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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
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International and Area Studies
Singapore Management University
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- Singapore (7)
- COVID-19 (4)
- China (3)
- Fertility (2)
- India (2)
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- Pandemic (2)
- Activation (1)
- Ageing (1)
- Article 123 (1)
- Asia Pacific forex markets (1)
- Bandwidth tax (1)
- Card transaction data (1)
- Cell phone signal data (1)
- Childcare (1)
- Childcare policy (1)
- Children (1)
- Chinese Economy (1)
- Citizen social science (1)
- Confucianism (1)
- Connectedness (1)
- Conservation (1)
- Corruption (1)
- Courts (1)
- Crowdfunding (1)
- Debt and arrears (1)
- Decree power (1)
- Demographic transition (1)
- Difference in differences (1)
- Differential reform (1)
- Downstream (1)
Articles 1 - 26 of 26
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Economic Impact Of Targeted Government Responses To Covid-19: Evidence From The Large-Scale Cluster In Seoul, Kim, Kanghyock Koh, Jinwook Shin
Economic Impact Of Targeted Government Responses To Covid-19: Evidence From The Large-Scale Cluster In Seoul, Kim, Kanghyock Koh, Jinwook Shin
Research Collection School Of Economics
We estimate the economic impact of South Korea's targeted responses to the first large-scale COVID-19 cluster in Seoul. We find that foot traffic and retail sales decreased only within a 300 meter radius of the cluster and recovered to its pre-outbreak level after four weeks. The reductions appear to be driven by temporary business closures rather than the risk avoidance behavior of the citizens. Our results imply that less intense, but more targeted COVID-19 interventions, such as pin-pointed, temporary closures of businesses, can be a low-cost alternative after lifting strict social distancing measures.
Does Precise Case Disclosure Limit Precautionary Behavior? Evidence From Covid-19 In Singapore, Aljoscha Janssen, Matthew H. Shapiro
Does Precise Case Disclosure Limit Precautionary Behavior? Evidence From Covid-19 In Singapore, Aljoscha Janssen, Matthew H. Shapiro
Research Collection School Of Economics
Limiting the spread of contagious diseases can involve both government-managed and voluntary efforts. Governments have a number of policy options beyond direct intervention that can shape individuals’ responses to a pandemic and its associated costs. During its first wave of COVID-19 cases, Singapore was among a few countries that attempted to adjust behavior through the announcement of detailed case information. Singapore's Ministry of Health maintained and shared precise, daily information detailing local travel behavior and residences of COVID-19 cases. We use this policy along with device-level cellphone data to quantify how local and national COVID-19 case announcements trigger differential behavioral …
Tapping On Growth Opportunities Through Trade And Investment, Andy Feng, Gerald Foong, Geraldine Lim
Tapping On Growth Opportunities Through Trade And Investment, Andy Feng, Gerald Foong, Geraldine Lim
Research Collection School Of Economics
As a small and open economy, external developments play a crucial role in shaping Singapore’s growth prospects. In particular, external demand is pivotal in supporting the growth of Singapore’s gross domestic product (GDP) beyond the limits afforded by a small domestic market. Furthermore, due to the resource constraints faced by Singapore, its production of goods and services to meet both external and domestic demand requires a substantial use of imported inputs. Apart from trade, Singapore’s openness and outward-orientation also extend to its embrace of inward and outward investments to grow its economy and create jobs for Singaporeans. In view of …
Urbanization Policy And Economic Development: A Quantitative Analysis Of China's Differential Hukou Reforms, Wen-Tai Hsu, Lin Ma
Urbanization Policy And Economic Development: A Quantitative Analysis Of China's Differential Hukou Reforms, Wen-Tai Hsu, Lin Ma
Research Collection School Of Economics
The household registration system (hukou system) in China has hampered rural-urban migration by posing large migration friction. The system has been gradually relaxed in the past few decades, but the reforms have been differential in city size. We find a striking contrast in migration patterns between years 2005 and 2015; rural people tended to move more to large cities in 2005, but more to small- and medium-sized cities in 2015. We calibrate a spatial quantitative model to the world economy in both years with China divided into rural, mega-city, and other-city regions. We find that alternative urbanization policies that are …
Scaled, Citizen-Led, And Public Qualitative Research: A Framework For Citizen Social Science, Amirah Amirrudin, Nicholas Harrigan, Ijlal Naqvi
