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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Does Market Competition Lead To Customization?, Wen-Tai Hsu, Yi Lu, Travis Ng Oct 2014

Does Market Competition Lead To Customization?, Wen-Tai Hsu, Yi Lu, Travis Ng

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper proposes a theory of competition and customization. When firms allocate their production to both custom-made and standardized products, the fraction of sales from the former will increase in the face of increased competition. Recent surveys conducted by the World Bank on Chinese firms provide a rare direct measure of customization that allows us to test the above-mentioned prediction. We find empirical results consistent with the prediction.


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.


Is Urban Food Demand In The Philippines Different From China?, Tomoki Fujii Oct 2014

Is Urban Food Demand In The Philippines Different From China?, Tomoki Fujii

Research Collection School Of Economics

It is essential to understand the consumption pattern of food and how it changes over time to formulate sound economic policies as well as marketing and pricing strategies. In this study, we estimate the Quadratic Almost Ideal Demand System with six rounds of the Family Income Expenditure Survey exploiting the conditional linearity of the demand system. We find that the Filipino diet has become westernized and that the changes in urban food demand elasticities are qualitatively similar to those in urban China, especially for meat, fruits, and vegetables.We also offer some policy and business implications.


Additive Nonparametric Regression In The Presence Of Endogenous Regressors, Deniz Ozabaci, Daniel J. Henderson, Liangjun Su Oct 2014

Additive Nonparametric Regression In The Presence Of Endogenous Regressors, Deniz Ozabaci, Daniel J. Henderson, Liangjun Su

Research Collection School Of Economics

In this article we consider nonparametric estimation of a structural equation model under full additivity constraint. We propose estimators for both the conditional mean and gradient which are consistent, asymptotically normal, oracle efficient, and free from the curse of dimensionality. Monte Carlo simulations support the asymptotic developments. We employ a partially linear extension of our model to study the relationship between child care and cognitive outcomes. Some of our (average) results are consistent with the literature (e.g., negative returns to child care when mothers have higher levels of education). However, as our estimators allow for heterogeneity both across and within …


Finance And Social Responsibility In The Informal Economy: Institutional Voids, Globalization And Microfinance Institutions, Hao Liang, Chris Marquis, Sunny Li Sun Oct 2014

Finance And Social Responsibility In The Informal Economy: Institutional Voids, Globalization And Microfinance Institutions, Hao Liang, Chris Marquis, Sunny Li Sun

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We examine how different types of country-level globalization and the industry structure of microfinance institutions (MFIs) affect organization-level microcredit interest rates which crucially affect the poor's entrepreneurial opportunities. We develop an opportunity structure perspective that argues that MFI interest rates can be reduced by egalitarian-based social globalization but increased by neoliberal-based economic globalization. Moreover, stronger presence of nonprofit organizations in the microfinance industry lowers interest rates. Furthermore, these three forces can moderate the relationship between MFIs' outreach to the poor and average interest rate. Analyses of 2,559 MFI observations across 74 countries from 2002 - 2012 largely support our hypotheses.


Sustaining Frugal Green Innovations, Singapore Management University Sep 2014

Sustaining Frugal Green Innovations, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Sharing knowledge and acknowledging the innovativeness of those at the bottom of the economic pyramid is crucial


Testing Conditional Independence Via Empirical Likelihood, Liangjun Su, Halbert White Sep 2014

Testing Conditional Independence Via Empirical Likelihood, Liangjun Su, Halbert White

Research Collection School Of Economics

We construct two classes of smoothed empirical likelihood ratio tests for the conditional independence hypothesis by writing the null hypothesis as an infinite collection of conditional moment restrictions indexed by a nuisance parameter. One class is based on the CDF; another is based on smoother functions. We show that the test statistics are asymptotically normal under the null hypothesis and a sequence of Pitman local alternatives. We also show that the tests possess an asymptotic optimality property in terms of average power. Simulations suggest that the tests are well behaved in finite samples. Applications to some economic and financial time …


Intraday Periodicity Adjustments Of Transaction Duration And Their Effects On High-Frequency Volatility Estimation, Yiu Kuen Tse, Yingjie Dong Sep 2014

Intraday Periodicity Adjustments Of Transaction Duration And Their Effects On High-Frequency Volatility Estimation, Yiu Kuen Tse, Yingjie Dong

