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House Price Risk: What's Driving Property Values?
With equities looking unreliable, Australians continue to rest assured that their wealth is as safe as houses when it's invested in direct property – and many are relying on it as a means of funding retirement. But property prices are more volatile than most people think – even within the same postcode, insist researchers from the Australian School of Business. A new model that takes in factors not normally considered in indices shows substantial discrepancies in the growth rates of house prices. Seasonal effects and a range of variables including interest and unemployment rates, equity prices and housing stock may cause market values to plummet or soar.

Knowledge@Australian School of Business 08/02/2012 - 21/02/2012

Grey Matter: How Managing Others Affects Brain Power - Positively!
Corporate players often list managing others as one of their greatest challenges, but new research from the University of New South Wales shows the upshot may be a bigger hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for learning and memory. Being a manager potentially may ward off common neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's. The research is thought-provoking for policymakers as they attempt to keep mature individuals in the workforce longer to tackle the dilemmas of an ageing population. And senior staff may want to think again about the prospect of early retirement.

Intellectual Property: Can Australia Clean Up on Clean Tech?
Australia has had notable triumphs with innovation, but when it comes to the emerging 21st century boom sector – clean tech – international experts say it's lagging. While Australia is a leader in solar, helping China successfully decrease energy intensity, rather than joining the global race to meet demand for green technologies and service, it's effectively on the sidelines tying its shoelaces."Quarry Australia" may be killing green manufacturing, but big opportunities also exist in R&D. Now a new program at the University of New South Wales, a frontrunner in solar innovation, is blazing another trail by giving away intellectual property for commercialisation.

What's Wrong With this Picture: Kodak's 30-year Slide into Bankruptcy
When new technologies change the world, some companies are caught off-guard. Others see change coming and are able to adapt in time. And then there are companies like Kodak -- which saw the future and simply couldn't figure out what to do. Kodak's Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing on January 19 culminates a long series of missteps, including a fear of introducing new technologies that would disrupt its highly profitable film business.

A World of Difference: Why Some Australians Keep Getting Richer
Prior to its recent Davos meeting, the World Economic Forum identified inequality as a major threat to the global economy. In an election year, US president Obama is also heeding the loud protests about the gap between the haves and have-nots. And the issue is growing in Australia where the rich are definitely getting richer, in part due to the mining boom. Other reasons include the decline in manufacturing, increasing numbers of single parent and solo households, labour market changes, and uneven redistribution through taxes and benefits. Peter Whiteford, director of the Social Policy Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, urges policymakers to shift focus from income growth to inequality.

Raise a Glass to the Free Market in Wine
The worldwide wine business is a good case study in free trade, given that there are many producers and few restrictions on commerce. In recent years, the cost of wine has reflected this generally free global market in two ways -- one good and the other bad, as George M. Taber argues in this op-ed piece. Taber is the author of four books on wine. His latest is titled, A Toast to Bargain Wines: How innovators, iconoclasts, and winemaking revolutionaries are changing the way the world drinks.