What Determines the Future Value of an Icon Wine? Evidence from Australia

The Australian wine auction market is characterised by large variations in price between different vintages of the same wine. Yet the release prices of those wines exhibit considerably less volatility. This paper addresses the question: to what extent can we anticipate the future price of such icon wines from information available at the time of release? Specifically, it looks at the importance of the weather conditions during the grape-growing season. A hedonic model is estimated to explain the variation in price between different vintages using several weather variables plus dummy variables for capturing changes in winemaking and grape growing techniques. The model is estimated using auction price data for four South Australian icon red wines: three by Penfolds (Grange, St Henri and Bin 707), and one by HenschkeÂ’s (Hill of Grace). We show that weather variables and changes in production techniques, along with the age of the wine, have significant power in explaining the secondary market price variation across different vintages of each wine. The results have implications for winemakers in determining the prices they pay for grapes and charge for their wines, and for consumers/wine investors as a guide to the quality of immature icon wines.Wine quality, Investment under uncertainty, Hedonic pricing model

Fiscal challenges for Australia

Australia is set for more than a decade of deficits between 2008 and 2019, but the reality may be even worse than projections, argues this report. Overview Grattan Institute’s 2013 report, Balancing budgets: tough choices we need, concluded that without structural reforms Australian Governments could face a decade of deficits. Subsequent events suggest this may have been optimistic. The Commonwealth Government has run deficits for six years, largely due to a rapid increase in net spending on older households. The costs of repaying these deficits will fall primarily on younger households. The next ten years are likely to be even more difficult. Falling terms of trade and lower nominal economic growth will drag on revenues at the same time the Commonwealth Government intends to fund substantial new policy initiatives. The Commonwealth Government is yet to respond to the scale of its budget challenges. In office, both major political parties have hoped that bracket creep and favourable economic conditions would deliver a surplus. Hope is the key word: over the last six years, outcomes have consistently been worse than these projections. The latest short- and medium-term projections rely on optimistic assumptions about organic revenue growth and spending restraint. If any of them fail to materialise, the burden on younger generations will increase. The biggest worry is that budget projections assume that growth will return to “trend”. The International Monetary Fund recently joined a growing group of economists who believe that long-run economic growth in developed countries was trending lower even before the financial crisis, and future expectations should be lower again. State budgets are also under pressure. Spending in health and education and other vital areas is growing faster than GDP. States’ revenues are threatened because the Commonwealth has alleviated some of its own budget pressures by substantially reducing promised transfers to state governments for hospitals and schools. Recent state government budgets provide no insight into how they will respond to the looming funding gap. Hoping for the best is not a budget management strategy: it simply shifts the costs and risk of budget repair onto future generations. More active policy measures to achieve budget repair are required. While containing spending will be important, both the politics of budget repair and the sheer size of the budget gap mean that governments will not be able to restore budgets to balance without also boosting revenues. In a series of papers over the next two months, the Grattan Institute will set out four priority reforms for repairing Commonwealth and state government revenues. Our proposed policies – reducing superannuation tax concessions, changing capital gains tax and negative gearing, broadening the GST, and introducing a broad-based property levy – would all materially increase government revenue with limited collateral damage to the economy and the most vulnerable in our society. These changes are politically difficult, particularly as governments do not have the money to “buy” reform. But if they are serious about tackling the looming budget gap governments will need to tackle some of them. Sustainable budgets depend on tough choices, not hope. Making these choices will be vital so that future generations do not have to foot the bill for today’s inaction

