Knowledge at Wharton

Climate change. Middle East instability. International terrorism. Oil price shocks. Weapons of mass destruction. The world is fast becoming a riskier place and the days of wait-and-see are no longer an option says the World Economic Forum’s recently released Global Risks 2007 report. The report published in cooperation with Wharton’s Risk Management and Decision Processes Center identifies 23 core...

The Economist called it ”a snort from a dragon’s nostrils.” At the end of February as China’s stock market index fell by more than 8% stock markets tumbled around the globe in their steepest decline since the attacks on September 11 2001. Adding to the anxiety were concerns about a possible shakeout in the U.S. sub-prime mortgage market and former chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan’s c...

According to a new study by Wharton professors Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers marriage and divorce rates in the United States are both at historic lows. When Stevenson and Wolfers began to analyze the changing market forces behind these new statistics one thing became clear: The same forces that play a role in marriage and divorce statistics -- namely birth control partial closing of the gend...

As recently as 1990 nearly 70% of newspaper carriers in the U.S. were teens. But that number dropped to 18% in 2004 and more declines are likely. Although reasons for teens being edged out of this formerly youth-dominated profession are specific to the newspaper industry the end of the boyhood (or girlhood) paper route reflects a dramatic but little-noticed trend: Teen unemployment has hit histori...

Kenneth Shropshire knows sports. He is director of Wharton’s Sports Business Initiative president of the Sports Lawyers Association a former executive with the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee and a football player during his undergraduate days at Stanford. He has written The Business of Sports; In Black and White: Race and Sports in America and Basketball Jones: America Above the Rim. His...

When the Lilliputians came upon the sleeping Gulliver they didn’t know if he was friendly or hostile but he was so big it seemed prudent to tie him down. Should the 9 000 hedge funds -- the secretive investment pools controlling $1.4 trillion in assets -- be treated the same way? The President’s Working Group on Financial Markets doesn’t think so. In a late-February report the group urged vigilanc...

Viacom and CBS have pulled videos from Google’s YouTube. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recently requested that some Oscar footage be taken down from YouTube as well. And Google’s efforts to sell radio and print advertising have not met expectations. In short Google’s ability to navigate the traditional media landscape doesn’t seem to be going particularly well. What’s the problem...

In one sense Frank Abagnale Jr. might seem an odd choice as a featured speaker at a cutting-edge computer-ruled event like the Wharton Technology Conference 2007. That’s not just because Abagnale -- the subject of the 2002 Steven Spielberg movie ”Catch Me If You Can” -- was one of the most notorious con men of the 20th century but also because his technique was so decidedly low-tech. But that was...

Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo has set an ambitious goal: He wants the country to become one of the world’s top 20 economies during the next two decades. To accomplish this he has mandated that all university students in Nigeria study entrepreneurship. That is one of the factors that brought Peter Bamkole General Manager Enterprise Development Services at Lagos Business School to Wharton whe...

The issue of using hardware- or software-based digital rights management or ”DRM” to restrict how music and movies can be copied or shared has spurred fierce debate between those who think DRM is essential to protect content from unauthorized use and those who believe it undermines consumers’ rights to do whatever they want with the content they purchase. On February 6 Apple CEO Steve Jobs added t...

On Monday the country’s two satellite radio services -- Sirius and XM -- announced that they had finally agreed to merge. The move raises a number of questions not the least of which is whether they can get this deal approved by the Federal Communications Commission and the Justice Department. But regulatory issues aside what prompted these two archrivals to embrace each other what do they expect...

Some media reports called it a Valentine’s Day gift to Wall Street. When Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke appeared before Congress on February 14 and 15 he gave an upbeat view of inflation and the economy setting off a strong rally in stocks. The Dow Jones industrial average rose 87 points to 12 741.86. Bernanke told Congress that the economy seems to be moving to a slower but more sustainabl...