Scaled, Citizen-Led, And Public Qualitative Research: A Framework For Citizen Social Science, Amirah Amirrudin, Nicholas Harrigan, Ijlal Naqvi
Research Collection School Of Economics
We propose a framework for citizen social science that brings together three reinforcing elements of a research project – scale, citizen-leadership, and publicness – to improve qualitative research. Our framework was born out of necessity; a desire to involve ordinary citizens, in researching public issues, with limited funding. We illustrate the application of our framework using insights from research we have led, involving first, a series of qualitative studies of state and civil society organizations working on community engagement by three separate years of public policy students; and second, a qualitative study on the system for processing salary and injury …
Social Norms And Fertility, Sunha Myong, Junghae Park, Junjian Yi
Social Norms And Fertility, Sunha Myong, Junghae Park, Junjian Yi
Research Collection School Of Economics
We document three stylized facts on marriage and fertility patterns in East Asian societies: (i) their marriage rates are among the highest in the world, but their total fertility is the lowest; (ii) although they have the lowest total fertility, almost all married women have at least one child; and (iii) almost no single women have any children. As these societies have been influenced by Confucianism over millennia, marriage and fertility decisions are potentially shaped by two social norms: the unequal gender division of childcare and the stigma attached to out-of-wedlock births. We present a model incorporating the two social …
The Price Elasticity Of African Elephant Poaching, Quy-Toan Do, Andrei A. Levchenko, Lin Ma, Julian Blanc, Holly Dublin, Tom Milliken
The Price Elasticity Of African Elephant Poaching, Quy-Toan Do, Andrei A. Levchenko, Lin Ma, Julian Blanc, Holly Dublin, Tom Milliken
Research Collection School Of Economics
The objective of this paper is to provide an estimate of the elasticity of elephant poaching with respect to prices. Ivory being a storable commodity subjects its price to Hotelling’s no-arbitrage condition, hence allowing identification of the supply curve. The price of gold, one of many commodities used as stores of value, is thus used as an instrument for ivory prices. The supply of illegal ivory is found to be price inelastic with an elasticity of 0.4, with changes in consumer prices passing-through to prices faced by producers at a rate close to unity. Estimations based on a number of …
Decree Power In Parliamentary Systems: Theory And Evidence From India, Madhav Shrihari Aney, Shubhankar Dam
Decree Power In Parliamentary Systems: Theory And Evidence From India, Madhav Shrihari Aney, Shubhankar Dam
Research Collection School Of Economics
Decree powers are common to presidential systems; they are rarely found in parliamentary ones. We analyze decree powers in one such rare setting: India. We show that bicameral minority governments in India systematically use ordinances to circumvent parliament and prosecute their legislative agendas. They promulgate more ordinances, enact less legislation, and often repromulgate lapsed ordinances. These patterns suggest that, with bicameral minority governments, the locus of lawmaking shifts to the executive branch. While both majority and minority governments invoke ordinances, the latter do so systematically to get around their parliamentary deficit. In the hands of minority governments, then, the mechanism …
The Importance Of Considering Debt And Young Children In Activation: A Survival Analysis Of Return To Welfare, Irene N. Y. Ng, Jian Qi Tan, Mathews Mathew, Kong Weng Ho, Yi Ting Ting
The Importance Of Considering Debt And Young Children In Activation: A Survival Analysis Of Return To Welfare, Irene N. Y. Ng, Jian Qi Tan, Mathews Mathew, Kong Weng Ho, Yi Ting Ting
Research Collection School Of Economics
While there has been much research on welfare exit and entry into employment, less research has looked at return to government assistance. Applying survival analysis on data from a national government assistance programme in Singapore, we found two important factors of welfare return to which activation programmes need to pay greater attention. First, return was more likely if former beneficiaries accumulated a higher number of types of arrears rather than higher dollar values of arrears. This new finding contributes to the emerging literature on bandwidth tax, and suggests the importance of designing programmes that relieve mental accounting due to debt …
Providing Childcare, Christine Ho, Sunha Myong
Providing Childcare, Christine Ho, Sunha Myong
Research Collection School Of Economics