The wealth of generations

This report finds that older Australians are capturing a growing share of Australia’s wealth, while the wealth of younger Australians has stagnated. Overview We have come to expect that each generation will be better off than its parents: wealthier, healthier and better housed. But the world is changing. Today\u27s generation of young Australians may have lower standards of living than their parents at a similar age. Over the last decade, older households captured most of the growth in Australia\u27s wealth. Despite the global financial crisis, households aged between 65 and 74 today are $200,000 wealthier than households of that age eight years ago. Meanwhile, the wealth of households aged 25 to 34 has gone backwards. In part, the wealth of generations has diverged because of the boom in housing prices. Older households made big capital gains. With lower and falling rates of home ownership, younger households shared less of this windfall. Incomes also grew fastest for older Australians, allowing them to add more to their wealth by saving. Households aged 55-64 saved$12,000 in 2010, up from $1000 in 2004. Households aged 25 to 34 controlled their spending just as tightly, but their savings only increased to$11,000 in 2010 from $4000 in 2004, because their incomes did not rise as much. Governments are also spending much more on older households for pensions and services, particularly health. In 2010, governments spent$9400 more per household over 65 than they did six years before. Budget deficits funded much of the increased spending. Future taxpayers will have to repay the debt, dragging further on the prosperity of younger generations. In the past, each generation took out more from the budget over its lifetime than it put in. This generational bargain was sustainable when incomes rose quickly, as they did for 70 years. Yet government transfers from younger to older cohorts are now so large that future budgets may not be able to afford them as the population ages. In other words, the generational bargain is at risk. Many expect that incomes will rise more slowly over coming decades. If so, the last decade in the United States and Britain illustrates the potential outcomes. The wealth and incomes of younger age groups in these countries have fallen behind those of their parents at a similar age. Although older generations will ultimately pass on much of their accumulated wealth, this may not help younger generations much. On current trends, inheritances are typically received later in life and primarily benefit those who are already wealthy. Gifts to younger generations are typically small, and also primarily benefit well-off households. Governments can choose to prevent the next generation being worse off than its parents. Targeting the Age Pension, reducing superannuation tax concessions and shifting towards asset taxes could reduce the transfers between today\u27s younger taxpayers and older retirees. These reforms would fall most on those who have benefited from windfalls, government largesse, and paying lower taxes while deficits accumulated. And we shouldn’t delay: later implementation may leave a younger generation even worse off, as they miss out on the benefits their parents enjoyed

Small Satellites Contribute to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

The United Nations (UN) led the countries of the world to define and commit to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which identifies 17 goals toward improving life on Earth. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide the high-priority challenges for our generation in areas such as access to clean water, food security, poverty alleviation, health care, environmental sustainability and urban development. Space technology, including small satellites, can play a role in helping countries pursue the SDGs. Each goal includes a set of Targets countries are working to achieve by 2030. Each Target includes a set of indicators that define the quantitative measurement for the Targets. A key element of pursuing the SDGs is for nations to work with the UN to develop methods to measure progress toward the Targets on each indicator. Many of the indicators and targets relate to environmental factors, human infrastructure or investment in research and education. In each of these areas, small satellite missions can play a role as part of national strategies to both monitor progress toward the SDGs and to work toward achieving the Targets. This paper reviews examples showing how space technology, including satellite-based earth observation, communication and positioning services, is already being used to support the SDGs. The discussion illustrates how emerging business and operational models in each sector and exploring new ways to apply small satellites for earth observation, communication and positioning. The paper describes coordination activities by organizations such as the Group on Earth Observations, NASA and the UN that are designed to help national governments around the world increase the use of satellite-based technology in support of the SDGs. The paper also introduces a new academic Research Group at the Media Lab within the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The mission of this research group is to increase the use of space technology in support of the SDGs. Small satellites provide an important opportunity to consider the needs defined by the Sustainable Development Goals and create customized space missions that respond to these needs

Writing Tasmania’s “Different Soul”

The narrator of Christopher Koch's 1958 novel The Boys in the Island claims for Tasmania “a different soul”, distinct from that of the Australian mainland to the north, in the same breath in which he claims for the island “a different weather”. Observations of the distinctiveness of island geography and weather – and of the quality of the light – are recurrent in narratives set not only in Tasmania, but also on those islands to which Tasmania itself acts as a ‘mainland’. This paper surveys a range of texts, including Koch’s The Boys in the Island, Joanna Murray-Smith’s Truce, and my own The Alphabet of Light and Dark, in which a Tasmanian island functions both as a setting for the protagonist's idealized childhood and as a metaphor for the protagonist’s “true self”. It explores the representation of islands in these texts, examining how a specific tradition of writing about Tasmania intersects with a broader tradition of writing about islands

Linking Historical Roots and Current Methodologies of Engineering Systems

This paper reviews the historical context and present impact of two sets of literature: the work of Joseph Schumpeter and the field of Strategy Development. Schumpeter’s theories about the impact of technology or innovation on the economy are an important input into modern Engineering Systems (ES) thinking. Meanwhile, Strategy Development is an active contemporary methodology that is relevant to Engineering Systems. Both Schumpeter and the scholars in Strategy Development are concerned with how firms perform, but Schumpeter's approach is descriptive while Strategy Development is prescriptive. The approach in this paper is as follows. It first introduces the theories of Schumpeter on innovation and the major ideas within Strategy Development. Next, two historical reviews are presented. One review looks forward to find the impact that Schumpeter has had on modern fields; the second review looks backward to understand the roots of Strategy Development. These historical reviews are initially done independently. The final section asks whether there are direct historical links between Schumpeter and the scholars or ideas of Strategy Development. The major result of this investigation is that Schumpeter’s influence is widespread as are the roots of Strategy Development. The results also show that the writing of Schumpeter is related to Strategy literature because many of Schumpeter’s ideas have become foundational realities for Strategy Development. Meanwhile, this connection is just one of many for each field, and the link between Schumpeter and Strategy Development does not appear to be the most important