Research Collection School Of Economics

We study two methods of adjusting for intraday periodicity of high-frequency financial data: the well-known Duration Adjustment (DA) method and the recently proposed Time Transformation (TT) method (Wu (2012)). We examine the effects of these adjustments on the estimation of intraday volatility using the Autoregressive Conditional Duration-Integrated Conditional Variance (ACD-ICV) method of Tse and Yang (2012). We find that daily volatility estimates are not sensitive to intraday periodicity adjustment. However, intraday volatility is found to have a weaker U-shaped volatility smile and a biased trough if intraday periodicity adjustment is not applied. In addition, adjustment taking account of trades with …


A Characterization Of Single-Peaked Preferences Via Random Social Choice Functions, Shurojit Chatterji, Arunava Sen, Huaxia Zeng Sep 2014

A Characterization Of Single-Peaked Preferences Via Random Social Choice Functions, Shurojit Chatterji, Arunava Sen, Huaxia Zeng

Research Collection School Of Economics

The paper proves the following result: every path-connected domain of preferences that admits a strategy-proof, unanimous, tops-only random social choice function satisfying a compromise property, is single-peaked. Conversely, every single-peaked domain admits a random social choice function satisfying these properties. Single-peakedness is defined with respect to arbitrary trees. We also show that a maximal domain that admits a strategy-proof, unanimous, tops-only random social choice function satisfying a stronger version of the compromise property, is single-peaked on a line. A converse to this result also holds. The paper provides justification of the salience of single-peaked preferences and evidence in favour of …


Modified Qml Estimation Of Spatial Autoregressive Models With Unknown Heteroskedasticity And Nonnormality, Shew Fan Liu, Zhenlin Yang Sep 2014

Modified Qml Estimation Of Spatial Autoregressive Models With Unknown Heteroskedasticity And Nonnormality, Shew Fan Liu, Zhenlin Yang

Research Collection School Of Economics

In the presence of heteroskedasticity, Lin and Lee (2010) show that the quasi maximum likelihood (QML) estimators of spatial autoregressive models (SAR) can be inconsistent as a ‘necessary’ condition for consistency can be violated, and thus propose robust GMM estimators for the model. In this paper, we first show that this condition may hold in many practical situations and when it does the regular QML estimators can be consistent.In cases where this condition is violated, we propose a modified QML estimation method robust against heteroskedasticity of unknown form. In both cases, asymptotic distributions of the estimators are derived, and methods …


Borrower Targeting Under Microfinance: Competition With Motivated Microfinance Institutions And Strategic Complementarity, Brishti Guha, Prabal Roy Chowdhury Sep 2014

Borrower Targeting Under Microfinance: Competition With Motivated Microfinance Institutions And Strategic Complementarity, Brishti Guha, Prabal Roy Chowdhury

Research Collection School Of Economics

We examine how increased competition among motivated microfinance institutions (MFIs) impacts the poorest borrowers’ access to microfinance. We find that competition depends on inequality, technology, and the possibility of double-dipping (borrowing from several sources). Without competition, even a motivated MFI may lend to the not-so-poor in preference to poor borrowers. If double-dipping is feasible, competition may encourage lending to the poor. The presence of double-dipping is critical for MFI competition to have a positive effect. When double-dipping is feasible, MFI coordination may worsen borrower targeting whenever inequality is intermediate. We discuss policy implications dealing with double-dipping, MFI coordination, and competition.


Asymptotic Distribution And Finite-Sample Bias Correction Of Qml Estimators For Spatial Dependence Model, Shew Fan Liu, Zhenlin Yang Sep 2014

Asymptotic Distribution And Finite-Sample Bias Correction Of Qml Estimators For Spatial Dependence Model, Shew Fan Liu, Zhenlin Yang

Research Collection School Of Economics

In studying the asymptotic and finite-sample properties of quasi-maximum likelihood (QML) estimators for the spatial linear regression models, much attention has been paid to the spatial lag dependence (SLD) model; little has been given to its companion, the spatial error dependence (SED) model. In particular, the effect of spatial dependence on the convergence rate of the QML estimators has not been formally studied, and methods for correcting finite-sample bias of the QML estimators have not been given. This paper fills in these gaps. Of the two, bias correction is particularly important to the application of this model. Contrary to the …


Exchange Rates And Export Structure, Wen-Tai Hsu, Yi Lu, Yingke Zhou Sep 2014

Exchange Rates And Export Structure, Wen-Tai Hsu, Yi Lu, Yingke Zhou

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper studies whether changes in the exchange rate affect a country’s export structure, using an arguably exogenous sudden appreciation of renminbi on July 21, 2005 as the main source of identification. Employing combined regression discontinuity and difference-in-differences approach, we show that China’s export structure became more similar to that of the developed countries after the currency appreciation. We also find that the majority of the appreciation effect comes from the inter-firm resource reallocation rather than the inter-region or intra-firm resource reallocation.