Women’s economic empowerment has been hailed as one of the most remarkable revolutions in the past 50 years. Yet, women still face the lion’s share of the burden of childcare despite major progress in their education and earnings capacity. This is particularly salient in many Asian countries. This chapter proposes a synthesis of the state of knowledge on childcare and discusses policy-relevant issues applicable to the Singapore context. Selected policies are documented and lessons from the international landscape are discussed. Raising children incurs both direct costs in the form of childcare and opportunity costs in the form of career costs. …
Challenges To Social Mobility In Singapore, Kong Weng Ho, Marcus Kheng Tat Tan
Challenges To Social Mobility In Singapore, Kong Weng Ho, Marcus Kheng Tat Tan
Research Collection School Of Economics
Singapore had achieved impressive economic growth together with a high level of upward mobility since her independence in 1965. However, the growth process might have become more uneven, in addition to diminishing growth for a matured economy like Singapore, which is also a highly open city state subject to competitive forces from other economies. Singapore has fared well recently,
evident from the 2020 social mobility findings reported by the World Economic Forum and the decline in Gini coefficients for the past decade. We discuss the education system in Singapore and the recently formed National Jobs Council, both important institutions for …
On The Market Failure Of “Missing Pioneers”, Shang-Jin Wei, Ziru Wei, Jianhuan Xu
On The Market Failure Of “Missing Pioneers”, Shang-Jin Wei, Ziru Wei, Jianhuan Xu
Research Collection School Of Economics
An influential hypothesis states that export pioneers are too few relative to social optimum because the first exporter's action creates an informational public good for all subsequent exporters. The hypothesis has been invoked to justify certain types of government interventions. We note, however, that such market failure requires two inequalities to hold simultaneously: the discovery cost is neither too low nor too high. Neither has to hold in the data. We propose a structural estimation framework to evaluate the hypothesis, and estimate the parameters based on the customs data of Chinese electronics exports. Our key finding is that "missing pioneers" …
Achieving Price Stability, Hwee Kwan Chow, Taojun Xie
Achieving Price Stability, Hwee Kwan Chow, Taojun Xie
Research Collection School Of Economics
The aim of delivering medium-term price stability is the stated objective of the Monetary Authority of Singapore. To this end, the central bank adopted an unusual exchange rate–based monetary policy framework that has served the economy well over the past decades. However, the shift from the phase of catch-up growth to a mature economy raises the question of whether the current monetary policy framework needs reformulation. Moreover, as global financial integration deepens, surges in cross-border capital flows impact Singapore’s exchange rate and asset prices, which has implications for economic dynamism and inclusion. Since a large and persistent deviation of the …
Singapore In The Global Value Chains, Pao-Li Chang, Tran Bao Phuong Nguyen
Singapore In The Global Value Chains, Pao-Li Chang, Tran Bao Phuong Nguyen
Research Collection School Of Economics
This chapter analyses the participation of Singapore in the global value chains (GVC): how much of its gross exports are GVC-related trade; how downstream it is; and which countries are its key upstream and downstream trade partners. The analysis is carried out both at the country aggregate level and at the sector level. New formulas are proposed in the gross export decomposition framework of Koopman, Wang and Wei (2014) and Borin and Mancini (2017), to characterise a country/industry’s downstreamness in the GVC and the importance of each trade partner in its backward/forward linkages. Singapore started off with a very high …
Entrepreneurship In Singapore, Jungho Lee
Entrepreneurship In Singapore, Jungho Lee
Research Collection School Of Economics
Singapore has completed its catch-up growth phase and needs to find a new growth engine. Entrepreneurship can contribute to a nation’s productivity growth. The purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, a theoretical framework is presented, along with empirical evidence, to understand government interventions aimed at boosting entrepreneurship. Second, using the framework, the chapter discusses whether Singapore’s current policies are suitable for helping entrepreneurship. The theory demonstrates four reasons why government intervention is needed: (1) resource misallocation, (2) positive externality, (3) entrepreneurial human capital, and (4) tax and default policies. Singapore’s government has implemented various policies that potentially fix market …
Jobs For Justice(S): Corruption In The Supreme Court Of India, Madhav S. Aney, Shubhankar Dam, Giovanni Ko
Jobs For Justice(S): Corruption In The Supreme Court Of India, Madhav S. Aney, Shubhankar Dam, Giovanni Ko
Research Collection School Of Economics