Charting a Path Forward to Create Justice for All

It has been an unprecedented year, and the challenges we face are not yet over. Chief among them are the dual crises of coronavirus and racism, challenges which are distinct, yet undeniably intertwined. Existing research indicates that members of poor and minority groups are less likely than their white and higher-income counterparts to seek help when they experience a civil legal problem. Indeed, roughly three-quarters of the members of poor and minority groups do not seek legal help when they experience such problems.2 Frequently, people’s legal problems are connected to other issues in their lives, including domestic violence, substance abuse, mental health, poverty, or lack of housing or employment.3 This article showcases the Justice for All Initiative as one way forward for courts and a broad range of partner stakeholders to increase capacity and address the challenges faced by all people—with special emphasis on those traditionally underserved—with unmet civil legal needs. Through grants and engagement in fourteen states and the District of Columbia, the Justice for All Initiative (JFA) has supported systems-oriented strategic planning and systemic collaboration to establish new ways for all people with unmet civil legal issues to get the help they need, in the form they need it, when they need it.

NASA Ames Institutional Scientific Collection (ISC)

NASA's current human space flight research is directed towards enabling human space exploration beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO). The Space Flight Payload Projects; Rodent Research, Cell Science, and Microbial Labs, flown on the International Space Station (ISS), benefit both the global life sciences and commercial space communities. Verified data sets, science results, peer-reviewed publications, and returned biospecimens, collected and analyzed for flight and ground investigations, are all part of the knowledge base within NASAs Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorates Space Life and Physical Sciences Research and Applications (SLPSRA) Division, specifically the Human Research and Space Biology Programs. These data and biospecimens are made available through the public LSDA website. The Ames Institutional Scientific Collection (ISC), or ARC Biobank, stores flight and ground biospecimens from Space Shuttle and ISS programs. These specimens are curated and managed by the Ames Life Sciences Data Archive (ALSDA), an internal node of NASA's Life Sciences Data Archive (LSDA). The ARC Biolbank stores over 15,000 specimens from experiments dating from 1984 to present. Currently available specimens include tissues from the circulatory, digestive, endocrine, excretory, integumentary, muscular, neurosensory, reproductive, respiratory and skeletal systems. The most recent contributions include RNA, DNA and protein extracts from Rodent Research 1 and tissues from Rodent Research 4. NASA's biospecimen collection represents a unique and limited resource. The use of these biospecimens maximizes utilization and scientific return from these unique spaceflight payload and ground control research subjects. These biospecimens are harvested following complex, costly NASA research activities to meet primary scientific objectives. Once the primary scientific objectives have been met, the remaining specimens are made available to provide secondary opportunities for complementary studies or new investigations to broaden research without large expenditures of time or resources. Innovative ways of sharing this information ultimately advances the frontiers of human space exploration as well as scientific understanding of the effects of gravity on life on earth

Panorama Meats/Western Grassfed Beef: Better Beef, Better You

Western Grasslands, Inc. started in 2001, to process and market grass-fed beef. Grass fed, though about only 1% of the US beef market, is a quickly growing market. Today, WGI markets its Panorama meat through Whole Foods and other grass-fed brands on-line

Lifting Diversity and Inclusion in Economics:How the Australian Women in Economics Network Put the Evidence into Action*

To support broader global efforts to improve diversity and inclusion in economics, this paper provides a statistical picture of the gender composition of the economics profession in Australia and the evidence-based initiatives taken by the Women in Economics Network (WEN) to improve women's representation and recognition. WEN's impact is evaluated across a range of metrics. This includes a case study of WEN's mentorship programme for university students that was delivered as a behavioural intervention and evaluated as a randomised control trial. Drawing on practical experiences in combination with research insights, the paper identifies some of the challenges encountered and the lessons that can be shared with similar organisations globally that are pursuing diversity and inclusion goals.</p