Initial-Condition Free Estimation Of Fixed Effects Dynamic Panel Data Models, Zhenlin Yang Sep 2014

Initial-Condition Free Estimation Of Fixed Effects Dynamic Panel Data Models, Zhenlin Yang

Research Collection School Of Economics

It is well known that (quasi) MLE of dynamic panel data (DPD) models with short panels depends on the assumptions on the initial values; ignoring them or a wrong treatment of them will result in inconsistency or serious bias. This paper introduces a initial-condition free method for estimating the fixed-effects DPD models, through as simple modification of the quasi-score. An outer-product-of-gradients (OPG) method is also proposed for robust inference. The MLE of Hsiao, Pesaran and Tahmiscioglu (2002, Journal of Econometrics), where the initial observations are modeled, is extended to quasi MLE and an OPG method is proposed for robust inference. …


Wage A Measured Battle Against The Bottle, Tan K. B. Eugene Aug 2014

Wage A Measured Battle Against The Bottle, Tan K. B. Eugene

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In a commentary, SMU Associate Professor of Law and Nominated Member of Parliament Eugene Tan believed that there are legitimate and pressing concerns to justify the close scrutiny of the existing regime on alcohol sale and consumption. He felt that the authorities could leverage market research data to understand the drinking culture and norms here and generate nuanced regulatory responses to alcohol sale and consumption. The insights gleaned from such research could aid our understanding of the dynamics of the drinking culture here. Associate Prof Tan added that the key policy challenge in the review process is to tackle the …


Minimum Investment Requirements, Financial Market Globalization, And Symmetry Breaking, Haiping Zhang Aug 2014

Minimum Investment Requirements, Financial Market Globalization, And Symmetry Breaking, Haiping Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

We incorporate wealth heterogeneity and the minimum investment requirements in the model of Matsuyama (2004, Econometrica) and provide a complete characterization of symmetry breaking. In particular, we identify the extensive margin of investment as a key channel through which the interest rate may respond positively to capital accumulation, or equivalently, the interest rate can be higher in the rich than in the poor countries. Then, financial market globalization may lead to “uphill” capital flows from the poor to the rich countries, which widens the initial cross-country income gap and leads to income divergence among inherently identical countries, a phenomenon that …


The People Want The Fall Of The Regime: Schooling, Political Protest, And The Economy, Filipe R. Campante, Davin Chor Aug 2014

The People Want The Fall Of The Regime: Schooling, Political Protest, And The Economy, Filipe R. Campante, Davin Chor

Research Collection School Of Economics

We provide evidence that economic circumstances are a key intermediating variable for understanding the relationship between schooling and political protest. Using the World Values Survey, we find that individuals with higher levels of schooling, but whose income outcomes fall short of that predicted by their biographical characteristics, in turn display a greater propensity to engage in protest activities. We discuss a number of interpretations that are consistent with this finding, including the idea that economic conditions can affect how individuals trade off the use of their human capital between production and political activities. Our results could also reflect a link …


Robustify Financial Time Series Forecasting With Bagging, Sainan Jin, Liangjun Su, Aman Ullah Aug 2014

Robustify Financial Time Series Forecasting With Bagging, Sainan Jin, Liangjun Su, Aman Ullah

Research Collection School Of Economics

In this paper we propose a revised version of (bagging) bootstrap aggregating as a forecast combination method for the out-of-sample forecasts in time series models. The revised version explicitly takes into account the dependence in time series data and can be used to justify the validity of bagging in the reduction of mean squared forecast error when compared with the unbagged forecasts. Monte Carlo simulations show that the new method works quite well and outperforms the traditional one-step-ahead linear forecast as well as the nonparametric forecast in general, especially when the in-sample estimation period is small. We also find that …