We investigate whether judicial decisions are affected by career concerns of judges by analyzing two questions: Do judges respond to incentives to pander by ruling in favor of the government in the hope of receiving jobs after retiring from the Supreme Court? Does the government reward judges who rule in its favor with prestigious jobs? We construct a data set of Supreme Court of India cases involving the government for 1999–2014. We find that incentives to pander have a causal effect on judicial decision-making, and they are jointly determined by the importance of the case and whether the judge retires …
Financing Singapore’S Smes And The Crowdfunding Industry In Singapore, Swee Liang Tan, Yoke Wang Tok, Chansriniyom Thitipat
Financing Singapore’S Smes And The Crowdfunding Industry In Singapore, Swee Liang Tan, Yoke Wang Tok, Chansriniyom Thitipat
Research Collection School Of Economics
As new digital technologies emerge that make the provision of financial services more efficient, they hold the potential to address barriers that SMEs face in accessing credit. This paper finds empirical evidence that crowdfunding for SMEs improved SMEs’ timeliness to pay debt in Singapore. Anecdotal evidence from growing SMEs suggests that getting crowdfunding loans also induced financing from banks, leading to more efficient allocation of credit. In just four years, Singapore’s crowdfunding volume has grown rapidly making it one of the top crowdfunding hubs in Southeast Asia in 2018. The rapid development of Singapore’s crowdfunding industry can be attributed to …
Connectedness Of Asia Pacific Forex Markets: China's Growing Influence, Hwee Kwan Chow
Connectedness Of Asia Pacific Forex Markets: China's Growing Influence, Hwee Kwan Chow
Research Collection School Of Economics
This paper investigates the degree of connectedness of Asia Pacific forex markets post global financial crisis and relates it to developments in the renminbi markets. The connectedness measure developed by Diebold and Yilmaz (2014) reveal the strength of linkages across the US dollar currency pairs of twelve currencies, namely offshore renminbi, onshore renminbi, euro, yen, Australian dollar, Indian rupee, Korean won, Malaysian ringgit, New Zealand dollar, Singapore dollar, Thai baht and Taiwan dollar. With the gradual liberalization of China’s exchange rate system, shocks from the renminbi markets contribute more to fluctuations in almost all individual Asia Pacific currency markets vis-a-vis …
Hedonic Price Of Housing Space, Sumit Agarwal, Yanying Chen, Li Jing, Yi Jin Tan
Hedonic Price Of Housing Space, Sumit Agarwal, Yanying Chen, Li Jing, Yi Jin Tan
Research Collection School Of Economics
This article estimates hedonic prices for different levels of housing space, by exploiting a unique space‐adding project in Singapore that added a uniform amount of space to each existing housing unit regardless of the original size. This space adding program was carried out if sufficient residents vote in favor of space adding. Using a difference‐in‐differences (DiD) strategy after restricting our sample to narrow margins around the voting cutoff, we find that the additional space increased the resale price of a housing unit by 7% on average, and the extent of price appreciation varied significantly across the original size of the …
High-Frequency Internet Survey Of A Probability Sample Of Older Singaporeans: The Singapore Life Panel, Rhema Vaithianathan, Bryce Hool, Michael D. Hurd, Susann Rohwedder
High-Frequency Internet Survey Of A Probability Sample Of Older Singaporeans: The Singapore Life Panel, Rhema Vaithianathan, Bryce Hool, Michael D. Hurd, Susann Rohwedder
Research Collection School Of Economics
Facing a rapidly ageing population, Singapore is presented with urgent policy challenges. Yet there is very little data on the economic, health and family circumstances of older Singaporeans. In response, the Centre for Research on the Economics of Ageing (CREA) at Singapore Management University has been collecting monthly data on a panel of Singaporeans aged between 50 and 70 years. We detail the methodology by which the Singapore Life Panel® (SLP) was constructed using a population-representative sampling frame from the Singapore Department of Statistics. Contact was made with 25,000 households through postal, phone and in-person canvassing. More than 15,200 respondents …
The Response Of The Chinese Economy To The U.S.-China Trade War: 2018-2019, Pao-Li Chang, Kefang Yao, Fan Zheng
The Response Of The Chinese Economy To The U.S.-China Trade War: 2018-2019, Pao-Li Chang, Kefang Yao, Fan Zheng
Research Collection School Of Economics
In this paper, we follow the micro-to-macro approach of Fajgelbaum et al. (2020) and analyze the impacts of the 2018–2019 U.S.-China trade war on the Chinese economy. We use highly disaggregated trade and tariff data with monthly frequency to identify the demand/supply elasticities of Chinese imports/exports, combined with a general equilibrium model for the Chinese economy (that takes into account input-output linkages, and regional heterogeneity in employment and sector specialization) to quantify the partial and general equilibrium effects of the tariff war at the product/sector/region/aggregate levels. This complements the studies that focus on the ex post response of the U.S. …
