Columbia Business School In the News

Findings from a paper co-authored by CJEB's Director, Professor David Weinstein, titled “The Anatomy of Tariff Pass-Through into Consumer Prices” were referenced in the Wall Street Journal article titled “The Biggest Inflation Contributor: Tariffs”Read the full article here.The core findings from the research paper, “The Anatomy of Tariff Pass-Through into Consumer Prices,” are also summarized by the paper's co-authors in a research blog post titled “How Fast Do Tariffs Pass Through into Consumer Prices?” which was published on the Liberty Street Economics blog. The platform features insight and analysis from New York Fed economists working at the intersection of research and policy. Read the research paper here. Read the blog post here. The Biggest Inflation Contributor: Tariffs (The Wall Street Journal, 10/20/2026) 

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According to National Jeweler, Graff USA has named Katy Chen, who earned her MBA at Columbia Business School, as executive vice president. She joined on August 31 and reports directly to President and CEO Marc Hruschka, overseeing retail sales and operations at Graff's 11 US locations in New York, California, Florida, Chicago, Houston, and Las Vegas. Chen most recently spent a year as senior vice president of client engagement at Christian Dior Couture. Before that, she was head of client engagement in North America at Cartier for two years and spent 12 years at Tiffany & Co., where she became senior director for global client relations for high jewelry. Graff USA pointed to her "proven track record of building high-performing teams and driving sustainable growth" and said she'll help strengthen the brand's US retail presence and client experience. She also holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from Bryn Mawr College.

In Forbes, Columbia Business School Professor Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh looks at the surge in high-yield debt behind the AI data center buildout. So far in 2026, data center developers and AI cloud providers known as "neoclouds" have raised $80 billion in data center bonds. Of that, $37 billion, nearly half, is rated junk, more than four times the 2025 total. A Forbes analysis of FactSet data found these bonds finance 16 data center projects leased to or backed by companies such as Amazon, Meta, Nvidia, Oracle, and Jane Street, along with fast-growing neoclouds like CoreWeave and Fluidstack. Investors are now pulling back. Average yields on these bonds climbed to nearly 10% in a single week, and about $4 billion of CoreWeave's corporate debt is trading below 80 cents on the dollar. "Bond investors don't benefit from the upside. They only worry about the downside," Van Nieuwerburgh says. "The yields are beginning to reflect an increased probability of a downside scenario." Equity markets are showing the same strain, as heavily indebted developers Firmus, SB Energy, and AirTrunk have postponed or canceled their IPOs.

In a MarketWatch report on the International Monetary Fund's latest AI outlook, Columbia Business School Professor Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh's research helps show how big the AI buildout is. In a paper published by the Brookings Institution, Van Nieuwerburgh estimates that investment in AI infrastructure and specialized chips will total $10.3 trillion between 2025 and 2032. That's about 3.63% of US gross domestic product each year. The article says AI spending is likely to exceed what was spent building the railroads, the electricity grid, and the internet. Economists at ING estimate AI will account for a third of US growth this year. IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva says AI could raise global growth by up to half a percentage point a year over the next decade.

In a column for CNBC Make It, former Columbia Business School executive education faculty member Dorie Clark explains how to handle a coworker who seems to believe their own false claims. She opens with Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, who is back in the news with a new documentary. Clark has consulted for companies including Google and Microsoft, and she warns that ignoring a pattern of broken promises can leave you "holding the bag when things unravel."

In an exclusive Business Insider report, Columbia Business School executive in residence and adjunct professor Len Sherman analyzes how much Uber pays its drivers in 16 US cities. The data comes from GigU, a third-party app that helps drivers evaluate trips, and covers about 1.8 million trip offers made between March 2025 and March 2026, including offers drivers declined. Sherman found big regional differences. In Orlando, Uber offered a median of 72 cents a mile, or $19.30 per active hour. In Los Angeles, the median was $2.15 a mile, or $46 per active hour. After accounting for driving expenses, typical trip counts, and trip distances, he estimates drivers in six cities earned less than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Columbia Business School accounting professor Shivaram Rajgopal explains how he teaches students to recognize and avoid the ethical missteps behind some of the biggest financial scandals in modern history. In his classes, Rajgopal walks students "step by step, decision by decision" through frauds like Silicon Valley Bank, WorldCom, Enron, and Theranos. He wants them to see how these scandals actually happened so they can avoid making the same mistakes. To make the lesson stick, he turns to a much older story, Shakespeare's "Macbeth." The play shows the slippery slope Rajgopal sees behind many corporate frauds, where one compromise leads to the next until wrongdoing feels normal.

In a Quartz report on Asia's debt-fueled AI infrastructure boom, Columbia Business School Professor Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh's research helps show how much borrowing is behind data center growth. In work for the Brookings Institution, Van Nieuwerburgh estimates that about $1.4 trillion of debt has gone into financing data centers, and that banks hold roughly half of it. The article covers Singapore-based Princeton Digital Group's push for a three-year syndicated loan of up to $1.2 billion, citing Bloomberg. The money would fund a 198.8-megawatt data center campus in Johor, Malaysia, and refinance existing debt. HSBC, Maybank, OCBC, Standard Chartered, and UOB are leading the deal. Earlier this year the company raised about $856 million for data centers in Indonesia, and it has set a $5 billion debt target for regional expansion.

POLITICO's Decoded newsletter looks at how Wall Street leaders are weighing the financial risks of the AI boom, and it cites Columbia Business School Professor Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh's research on the scale of the spending. In work published through the Brookings Institution, Van Nieuwerburgh estimates the cost of the AI buildout could exceed $10.3 trillion through 2032. Relative to the size of the economy, that's more than the US invested during its canal, railroad, electrification, highway, and telecommunications booms.

WebProNews cites Columbia Business School economist Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh in its look at how the AI data center boom is creating demand well beyond the server halls. Van Nieuwerburgh calculates that annual AI-related construction investment could exceed 3% of US GDP between 2025 and 2032, a larger share than historical spending on railroads, the electric grid, or highways. That scale is creating a side economy for the thousands of construction workers who spend years on each site. National Jobsite Catering serves about 1,500 meals a day at each of its 12 data center sites and has grown its revenue tenfold in four years. WhereiPark leases temporary parking lots near builds.

In a reflective Medium essay, writer David Suaza Cardona draws on research by Columbia Business School Professor Adam Galinsky to explore how travel shapes identity. After a trip to Taiwan, where he hiked Taroko National Park and explored Green Island, Cardona asks why he felt so much more at ease with himself abroad than in his everyday routine in Abu Dhabi. He suggests identity is a process rather than something fixed, and that new environments bring out traits that were "frozen" inside us. Galinsky's finding anchors that argument: people who live abroad and actively engage with foreign cultures consistently score higher in creative cognition and self-concept clarity.

Mentioned is a rising private-equity star who had graduated from Columbia Business School, Kollitides moved up the ranks at Cerberus, Feinberg’s firm, taking the reins of its aerospace, defense and government groups. In 2012, Kollitides took on an especially sensitive and more public job for the private-equity giant.

Europe catches up to the United States in research influence, according to the Financial Times.