Jackknife Model Averaging For Quantile Regressions, Xun Lu, Liangjun Su Aug 2014

Jackknife Model Averaging For Quantile Regressions, Xun Lu, Liangjun Su

Research Collection School Of Economics

In this paper, we consider the problem of frequentist model averaging for quantile regression (QR) when all the M models under investigation are potentially misspecified and the number of parameters in some or all models is diverging with the sample size n. To allow for the dependence between the error terms and the regressors in the QR models, we propose a jackknife model averaging (JMA) estimator which selects the weights by minimizing a leave-one-out cross-validation criterion function and demonstrate that the jackknife selected weight vector is asymptotically optimal in terms of minimizing the out-of-sample final prediction error among the given …


Shrinkage Estimation Of Regression Models With Multiple Structural Changes, Junhui Qian, Liangjun Su Aug 2014

Shrinkage Estimation Of Regression Models With Multiple Structural Changes, Junhui Qian, Liangjun Su

Research Collection School Of Economics

In this paper we consider the problem of determining the number of structural changes in multiple linear regression models via group fused Lasso (least absolute shrinkage and selection operator). We show that with probability tending to one our method can correctly determine the unknown number of breaks and the estimated break dates are sufficiently close to the true break dates. We obtain estimates of the regression coefficients via post Lasso and establish the asymptotic distributions of the estimates of both break ratios and regression coefficients. We also propose and validate a data-driven method to determine the tuning parameter. Monte Carlo …


Identifying Latent Structures In Panel Data, Liangjun Su, Zhentao Shi, Peter C. B. Phillips Aug 2014

Identifying Latent Structures In Panel Data, Liangjun Su, Zhentao Shi, Peter C. B. Phillips

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper provides a novel mechanism for identifying and estimating latent group structures in panel data using penalized regression techniques. We focus on linear models where the slope parameters are heterogeneous across groups but homogenous within a group and the group membership is unknown. Two approaches are considered — penalized least squares (PLS) for models without endogenous regressors, and penalized GMM (PGMM) for models with endogeneity. In both cases we develop a new variant of Lasso called classifier-Lasso (C-Lasso) that serves to shrink individual coefficients to the unknown group-specific coefficients. C-Lasso achieves simultaneous classification and consistent estimation in a single …


Unilateral Emissions Mitigation, Spillovers, And Global Learning, Shurojit Chatterji, Sayantan Ghosal, Sean Walsh, John Whalley Aug 2014

Unilateral Emissions Mitigation, Spillovers, And Global Learning, Shurojit Chatterji, Sayantan Ghosal, Sean Walsh, John Whalley

Research Collection School Of Economics

What's the role of unilateral measures in global climate change mitigation in a post-Durban, post 2012 global policy regime? We argue that under conditions of preference heterogeneity, unilateral emissions mitigation at a subnational level may exist even when a nation is unwilling to commit to emission cuts. We establish that under certain assumptions, in a global strongly connected network of countries, learning the costs of switching to a low emissions activity can result in a universal adoption of such activities. We analyze the features of a policy proposal that could accelerate convergence to a low carbon world in the presence …


A Flexible And Automated Likelihood Based Framework For Inference In Stochastic Volatility Models, Hans J. Skaug, Jun Yu Aug 2014

A Flexible And Automated Likelihood Based Framework For Inference In Stochastic Volatility Models, Hans J. Skaug, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

The Laplace approximation is used to perform maximum likelihood estimation of univariate and multivariate stochastic volatility (SV) models. It is shown that the implementation of the Laplace approximation is greatly simplified by the use of a numerical technique known as automatic differentiation (AD). Several algorithms are proposed and compared with some existing maximum likelihood methods using both simulated data and actual data. It is found that the new methods match the statistical efficiency of the existing methods while significantly reducing the coding effort. Also proposed are simple methods for obtaining the filtered, smoothed and predictive values for the latent variable. …


Unit Roots In Life: A Graduate Student Story, Peter C. B. Phillips Aug 2014

Unit Roots In Life: A Graduate Student Story, Peter C. B. Phillips

Research Collection School Of Economics

What follows is a graduate student story. It draws on the first part of the speech I gave that evening at the NZESG conference dinner. It mixes personal reflections with recollections of the extraordinary New Zealanders who shaped my thinking as a graduate student and beginning researcher-people who have had an enduring impact on my work and career as an econometrician. The story traces out these human initial conditions and unit roots that figure in my early life of teaching and research.


