The full-time MBA ranking includes quantitative and qualitative data from current MBA candidates and recent graduates of global MBA programs. Factors such as educational experience, potential to network, and faculty quality were measured in the publication’s annual report. A total of 153 schools were asked to participate.

Ranked favorably for its student-alumni ratio and No. 12 for its network potential, the Gabelli School was recognized as one of world’s leading business programs.

“We have placed an emphasis firmly on quality in the MBA program,” said Donna Rapaccioli, Ph.D., dean of the Gabelli School. “We’re making sure that our curriculum is industry relevant, ensuring that we have the best faculty, and creating new opportunities for students to take on consulting-style work.”

In the regional ranking, the Gabelli School comes in at 54, and 92 overall. This puts the school third behind the Columbia Business School and New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business in the New York City region. Among Jesuit institutions, the Gabelli School ranks second behind Georgetown University.

“Our debut in the Economist‘s global rankings as a top 100 full-time MBA program really demonstrates that the Gabelli School of Business is on the move,” said Benjamin M. Cole, Ph.D., director of the Full-Time MBA and Professional MBA programs.

The school’s entrance in the Economist survey comes months after the Gabelli School launched its cutting-edge MBA onboarding program, Gabelli Launch. The innovative program took 42 incoming full-time MBA students to Argentina to work on social impact consulting projects with local NGOs, such as Fundación Emanuel, Red Por La Infancia, and Azul Solidario.

Besides this intensive orientation program, Cole said the school would be offering new courses this spring on blockchain and cryptocurrencies— as well as bootcamp-style training in social entrepreneurship. These features are important differentiators in the MBA market, he said.

“We have exciting programming that helps students attain the personal transformation they came to achieve at Fordham.”

“It is kind of cool,” he said, noting that the physical move of gold bars represents a tiny fraction of the trillions in currency that move through the Federal Reserve every single day.

Analyzing how those trillions move falls to economists like Bennett, who, after spending more than 20 years at the reserve, rose through the ranks to become senior vice president. He eventually left the reserve to become chief economist at the New York Stock Exchange from 2001 to 2008.

With a stock market career bookended by the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the 2008 financial crisis, it’s not surprising that Bennett takes a cool analytic approach to contemporary issues facing the economy and the markets, one which manifests itself in a course he teaches titled “Contemporary Issues in Finance, Managerial Economics, and Macroeconomics.”

Bennett does not diminish the human cost of terrorism or the economic downturn. But he points out that the markets continued to function and recover after 9/11 and again in 2008. He said that people often forget that the post-9/11 recession began with a tech bubble that burst well before the attacks.

“Clearly the markets preformed badly in the wake of the attacks but they came back pretty quick,” he said. “The New York Stock Exchange continued to function in the 1930s even after prices were very depressed and the U.S. economy was in the doghouse.”

He said that terrorism, such as the ongoing attacks by ISIS, probably would not affect the markets or the U.S. economy very much. He reiterated President Obama’s point of view, from his final State of the Union address, that the U.S. economy is the “strongest, most durable economy in the world.”

Wall Street Isn’t Main Street

Bennett was quick to note the distinction between the markets and the economy.

“The U.S. stock market is not as integrated with the U.S. economy as some imagine. There’s a trading dynamic on Wall Street that’s separate from what happens on Main Street. The market can go up and down, but it doesn’t mean the economy is going to go up and down,” he said.

Bennett’s views on the economy developed in two environments that he said were culturally distinct: the University of Chicago, where he got his undergraduate degree, and Princeton University, where he earned his doctoral degree.

“I did have a sense that Chicago was idiosyncratic in terms of its view especially when it comes to macroeconomics; it had a monetarist ideology influenced by Milton Friedman. Princeton was in a Keynesian tradition. The way macroeconomics was taught was completely different in the two places.”

He said that Chicago “did real world” analysis whereas Princeton was heavy on economic models, equations and the language of math. A Princeton-educated economist usually went into academia—but not Bennett.

“I wanted to go do something that applied to the real world, in New York,” he said.

During his 20-year career at the Federal Reserve, he played many roles at the bank, with research being one component. He also supervised transactions between the big banks. And he advised the president of the New York Federal Reserve who in his role as vice chairman of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) influences monitory policy, such as interest rates.

“It was gratifying to brief the (NY Fed) president before every FOMC meeting and say this is important and here’s some research you have to keep in mind,” he said.

Macroeconomics and a Stabilized Economy

Macroeconomics, he said, is essentially “thinking about the stability of the economy.”

“It is not something that’s intellectually fun. It’s a practical issue in modern societies: trying to understand what to do if there is a recession or what kinds of things can be done to avoid periods of inflation.”

Though, he admitted, economists aren’t always successful.

“The reason all these fancy models don’t work so well is because there’s a randomness to human endeavors you really can’t forecast,” he said. “Still, I don’t think it’s just an accident that the U.S. economy has been stable.”

He pointed to the fact that, since the Great Depression, the field of economics has grown tremendously in this country. Of the 75 individuals who have received the Nobel Prize in economics, 53 were from the United States.

“These are things that we (Americans) have actually gotten kind of good at,” he said.

Spend enough time with an economist and the word “elegant” is sure to pop up to describe a mathematical equation.

Developing a simple mathematical design, however, isn’t always a pretty process, said associate professor of economics Duncan James, Ph.D.

For his latest paper, published by the journal Econometrica last year, James said a tremendous effort was made “nailing down [the design of the experiments], and cutting down the various angles before we let people anywhere near it.”

The resulting article, “Clocks and Trees: Isomorphic Dutch Auctions and Centipede Games,” brings together two different strands of decision-making in game theory, and in auctions. The paper was co-authored with James C. Cox, Ph.D., the Noah Langdale, Jr. Chair of Economics at Georgia State University.

Game theory is the study of strategic interaction as developed mathematically.

James and Cox decided to study two game strategies: the Dutch auction and the centipede game. The Dutch auction is a naturally occurring auction: it has its roots in real-world trading. But the centipede is considered synthetic because it was initially developed purely as a conceptual paradox to challenge game theorists.

In the Dutch auction, the desired object is given a price well above its perceived value. A descending clock, like a stopwatch, is started. The price goes down in a linear fashion corresponding to the dwindling seconds: $98, $97, $96, etc. The winner stops the clock earlier (and at a higher price) than the others.

The centipede game is not unlike the game of hot potato, but each time the potato gets passed on to the next player, it grows in value. The person who decides not to pass it on is the winner.

“You have to move it around for it to gain value, but ultimately you want to hold on to it,” said James.

The accumulation of the pot for the centipede game is often geometric—the pot doubles in value as it gets passed on. For example, the first player’s potato is worth $2, the next player’s is worth $4, the next is worth $8, then $16, $32, $64, etc.

Over the years researchers have come to certain conclusions about participant behaviors in each setting. Cox and economists Bruce Roberson and Vernon Smith pioneered an explanation of the Dutch auction that concluded, in part, that subjects dropped out of the game too soon due to risk aversion.

Other economists researching the centipede game concluded that participants stayed in the game too long, due to an altruistic belief that there was enough good will among participants that the object might eventually find its way back into their possession.

“You have centipede literature on one track and Dutch auction literature on another track, and each track [has]its own mythology,” said James. “These two fields had been living these parallel lives for about 30 years and no one had put the two together.”

James and Cox challenged the economists’ conclusions. First, they made changes to both games that didn’t unduly change their character, or their equilibrium predictions, “nesting” the Dutch auction and centipede game into a more general “meta-game,” and making the games slightly more like each other.

As the centipede is a synthetic game formed purely for the purpose of game theorists, participants know everything about each other’s value structure. However, Cox and James no longer allowed bidders to know each other’s values, thus making it more like a Dutch auction.

“You may value an object to be $8.23, but I don’t know that,” said James. “[Even though] I may know that its general value ranges from 0 to $10.”

They also made the centipede pot linear, with the pot gaining in increments of $1 to $2, $2 to $3, etc.

The Dutch auction was tweaked to allow players to alternate turns as the clock ticked down. The predictions for the Dutch auction were arrived at in the same manner as before.

Each game is associated with a visual presentation; the Dutch auction represented by a counting-down clock, and the centipede game represented by a treelike graphic. When using the visual presentation usually associated with that game, Cox and James were able to replicate the kinds of results usually observed for that game. But then the researchers switched the presentations—a supposedly inconsequential detail.

After nearly 600 subjects participated, the economists found that with the new presentation, Dutch auction players played longer and paid lower prices when using the tree visuals, while centipede players actually tapped out at the earliest opportunity when using the clock visuals.

“By smashing the two games together we were able to eliminate a lot of theories we now know probably aren’t true,” said James. “For example, it’s probably not risk aversion in the Dutch auction and it’s probably not altruism that drives the centipede game.

“The behavior isn’t coming from people’s preferences, because we can turn this stuff on or off like a light switch, based on how we present the game to them.”
James was careful not to insinuate that his paper’s conclusion means that 30 years’ worth of economists’ research goes down the drain.

But the authors are expecting challenges.

“You have a lot of really smart people, Nobel Prize winners on both sides, writing on these two games, but when the findings are put together they basically annihilate each other,” he said.

Practically speaking, James said that there are any number of ways for people to come to and execute a decision, and the Dutch auction and centipede game create a benchmark for comparison.

“Whether it’s the clock version or tree version, the games trigger very different reactions if they’re laid out differently, but people should recognize that it’s the same thing, its just being presented differently,” said James. “Critical thinking sounds too much like school work, so I’d describe it as situational awareness.”

“The way I’d explain this to the man on the street is: pay attention to your surroundings, keep your eyes open.”