Research

The resale season starts in March with an upswing in real estate transactions, but last month's numbers were much higher than might be expected if this were a "normal" year.

Recovery from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression remains incomplete, but most experts concur that the worst is behind us. Now economists, policy makers and analysts alike are asking, how did we get here?

In the Web's early days, self-styled seers proclaimed that the ironclad law of online commerce would be survival of the cheapest. Consumers could compare products with a few clicks of a mouse, these folks said, and thus they'd all soon migrate to the places where they paid the least.

The American dollar is the major currency for commerce around the globe. By some estimates, the dollar is used in nearly half of all world trade, and has long played a vital role in domestic economies from Africa to the former USSR.

Final revised state figures for 2009 have just become available for two key indicators: nonfarm employment (from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics) and personal income (from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis).

How does your organization make decisions? Thomas Davenport, a professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College and author of "Competing on Analytics: The Science of Winning," has taken a systematic look at the way decisions are made.

In the aftermath of recession, experts and international agencies such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) often advise this strategy: countries are told to hold tight on currency flows as part of a painful set of austerity measures, let exchange rates drop, then boost exports and productivi

According to the latest ASU-Repeat Sales Index (ASU-RSI), overall house prices declined by 13 percent in December compared to December 2008, an improvement over the 17 percent year over year decline seen in November and the 20 percent decline in October.

In 2009, inflation-adjusted output (Gross Domestic Product) fell by -2.4 percent. This was the largest one-year decrease in GDP since the Great Depression, causing economists to dub this contraction as the Great Recession.

Is the Chinese currency undervalued? If so, by how much, and how does this impact global trade? "That's a profound question," said one expert at "The Currency of Trade," a forum convened recently in Beijing, hosted by Arizona State University, the Kearny Alliance and Tsinghua University.