Knowledge@Wharton Business Research Journal

SFOs in Action: How the Richest Families Manage Their Wealth
For many of the world's richest families, SFOs -- Single Family Offices -- play an essential role in their investment strategy. SFOs manage the family financial portfolio and often provide other services, such as handling children's college applications or managing the family fleet of jets. Up until now, however, little has been known about these powerful entities. Yet new Wharton research shows that they play an important role in managing major investment portfolios, guiding significant philanthropic endeavors and maintaining a core set of values across generations of extremely wealthy families.

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Microsoft's Vista: New Horizon or the End of the Road for PC Operating Systems?
After Microsoft announced on May 3 that it will drop its $44.6 billion bid to acquire Yahoo, many -- including experts at Wharton -- declared the decision to be a smart move. Microsoft, they say, has more pressing issues, including the need to make its flagship operating system Vista more popular among customers as it competes for attention against its predecessor, Windows XP, and rivals such as Apple's OS X.

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Cleaning up Its Act: How China Can Convert to More Environmentally Friendly Energy
If China doesn't take steps to prevent it, a big black cloud may soon engulf its economic boom. The country is growing at a torrid rate, but pollution from its hard-chugging industrial engine is expanding even faster, according to energy experts at the recent 2008 Wharton China Business Conference. Chinese leaders, however, have some options, including a method to capture the pollutants released when coal burns, and coal gasification, which transforms coal into a synthetic fuel that burns as cleanly as natural gas.

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Conspicuous Consumption and Race: Who Spends More on What
Fashionable clothes, jewelry, flashy cars.... They are all items of conspicuous consumption that give their owners status on the street. Some groups, such as blacks and Hispanics, seem to spend more on such emblems of success than others. Or is that just a stereotype? In a new research paper, Wharton finance professor Nikolai Roussanov and two co-authors found some truth to the ethnic stereotypes on spending, but concluded that the explanation lies in economics, not culture.

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An Ideal Marketplace: For-profit Businesses Helping, Not Exploiting, the Poor
Can a company make money from the work of impoverished people in the developing world without taking advantage of them? For Patrick Byrne, the answer is a qualified yes. Byrne believes that he has found a way for his company, Overstock.com, to benefit while it helps developing-world artisans connect with developed-world customers. But for Chuck Waterfield, creator of Microfin -- a software program he wrote for microlenders -- the answer is a qualified no, at least as it applies to Compartamos, a well-known microfinance lender operating in Mexico. Both men spoke at this year's University of Pennsylvania Microfinance Conference.

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ExxonMobil's Donald Humphreys Defends Big Oil and Its Role in a Global Economy
The controversy over carbon emissions is just one of several surrounding ExxonMobil -- a list that includes gasoline prices surging towards $4 a gallon, the company's push for expanded oil exploration and drilling, and its high-profile war of wills with the president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. Yet during a presentation as part of the Wharton Leadership Lecture series, Donald D. Humphreys, senior vice president and treasurer of the Irving, Texas-based behemoth, set out to erase what he said are widely held misconceptions about the powerful company that traces its roots back to the 19^th century and John D. Rockefeller.

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