Economics & Business
- Home
- Economics & Business
- Building more apartments will not solve Australia's housing affordability crisis unless policymakers address rising house prices and investor activity, new research shows. Australia's housing affordability crisis is being driven less by a shortage of apartments than by systemwide price pressures originating in the market for freestanding homes, according to new research.
- Financial markets are governed by a combination of rational and irrational forces, statistical probabilities and "animal spirits." It takes fluency in both to understand the market, let alone beat it. Yet market actors, including asset traders, now frequently use machine-learning techniques to help generate predictions of future asset prices.
- We have built tools that save us hours at work. So why do so many people feel worse for using them? The answer has less to do with AI and more to do with what we have always believed work is supposed to cost us.
- Millions of Californians, in every part of the state, live with an uneasy day-to-day preoccupation: Housing is so expensive here, food and gas and utilities are so expensive—would it make sense to pull up stakes and leave for another state?
- A new Special Report in the journal BioScience introduces the Scientist Network for Advancing Policy (SNAP), a student-led, nonpartisan, grassroots coalition founded in 2025 to empower early-career researchers to engage with science policy, advocacy and public communication. The report details the ways in which SNAP is reshaping the role of scientists in their communities.
- Realizing the dream of homeownership comes with a cold reality for millions of people in California: more expensive insurance premiums that cover less. Increasingly, the only option for some homeowners is the California Fair Access to Insurance Requirements (FAIR) Plan, a state-mandated backstop that, until recently, primarily provided coverage in places conventional insurers would not touch because of wildfire risk.
- Tourism businesses across Aotearoa New Zealand are working to become more sustainable, but a new study shows the process is complex and rarely straightforward. The research, based on in-depth interviews, data analysis and site visits with established tourism operators across the country, examines how businesses move from good intentions to more sustainable ways of working.
- Instead of going to stores to compare products, Americans have increasingly turned to watching online video reviews. As far back as a decade ago, 55% of Americans reported they'd watched online reviews of products, according to Pew Research. As of late 2024, Pew found 62% were relying on the video platform TikTok to view product reviews or recommendations.
- The Hong Kong SAR imports more than 90% of its food, and it can be very difficult, when food safety incidents occur, to trace the source across a complex supply chain. Prof. Leng Mingming, dean of the Faculty of Business and chair professor of operations and risk management at Lingnan University, has published a new study proposing the introduction of a unified product tracing system across the food supply chain.
- New research from the University of St. Andrews is calling on employers to rethink flexible-working policies, warning that current approaches fail to reflect increasingly blurred boundaries between work and personal life.
- Frontline employees who face rude or disrespectful customers are more likely to justify negative behaviors, from cutting corners to leaving their jobs, according to a new study.
- Career interest tests can be very helpful for teenagers and young adults deciding which career to pursue. New research from Michigan State University challenges the assumption that vocational interests are only relevant for early career decision-making; rather, they remain relevant into adulthood.
- Using artificial intelligence, scammers can duplicate someone's voice with just seconds of audio, says the University of Cincinnati's Kimberly Hyun. Impostor scams are one of the most common forms of fraud, according to the Federal Trade Commission.
- How do political ideology and perceived ideological alignment influence supply chain professionals' evaluation of operational decisions involving politically charged macroeconomic issues such as tariffs?
- Paywalls are essential to the financial sustainability of news organizations, yet little is known about how readers respond when they encounter one. Do they subscribe, continue reading free content, look for ways around the paywall or leave the site altogether?
- The Life House Impact Project, led by Dr. Georgia Bowers, Professor Andrew King and Dr. Richard Green, worked with older LGBTQ+ people to document their real concerns about housing and social care—and then brought those experiences into training for the people responsible for that care. The report shows that the proportion of staff who said they regularly or always met their LGBTQ+ service users' needs rose from 55% to 85% in the weeks following the training.
- Hospitality leaders are being forced to handle far more than operational disruption when crises hit, according to new research from the University of Surrey. Researchers found that modern crises demand emotional resilience, ethical judgment and rapid decision-making under intense public scrutiny.
- The grocery store is a busy place, full of signs and signals that we may or may not always notice. Picture yourself in your usual store: Do your eyes get drawn to a "limited quantities" sign or a "buy now before it's gone" promotion?
- The "right to repair" movement is gaining steam as consumers push corporations to offer them more freedom to fix products—from cars to dishwashers to toys.
- Global uncertainty is the new normal. Here's why institutional legitimacy and resilience are crucialThe world has never had more data, more models or more economists. It has rarely felt more out of control. Uncertainty, not risk, has become the defining condition of our era. Central bankers invoke it. Political leaders use it to defer decisions and justify extraordinary ones. Academics are struggling to adapt their theories to a brave new world of unexpected outcomes and erratic policy choices. The IMF's World Uncertainty Index—which tracks how often the word appears in economic and political reporting across 143 countries—has been running at historically elevated levels for the better part of a decade, with fresh spikes […]
Photographer: