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The Vientiane Report: National Landscape, Current Challenges And Opportunities For Growt, Institute For Societal Leadership, Lai Cheng Lim Dec 2014

The Vientiane Report: National Landscape, Current Challenges And Opportunities For Growt, Institute For Societal Leadership, Lai Cheng Lim

Institute of Societal Leadership Research Collection

Laos is a small, landlocked, mountainous country in Southeast Asia. As a country, it shares borders with Myanmar and the People’s Republic of China to the Northwest, Vietnam to the East, Cambodia to the South and Thailand to the West.


The Dili Report: National Landscape, Current Challenges And Opportunities For Growth, Institute For Societal Leadership, Lai Cheng Lim Dec 2014

The Dili Report: National Landscape, Current Challenges And Opportunities For Growth, Institute For Societal Leadership, Lai Cheng Lim

Institute of Societal Leadership Research Collection

Timor-Leste, Asia’s newest nation, is located in Southeast Asia, on the southernmost edge of the Indonesian archipelago. The country was colonised by the Portuguese for over 450 years, occupied by the Indonesians for 24 years and administered by the United Nations for two and a half years. As a nation, Timor-Leste has had a very traumatic birth.


Testing The Martingale Hypothesis, Peter C. B. Phillips, Sainan Jin Dec 2014

Testing The Martingale Hypothesis, Peter C. B. Phillips, Sainan Jin

Research Collection School Of Economics

We propose new tests of the martingale hypothesis based on generalized versions of the Kolmogorov–Smirnov and Cramér–von Mises tests. The tests are distribution-free and allow for a weak drift in the null model. The methods do not require either smoothing parameters or bootstrap resampling for their implementation and so are well suited to practical work. The article develops limit theory for the tests under the null and shows that the tests are consistent against a wide class of nonlinear, nonmartingale processes. Simulations show that the tests have good finite sample properties in comparison with other tests particularly under conditional heteroscedasticity …


Business Time Sampling Scheme And Its Applications To Semi-Martingale Hypothesis And Estimating Integrated Volatility, Yingjie Dong, Yiu Kuen Tse Dec 2014

Business Time Sampling Scheme And Its Applications To Semi-Martingale Hypothesis And Estimating Integrated Volatility, Yingjie Dong, Yiu Kuen Tse

Research Collection School Of Economics

No abstract provided.


Executive Overreach By Minority Governments, Madhav S. Aney, Shubhankar Dam Dec 2014

Executive Overreach By Minority Governments, Madhav S. Aney, Shubhankar Dam

Research Collection School Of Economics

A provision in the Indian constitution allows the executive to make laws in the event oneof the two houses of parliament is not in session. This provision was intended to allow theexecutive to act in case there’s an immediate legislative necessity and the parliament cannotbe convened. Using a bargaining model with asymmetric information we show how partieswithin the parliament may reach an agreement on legislations when the ruling party does notcommand a majority (minority government). The model makes predictions about lawmakingpatterns by the legislature when the parliament is in session, and ordinances by the executivewhen the parliament is not in …


On Bias In The Estimation Of Structural Break Points, Liang Jiang, Xiaohu Wang, Jun Yu Dec 2014

On Bias In The Estimation Of Structural Break Points, Liang Jiang, Xiaohu Wang, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

Based on the Girsanov theorem, this paper obtains the exact Önite sample distribution of the maximum likelihood estimator of structural break points in a continuous time model. The exact Önite sample theory suggests that, in empirically realistic situations, there is a strong Önite sample bias in the estimator of structural break points. This property is shared by least squares estimator of both the absolute structural break point and the fractional structural break point in discrete time models. A simulation-based method based on the indirect estimation approach is proposed to reduce the bias both in continuous time and discrete time models. …


Structural Change Estimation In Time Series Regressions With Endogenous Variables, Junhui Qian, Liangjun Su Dec 2014

Structural Change Estimation In Time Series Regressions With Endogenous Variables, Junhui Qian, Liangjun Su

Research Collection School Of Economics

We propose to apply the group fused Lasso to estimate time series models with endogenous regressors and an unknown number of breaks. It can correctly determine the number of breaks and estimate the break dates asymptotically. Simulations and applications are given.


Negotiating Deals From A Position Of Powerlessness, Michael Schaerer, Roderick I. Swaab Dec 2014

Negotiating Deals From A Position Of Powerlessness, Michael Schaerer, Roderick I. Swaab

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

When you are negotiating a deal it pays to have viable alternatives to fall back on – or at least that’s what most people think. New research suggests that being powerless can be liberating and help you achieve better deals.


Emil Salim [Indonesia, Minister Of Environment], Emil Salim Nov 2014

Emil Salim [Indonesia, Minister Of Environment], Emil Salim

Digital Narratives of Asia

Emil Salim was part of the famed Berkeley Mafia who brought Indonesia out of its economic crisis in the mid-1960s. He later went on to become Minister of Environment in President Suharto's cabinet. He speaks to DNA about how he overcame obstacles in his career, even when he did have subject knowledge, and what it was like working with President Suharto.


Emerging Markets And The End Of Qe, Singapore Management University Nov 2014

Emerging Markets And The End Of Qe, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Quantitative easing made it easier for emerging economies to delay necessary reforms, but policymakers are better able to manage crises than ever before


Europe: Negotiating Changes Through Compromise, Singapore Management University Nov 2014

Europe: Negotiating Changes Through Compromise, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Herman Van Rompuy, the outgoing President of the European Council, believes Europe can overcome its current challenges by doing what it does best: negotiate and compromise


Bitcoins, Block Chains, And Mining Pools, Singapore Management University Nov 2014

Bitcoins, Block Chains, And Mining Pools, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Bitcoins can help facilitate online commerce, but investors – and speculators – should understand how the cryptocurrency works


Raising The Bar 2: Challenges To Productivity Initiatives In The Finance And Accounting Function, Clarence Goh Nov 2014

Raising The Bar 2: Challenges To Productivity Initiatives In The Finance And Accounting Function, Clarence Goh

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Faced with a tightening labour supply, raising productivity has become an increasingly important issue for manybusinesses in Singapore. To understand how this impacts on the F&A functions of businesses, the Instituteof Singapore Chartered Accountants (ISCA) collaborated with Robert Half to survey over 550 senior financeexecutives in Singapore and also the region to understand the focus of F&A functions of businesses andcorporations regarding raising productivity and effectiveness. Our findings are presented in a series of three reportswith the following themes – (1) Trends in implementing productivity initiatives, (2) Challenges faced in implementingproductivity initiatives, and (3) Essential skills and training needed to …


Allocative Efficiency, Mark-Ups, And The Welfare Gains From Trade, Thomas J. Holmes, Wen-Tai Hsu, Sanghoon Lee Nov 2014

Allocative Efficiency, Mark-Ups, And The Welfare Gains From Trade, Thomas J. Holmes, Wen-Tai Hsu, Sanghoon Lee

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper develops an index of allocative efficiency that depends upon the distribution of mark-ups across goods and is separable from an index of standard Ricardian gains from trade. It determines how changes in trade frictions affect allocative efficiency in an oligopoly model of international trade, decomposing the effect into the cost-change channel and the price-change channel. Formulas are derived shedding light on the signs and magnitudes of the two channels. In symmetric country models, trade tends to increase allocative efficiency through the cost-change channel, yielding a welfare benefit beyond productive efficiency gains. In contrast, the price-change channel has ambiguous …


Optimal City Hierarchy: A Dynamic Programming Approach To Central Place Theory, Wen-Tai Hsu, Thomas J. Holmes, Frank Morgan Nov 2014

Optimal City Hierarchy: A Dynamic Programming Approach To Central Place Theory, Wen-Tai Hsu, Thomas J. Holmes, Frank Morgan

Research Collection School Of Economics

Central place theory is a key building block of economic geography and an empirically plausible description of city systems. This paper provides a rationale for central place theory via a dynamic programming formulation of the social planner's problem of city hierarchy. We show that there must be one and only one immediate smaller city between two neighboring larger-sized cities in any optimal solution. If the fixed cost of setting up a city is a power function, then the immediate smaller city will be located in the middle, confirming the locational pattern suggested by Christaller. We also show that the solution …


Ceo Optimism And Incentive Compensation, Clemens A. Otto Nov 2014

Ceo Optimism And Incentive Compensation, Clemens A. Otto

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

I study the effect of chief executive officer (CEO) optimism on CEO compensation. Usingdata on compensation in US firms, I provide evidence that CEOs whose option exercisebehavior and earnings forecasts are indicative of optimistic beliefs receive smaller stockoption grants, fewer bonus payments, and less total compensation than their peers. Thesefindings add to our understanding of the interplay between managerial biases andremuneration and show how sophisticated principals can take advantage of optimisticagents by appropriately adjusting their compensation contracts.


Unleashing Asean's Potential Through Aec, Michael Zink Nov 2014

Unleashing Asean's Potential Through Aec, Michael Zink

Asian Management Insights

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has set an ambitious goal to integrate the economies of its ten members by 2015, a move that is aimed at boosting the bloc’s competitiveness and creating development across the region that is more equitable. With the target date for Southeast Asia's countries to create a single economic market just months away, increasing attention is being paid to the region's vast economic potential. If successful, the formation of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) will not only create one of the world’s largest integrated economic spheres, but will add vastly to the appeal of …


It’S Not Will You Succeed? But Can You Afford To Fail?, Girija Pande Nov 2014

It’S Not Will You Succeed? But Can You Afford To Fail?, Girija Pande

Asian Management Insights

With India and China’s economic ties no longer defined only by trade, the countries’ convergence is opening up new opportunities and challenges for businesses on either side seeking to cross the Sino-Indian border.


Mind The Liquidity Gap: Building A Better Capital Market For You, Kaushik Rudra Nov 2014

Mind The Liquidity Gap: Building A Better Capital Market For You, Kaushik Rudra

Asian Management Insights

Asian banks in most jurisdictions are currently more than adequately capitalised with respect to Basel III. However, as they are called upon to support the region’s economic growth over the next decade, they are likely to run up against capital constraints.


Do Asian Conglomerates Offer Attractive Risk-Adjusted Returns?, Nandini Vijayaraghavan Nov 2014

Do Asian Conglomerates Offer Attractive Risk-Adjusted Returns?, Nandini Vijayaraghavan

Asian Management Insights

Research on a sample of seven Asian conglomerates shows that stocks of some of these companies not only outperformed the S&P 500, but also exhibited lower volatility.


Trade And Divergence In Education Systems, Fali Huang, Pao-Li Chang Nov 2014

Trade And Divergence In Education Systems, Fali Huang, Pao-Li Chang

Research Collection School Of Economics

This article presents a theory on the endogenous choice of education policy and the two-way causal relationship between trade and education systems. A country’s education system determines its talent distribution and comparative advantage; the possibility of trade by raising the returns to the sector of comparative advantage in turn induces countries to further differentiate their education systems and reinforces the initial pattern of comparative advantage. Specifically, the Nash equilibrium choice of education systems by two countries interacting strategically are necessarily more divergent than their autarky choices, and yet less than what is socially optimal for the world.


Norming Rates And Limit Theory For Some Time-Varying Coefficient Autoregressions, Offer Lieberman, Peter C. B. Phillips Nov 2014

Norming Rates And Limit Theory For Some Time-Varying Coefficient Autoregressions, Offer Lieberman, Peter C. B. Phillips

Research Collection School Of Economics

A time-varying autoregression is considered with a similarity-based coefficient and possible drift. It is shown that the random-walk model has a natural interpretation as the leading term in a small-sigma expansion of a similarity model with an exponential similarity function as its AR coefficient. Consistency of the quasi-maximum likelihood estimator of the parameters in this model is established, the behaviours of the score and Hessian functions are analysed and test statistics are suggested. A complete list is provided of the normalization rates required for the consistency proof and for the score and Hessian function standardization. A large family of unit …


Mutual Funds And Information Diffusion: The Role Of Country-Level Governance, Chunmei Lin, Massimo Massa, Hong Zhang Nov 2014

Mutual Funds And Information Diffusion: The Role Of Country-Level Governance, Chunmei Lin, Massimo Massa, Hong Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We hypothesize that poor country-level governance, which makes public information less reliable, induces fund managers to increase their use of semipublic information. Utilizing data from international mutual funds and stocks over the 2000-2009 period, we find that semipublic information-related stock rebalancing can be five times higher in countries with the worst quality of governance than in countries with the best. The use of semipublic information increases price informativeness but also increases information asymmetry and reduces stock liquidity. It also intensified the price impact and liquidity crunch during the recent global financial crisis.


The Yangon Report: National Landscape, Current Challenges And Opportunities For Growth, Institute For Societal Leadership, John W. Ellington Oct 2014

The Yangon Report: National Landscape, Current Challenges And Opportunities For Growth, Institute For Societal Leadership, John W. Ellington

Institute of Societal Leadership Research Collection

Since its independence from British rule in 1948, Myanmar has struggled with multiple obstacles, including a series of violent internal ethnic and sectarian conflicts, isolationist fiscal policies instituted by an increasingly distrustful military government and international sanctions and condemnation following government crackdowns in 1988 and 2007. In spite of all these setbacks, President Thein Sein’s decision in 2011 to liberalise the country’s political and economic systems has created a new wave of optimism for what was once commonly regarded as a failed state.


Managing The Accounting And Finance Function – Productivity Trends And Focus, Clarence Goh Oct 2014

Managing The Accounting And Finance Function – Productivity Trends And Focus, Clarence Goh

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

We found that firms in Singapore, HongKong, Japan, and China tend to favourstaff-related initiatives over processrelatedones when looking to raiseproductivity, with this being relativelymore prominent in the more developedeconomies of Singapore, Hong Kongand Japan.


A New Hedonic Regression For Real Estate Prices Applied To The Singapore Residential Market, Jiang Liang, Peter C. B. Phillips, Jun Yu Oct 2014

A New Hedonic Regression For Real Estate Prices Applied To The Singapore Residential Market, Jiang Liang, Peter C. B. Phillips, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper develops a new hedonic method for constructing a real estate price index that utilizes all transaction price information that encompasses both single-sale and repeat-sale properties. The new method is less prone to specification errors than standard hedonic methods and uses all available data. Like the Case-Shiller repeat-sales method, the new method has the advantage of being computationally efficient. In an empirical analysis of the methodology, we fit the model to all transaction prices for private residential property holdings in Singapore between Q1 1995 and Q2 2014, covering several periods of major price fluctuation and changes in government macro …


Complementarity In Institutional Quality In Bilateral Fdi Flows, Pao Li Chang Oct 2014

Complementarity In Institutional Quality In Bilateral Fdi Flows, Pao Li Chang

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper develops a theory on the complementarity in institutional qualities between the home and host countries in bilateral FDI. Firms ‘born’ in countries with poorer institutions tend to invest more in informal institutions to mitigate political risk. The marginal advantage of higher informal institution endowment is bigger when the political risk at the FDI destination is higher. Thus, all else being equal, the ranking of the MNE’s home institutions predicts the ranking of the institutional qualities of their FDI destinations. I find robust empirical evidence for this theoretical prediction using bilateral FDI for 219 economies during year 2001-2010.


Wage, Income And Consumption Inequality In Japan, 1981-2008: From Boom To Lost Decades, Jeremy Lise, Nao Sudo, Michio Suzuki, Ken Yamada, Tomoaki Yamada Oct 2014

Wage, Income And Consumption Inequality In Japan, 1981-2008: From Boom To Lost Decades, Jeremy Lise, Nao Sudo, Michio Suzuki, Ken Yamada, Tomoaki Yamada

Research Collection School Of Economics

In this paper we document the main features of the distributions of wages, earnings, consumption and wealth in Japan since the early 1980s using four main data sources: the Basic Survey on Wage Structure (BSWS), the Family Income and Expenditure Survey (FIES), the National Survey of Family Income and Expenditure (NSFIE) and the Japanese Panel Survey of Consumers (JPSC). We present an empirical analysis of inequality that specifically considers the path from individual wages and earnings, to household earnings, after-tax income, and finally consumption. We find that household earnings inequality rose substantially over this period. This rise is made up …


Wage Subsidies As A Tool To Fight Recessions, Hian Teck Hoon Oct 2014

Wage Subsidies As A Tool To Fight Recessions, Hian Teck Hoon

Research Collection School Of Economics

Since 1981, MAS has used the exchange rate as the primary tool of macroeconomic stabilisation. An exchange rate-based policy rule not only describes very well Singapore’s actual conduct of monetary policy but it has also delivered reduced volatility in inflation and output. Yet, as the quotation above suggests, during the onslaught of the contagion effects arising from the 1997–98 Asian Financial Crisis when Singapore’s export demand declined precipitously, threatening a rise in the unemployment rate, exchange rate adjustment did not act alone to counteract the decline in aggregate demand (AD). Instead, the committee set up by then - Prime Minister …


Raising The Bar: Trends In Implementing Productivity Initiatives In The Finance And Accounting Function, Clarence Goh Oct 2014

Raising The Bar: Trends In Implementing Productivity Initiatives In The Finance And Accounting Function, Clarence Goh

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Faced with a tightening labour supply, raising productivity has become an increasingly important issue for manybusinesses in Singapore. To understand how this impacts the finance and accounting functions of businesses,the Institute of Singapore Chartered Accountants (ISCA) collaborated with Robert Half to survey over 550senior finance executives in Singapore and also the region to understand the focus of finance and accountingfunctions of businesses regarding raising productivity of these departments or functional units.