2008, was recently named one of the top 25 outstanding academic titles in economics by Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, a source for reviews of academic books, electronic media, and Internet resources of interest to those in higher education.
Assistant Professor of Information, Operations, and Management Sciences Sinan Aral recently won the best overall paper award at the International Conference on Information Systems for the second time in three years for his co-authored paper, “Mining Face-to-Face Interaction Networks Using Sociometric Badges: Predicting Productivity in an IT Configuration Task.” This is the most prestigious award at the most influential information systems conference in the world, where Aral also won the best dissertation award last year. The paper bridges two influential bodies of research in order to contrast the productivity effects of face-to-face networking with e-mail networking, and establishes a novel set of tools and techniques – based on the wearable sociometric badge – for discovering and recording precise face-to-face interaction data in real world work settings.
Professor of Management and Organizations Frances Milliken and Assistant Professor of Management and Organizations Joe Magee won the award for best paper at the Eastern Academy of Management in May 2008 for “The Lens and Language of Power: Sense-Making and Communication in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina,” which found significant differences in how individuals construed Hurricane Katrina as a function of the amount of formal authority they had at the time.
Assistant Professor of Management and Organizations Gonçalo Pacheco de Almeida won the distinguished paper award of the business policy and strategy division at the 2008 Academy of Management Meetings for “Time-Consuming Technology Development: How Imitation and Spillovers Affect Competitive Dynamics.” The research compares two technology competition regimes and finds firm incentives for both.
Associate Professor of Information, Operations, and Management Sciences Arun Sundararajan and Gal Oestreicher-Singer (PhD ’08) received the best paper award at the INFORMS Conference on Information Systems and Technology, held in October 2008, for “The Visible Hand of Recommendation Networks.” The paper observes that while social and economic networks of various kinds have historically affected purchasing choices and demand patterns, the widespread adoption of electronic commerce over the last decade, coupled with the more recent explosion of online social networking and Web 2.0 technologies, have made these networks explicitly visible to consumers and influential for product demand.
Professor of Finance Matthew Richardson and Associate Professor of Finance Alexander Ljungqvist won the 2007 Barclays Global Investors Prize for their paper, “The Investment Behavior of Buyout Fund Managers,” which analyzes the determinants of buyout funds’ investment decisions. Professor Ljungqvist also won the 2008 FMA Best Paper Award in Financial Markets for his co-authored paper, “The Value of Research,” in which he estimates the value added by sell-side equity-research analysts and explores the links between analyst research, informational efficiency, and asset prices.
Professor of Accounting Kashi Balachandran won the Impact on Management Accounting Practice Award for his jointly authored paper entitled, “CEVITATM: The Valuation and Reporting of Strategic Capabilities,” which focuses on combining the tangible and intangible assets in an organization to develop a capability index that signifies its economic value.
Assistant Professor of Information, Operations, and Management Sciences Panagiotis G. Ipeirotis and Associate Professor of Information, Operations, and Management Sciences Foster Provost received a best paper runner-up award at the top data-mining conference, ACM SIGKDD 2008, for “Improving Data Mining and Data Quality using Multiple, Noisy Labelers,” which examines the implications of inexpensive micro-outsourcing for improving data quality and data-mining results.
At the fall INFORMS meeting, Assistant Professor of Marketing Sam Hui was awarded second prize for the 2008 George B. Dantzig Dissertation Award, which is given for the best dissertation in operations research and the management sciences that is innovative and relevant to practice.
Professor of Marketing Priya Raghubir’s co-authored paper, “Customer Experience Management in Retailing: Understanding the Buying Process,” was published in the Journal of Retailing in a special issue on customer experience management in retailing. Her article “Memory-Based Store Price Judgments: The Role of Knowledge and Shopping Experience,” was also published in the Journal of Retailing. In addition, her paper, “Biases in Perceptions of Base Rates for Risk: The Effect of Denominator Salience on the Use of the Nominal Rate and the Numerator to Estimate Risk,” was published in the International Journal of Research in Marketing.
Professor of Accounting Stephen Ryan published two papers, “Accounting In and For the Subprime Crisis” and “Characteristics of Securitizations that Determine Issuers’ Retention of the Risks of the Securitized Assets,” in The Accounting Review.
Assistant Professor of Management Aviad Pe’er published his co-authored paper “Do Politics Shape Buyout Volume and Performance?” in the Harvard Business Review. The paper shows how the political leanings of a state influence buyout fund activity, particularly that Republican (red) states are more favorable than Democratic (blue) states for buyout firms.
Associate Professor of Marketing Tom Meyvis’s paper with Leif Nelson of the University of California-San Diego and Stern doctoral student Jeff Galak (PhD ’09), “Mispredicting Adaptation and the Consequences of Unwanted Disruptions: When Advertisements Make Television Programs More Enjoyable,” was published in the Journal of Consumer Research.
Assistant Professor of Management and Organizations Christina Fang’s co-authored paper, “The Near-Term Liability of Exploitation: Exploration and Exploitation in Multi-Stage Problems,” showing that exploratory behavior has value quite apart from its role in revising beliefs, is forthcoming in Organization Science.