Government Management Capacities And The Containment Of Covid-19: A Repeated Cross-Sectional Study Across Chinese Cities, Wenchao Li, Jing Li, Junjian Yi
Government Management Capacities And The Containment Of Covid-19: A Repeated Cross-Sectional Study Across Chinese Cities, Wenchao Li, Jing Li, Junjian Yi
Research Collection School Of Economics
Objectives: Better understanding of the dynamics of the COVID-19 (2019 novel coronavirus disease) pandemic to curb its spread is now a global imperative. While travel restrictions and control measures have been shown to limit the spread of the disease, the effectiveness of the enforcement of those measures should depend on the strength of the government. Whether, and how, the government plays a role in fighting the disease, however, has not been investigated. Here, we show that government management capacities are critical to the containment of the disease. Setting: We conducted a statistical analysis based on cross-city comparisons within China. China …
The Evolution Of Income Risk And Consumption Insurance In South Korea Over The Last Two Decades, Taehyun Ahn, Chung Gu Chee, Seonghoon Kim
The Evolution Of Income Risk And Consumption Insurance In South Korea Over The Last Two Decades, Taehyun Ahn, Chung Gu Chee, Seonghoon Kim
Research Collection School Of Economics
Using data from the Korea Labor Income Panel Study, we study the evolution of income risk and consumption insurance against transitory and permanent income shocks in South Korea over the last two decades. We find a decreasing trend in both income and consumption risks. Furthermore, we estimate that 47.6% of permanent income shocks and 9.8% of transitory income shocks pass through to consumption. We also provide evidence of substantial improvements in consumption insurance among the less educated and the older cohort nearing retirement. Our results suggest that recent developments of social safety net and welfare system may have played an …
Teaching In The Right Context: Textbook Supply Program, Language, And Vocabulary Ability In Vietnam, Tomoki Fujii, Maki Nakajima, Sijia Xu
Teaching In The Right Context: Textbook Supply Program, Language, And Vocabulary Ability In Vietnam, Tomoki Fujii, Maki Nakajima, Sijia Xu
Research Collection School Of Economics
While past two decades have witnessed a remarkable educational progress in Vietnam, ethnic minority children consistently lagged behind ethnic majority children in academic performance. The government of Vietnam has stepped up efforts to assist ethnic minority students in their learning by lowering the linguistic and cultural barriers they face. Among such efforts is the textbook supply program, and we examine its impact on the learning of children proxied by vocabulary test. We apply difference-in-differences estimation to four rounds of the Young Lives data between 2006 and 2015 in order to investigate how the textbook supply program narrowed the gap between …
The Effects Of Income On Health: Evidence From Lottery Wins In Singapore, Seonghoon Kim, Kanghyock Koh
The Effects Of Income On Health: Evidence From Lottery Wins In Singapore, Seonghoon Kim, Kanghyock Koh
Research Collection School Of Economics
We estimate the causal effects of household income on self-reported health status by exploiting random variations in the amount of lottery prizes won. We find that a S$10,000 (US$7,245) increase in income via lottery wins improves individuals’ health by a standard deviation of 0.18. As possible mechanisms, we find that lottery wins increase household consumption spending and improve overall life satisfaction, but do not change healthcare spending, labor supply, and risky health behavior. Previous studies, which focused on the health effects of lottery prizes in Western European countries with strong social safety nets, do not find positive effects other than …
Public Health Insurance And Pharmaceutical Innovation: Evidence From China, Xuan Zhang, Huihua Nie
Public Health Insurance And Pharmaceutical Innovation: Evidence From China, Xuan Zhang, Huihua Nie
Research Collection School Of Economics
Developing countries are characterized by low levels of pharmaceutical innovation. A likely reason is their small market size, which is not because of the population size but because of low levels of income and lack of health insurance coverage. This study exploits a natural experiment from the implementation of a public health insurance program for rural residents in China (New Cooperative Medical Scheme [NCMS]) to examine whether the pharmaceutical industry increases innovation regarding diseases covered by the NCMS that are prevalent in rural areas. We examine the 1993–2009 patent data to gauge pharmaceutical innovation in China. Diseases with a 10% …