Imagine paying for your car only when it works. Or your television. Or even your high-end toaster. That might sound far-fetched but it could be the future model for purchases requiring service over time. According to research by two Wharton professors of operations and information management Morris Cohen and Serguei Netessine and doctoral student Sang-Hyun Kim this new approach to service supply c...

For months the steady drip of news about troubles in the subprime mortgage market didn’t seem too bad and many economists started to feel reassured about the health of the general housing market. But now some experts wonder whether those feelings of reassurance came too soon. They suggest that the growing number of borrower defaults in the ”aggressive lending” market which includes various types o...

It sounds like something from a futuristic TV thriller: American spies thwarting a terrorist plot through a shared online community modeled after Wikipedia the free user-created web-based encyclopedia. But Anthony D. Williams co-author of the new book Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything recently told a conference at Wharton’s Mack Center for Technological Innovation that this onl...

All companies from major multinationals to start-ups face a common challenge: how to keep growing. These firms find it difficult to sustain growth because they become risk averse opting for safer incremental product and service improvements instead of more rewarding but riskier major initiatives according to a study by Wharton marketing professor George S. Day. Companies Day says need to better un...

Stephen A. Schwarzman CEO and co-founder of The Blackstone Group was doing sit-ups and watching CNBC when he suddenly heard his name mentioned on air. It was a signal to him that the private equity business had gone ”into a weird zone of visibility.” Schwarzman David A. Brandon chairman and CEO of Domino’s Pizza and Timothy Draper the Silicon Valley venture capitalist examined the recent explosion...

It’s a common occurrence in Corporate America: An entrepreneurial founder starts a successful business builds it to a certain size and hands it over to a CEO to run. But then when things don’t go well the founder steps back in to take direct control of the organization. That essentially is what happened last week when Michael Dell returned to become the CEO of Dell replacing Kevin Rollins. What wi...

Last May Knowledge at Wharton spoke with John Paul MacDuffie a management professor at Wharton and co-director of the International Motor Vehicle Program about the state of the auto industry. It seems that not much has changed since then except maybe for the worse. 2006 was the first year since 1991 that Detroit’s Big Three were all in the red. Ford’s situation seems direr than ever; Chrysler whic...

According to some industry estimates fantasy sports is now a $4 billion industry and growing quickly. What is fantasy sports who provides fantasy sports platforms what are the most popular fantasy sports and -- coming off the Indianapolis Colts’ recent Super Bowl win -- can we assume there will be a Super Bowl for fantasy football or for baseball basketball or hockey? Knowledge at Wharton asked Ke...

On February 2 a long-awaited report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was released citing ”unequivocal” proof of global warming. Meanwhile some of the biggest corporations in the world including Wal-Mart Ford General Electric and BP have adopted highly visible ”green” strategies. But what does ”going green” mean for the bottom line? Whether motivated by desire to do what is...

When Mike McCue founded Tellme in 1999 its initial product was a voice-driven information service what might be termed a ”voice portal.” Today the company’s voice-recognition systems power directory assistance services from AT&T Verizon and Cingular along with automated 800-number customer help lines at companies like Merrill Lynch and Federal Express. But McCue still harbors dreams of a broad...

Microsoft’s Vista operating system should give the company a revenue stream that will run for years but experts at Wharton say the January 30 launch of the consumer versions of Microsoft’s flagship software may be among the last of its kind -- a product sold for a flat fee in a shrink-wrapped box. Indeed many wonder if the software business model that has made Microsoft so dominant may begin to fa...

Every week one financial services firm or another releases findings of its latest retirement study: Americans aren’t saving enough. Americans are saving too much. The savings rate is abysmal. People are borrowing against their homes to pay for luxuries and so forth. Who’s right? It turns out not surprisingly that the future is hard to predict and that many calculators designed to make those predic...

This year’s convening of The World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland brought together approximately 2 400 corporate executives heads of government and leaders of organizations like the World Bank and Human Rights Watch to debate issues ranging from global warming to the rise of the Internet and the future of the Middle East. Michael Useem director of Wharton’s Center for Leadership and Change Ma...