Nonlinearity Induced Weak Instrumentation, Ioannis Kasparis, Peter C. B. Phillips, Tassos Magdalinos Aug 2014

Nonlinearity Induced Weak Instrumentation, Ioannis Kasparis, Peter C. B. Phillips, Tassos Magdalinos

Research Collection School Of Economics

In regressions involving integrable functions we examine the limit properties of instrumental variable (IV) estimators that utilise integrable transformations of lagged regressors as instruments. The regressors can be either I(0) or nearly integrated (NI) processes. We show that this kind of nonlinearity in the regression function can significantly affect the relevance of the instruments. In particular, such instruments become weak when the signal of the regressor is strong, as it is in the NI case. Instruments based on integrable functions of lagged NI regressors display long range dependence and so remain relevant even at long lags, continuing to contribute to …


Assessing Market Failures In Export Pioneering Activities: A Structural Estimation Approach, Shang-Jin Wei, Ziru Wei, Jianhuan Xu Aug 2014

Assessing Market Failures In Export Pioneering Activities: A Structural Estimation Approach, Shang-Jin Wei, Ziru Wei, Jianhuan Xu

Research Collection School Of Economics

The paper provides a first structural-estimation-based assessment of an influential hypothesis that export pioneers are too few relative to social optimum due to knowledge spillover in new market explorations. Such market failure requires two inequalities to hold simultaneously: the discovery cost is greater than any individual firm’s expected profit but Smaller than the sum of all potential exporters’ expected profits. Neither has to hold in the data. We estimate the structural parameters based on the customs data of Chinese electronics exports. While we find positive discover cost and spillovers, "missing pioneers" are nonetheless a low probability event.


Econometric Analysis Of Continuous Time Models: A Survey Of Peter Phillips' Work And Some New Results, Jun Yu Aug 2014

Econometric Analysis Of Continuous Time Models: A Survey Of Peter Phillips' Work And Some New Results, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

Econometric analysis of continuous time models has drawn the attention of Peter Phillips for 40 years, resulting in many important publications by him. In these publications he has dealt with a wide range of continuous time models and the associated econometric problems. He has investigated problems from univariate equations to systems of equations, from asymptotic theory to finite sample issues, from parametric models to nonparametric models, from identification problems to estimation and inference problems, from stationary models to nonstationary and nearly nonstationary models. This paper provides an overview of Peter Phillips' contributions in the continuous time econometrics literature. We review …


A Combined Approach To The Inference Of Conditional Factor Models, Yan Li, Liangjun Su, Yuewu Xu Aug 2014

A Combined Approach To The Inference Of Conditional Factor Models, Yan Li, Liangjun Su, Yuewu Xu

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper develops a new methodology for estimating and testing conditional factor models in finance. We propose a two-stage procedure that naturally unifies the two existing approaches in the finance literature -- the parametric approach and the nonparametric approach. Our combined approach possesses important advantages over both methods. Using our two-stage combined estimator, we derive new test statistics for investigating key hypotheses in the context of conditional factor models. Our tests can be performed on a single asset or jointly across multiple assets. We further propose a novel test to directly check whether the parametric model used in our first …


Specification Test For Panel Data Models With Interactive Fixed Effects, Liangjun Su, Sainan Jin, Yonghui Zhang Aug 2014

Specification Test For Panel Data Models With Interactive Fixed Effects, Liangjun Su, Sainan Jin, Yonghui Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

In this paper, we propose a consistent nonparametric test for linearity in a large dimensional panel data model with interactive fixed effects. Both lagged dependent variables and conditional heteroskedasticity of unknown form are allowed in the model. We estimate the model under the null hypothesis of linearity to obtain the restricted residuals which are then used to construct the test statistic. We show that after being appropriately centered and standardized, the test statistic is asymptotically normally distributed under both the null hypothesis and a sequence of Pitman local alternatives by using the concept of conditional strong mixing that was recently …


Bayesian Testing Volatility Persistence In Stochastic Volatility Models With Jumps, Xiaobin Liu, Yong Li Aug 2014

Bayesian Testing Volatility Persistence In Stochastic Volatility Models With Jumps, Xiaobin Liu, Yong Li

Research Collection School Of Economics

Whether or not there is a unit root persistence in volatility of financial assets has been a long-standing topic of interest to financial econometricians and empirical economists. The purpose of this article is to provide a Bayesian approach for testing the volatility persistence in the context of stochastic volatility with Merton jump and correlated Merton jump. The Shanghai Composite Index daily return data is used for empirical illustration. The result of Bayesian hypothesis testing strongly indicates that the volatility process doesn’t have unit root volatility persistence in this stock market.