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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Legal Risk And Insider Trading, Marcin Kacperczyk, Emiliano Sebastian Pagnotta Dec 2023

Legal Risk And Insider Trading, Marcin Kacperczyk, Emiliano Sebastian Pagnotta

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Do illegal insiders internalize legal risk? We address this question with hand-collected data from 530 SEC (the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) investigations. Using two plausibly exogenous shocks to expected penalties, we show that insiders trade less aggressively and earlier and concentrate on tips of greater value when facing a higher risk. The results match the predictions of a model where an insider internalizes the impact of trades on prices and the likelihood of prosecution and anticipates penalties in proportion to trade profits. Our findings lend support to the effectiveness of U.S. regulations' deterrence and the long-standing hypothesis that insider …


China’S Changing Perspective On The Wto: From Aspiration, Assimilation To Alienation, Henry S. Gao Dec 2023

China’S Changing Perspective On The Wto: From Aspiration, Assimilation To Alienation, Henry S. Gao

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Since its accession to the WTO twenty years ago, China’s image has shifted from a good student aspiring to assimilate itself into the multilateral trading system to one that is increasingly alienated from key WTO principles. How has China’s perspective on WTO been evolving? What are the reasons behind China’s changing perspective? This chapter addresses these questions from the Chinese perspective with a comprehensive analysis of the key moments in China’s first two decades in the WTO, followed by practical suggestions on how to engage China more constructively in the WTO and beyond.


Gender Divergence In Premarket Skill Acquisition And Wage Inequality, Sunha Myong Dec 2023

Gender Divergence In Premarket Skill Acquisition And Wage Inequality, Sunha Myong

Research Collection School Of Economics

I study the changes in premarket skills and the evolution of the wage distribution across two cohorts using the NLSY79 and NLSY97. To estimate the relative importance of changes in premarket skills and changes in skill prices in explaining the evolution of the wage distribution, I apply the DiNardo, Fortin, and Lemieux decomposition method (DiNardo et al. 1996). I find a substantial gender divergence in premarket skill acquisition and wage gain across the two cohorts. Women's wage gain associated with changes in premarket skills is greater than that of men's at all levels of the wage distribution. Changes in premarket …


Are Bond Returns Predictable With Real-Time Macro Data?, Dashan Huang, Fuwei Jiang, Kunpeng Li, Guoshi Tong, Guofu Zhou Dec 2023

Are Bond Returns Predictable With Real-Time Macro Data?, Dashan Huang, Fuwei Jiang, Kunpeng Li, Guoshi Tong, Guofu Zhou

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We investigate the predictability of bond returns using real-time macro variables and consider the possibility of a nonlinear predictive relationship and the presence of weak factors. To address these issues, we propose a scaled sufficient forecasting (sSUFF) method and analyze its asymptotic properties. Using both the existing and the new method, we find empirically that real-time macro variables have significant forecasting power both in-sample and out-of-sample. Moreover, they generate sizable economic values, and their predictability is not spanned by the yield curve. We also observe that the forecasted bond returns are countercyclical, and the magnitude of predictability is stronger during …


Market For Patents, Monopoly, And Misallocation, Shang-Jin Wei, Jianhuan Xu, Ge Yin, Xiaobo Zhang Dec 2023

Market For Patents, Monopoly, And Misallocation, Shang-Jin Wei, Jianhuan Xu, Ge Yin, Xiaobo Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

The paper studies a possible “dark side” of patent trade in enhancing the market power of monopolists. We explore the different effects of China’s 2008 tax reform on patent innovations and sales across industries. In particular, although easier patent trade leads to more patent creation, the new patents are disproportionately connected to existing monopolists and are more likely to be acquired by them. Using an endogenous growth model with patent trade, we show that subsidizing patent trade could skew investors’ research to appeal to the monopolists, increase the latter’s monopoly power, and reduce social welfare. An optimal subsidy policy for …


The Depth Of Preferential Trade Agreements, Pao-Li Chang, Wei Jin, Kefang Yao Dec 2023

The Depth Of Preferential Trade Agreements, Pao-Li Chang, Wei Jin, Kefang Yao

Research Collection School Of Economics

Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) have increased rapidly in number since the 1990s, and have extended their traditional focus on tariff reduction to include deeper integration in policy areas such as competition policy, intellectual property rights, investments, and movement of capital. This paper uses a comprehensive dataset on the content of PTAs to quantify the impacts of the depth of trade agreements on bilateral trade flows and national welfare across the world for the period 1980–2015. The results indicate that agreements that are deeper (by different definitions) contribute to larger trade growth and welfare gains. Furthermore, the results imply that the …


Heat And Observed Economic Activity In The Rich Urban Tropics, Eric Fesselmeyer, Haoming. Liu, Alberto. Salvo, Rhita P B. Simorangkir Dec 2023

Heat And Observed Economic Activity In The Rich Urban Tropics, Eric Fesselmeyer, Haoming. Liu, Alberto. Salvo, Rhita P B. Simorangkir

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

We use space-and-time resolved mobility data to assess how heat impacts Singapore, a rich city-state and arguably a harbinger of what is to come in the urbanizing tropics. Singapore’s offices, factories, malls, buses, and trains are widely air conditioned, its public schools less so. We document increased attendance and commuting to workplaces, malls, and the more air-conditioned schools on hotter relative to cooler days, particularly by low-income residents with limited use of adaptive technologies at home. Investment by rich cities may attenuate heat’s pervasive negative consequences on productive outcomes, yet this may worsen the climate emergency in the long run.


Reproducibility In Management Science, MiloˇS Fišar, Ben Greiner, Christoph Huber, Elena Katok, Ali I. Ozkes, Hannah H. Chang Dec 2023

Reproducibility In Management Science, MiloˇS Fišar, Ben Greiner, Christoph Huber, Elena Katok, Ali I. Ozkes, Hannah H. Chang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

With the help of more than 700 reviewers, we assess the reproducibility of nearly 500 articles published in the journal Management Science before and after the introduction of a new Data and Code Disclosure policy in 2019. When considering only articles for which data accessibility and hardware and software requirements were not an obstacle for reviewers, the results of more than 95% of articles under the new disclosure policy could be fully or largely computationally reproduced. However, for 29% of articles, at least part of the data set was not accessible to the reviewer. Considering all articles in our sample …


In Search Of Cryptocurrency Failure, Donglian Ma, Jun Tu, Zhaobo Zhu Dec 2023

In Search Of Cryptocurrency Failure, Donglian Ma, Jun Tu, Zhaobo Zhu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper explores the determinants of cryptocurrency failure and the pricing of crypto failure risk. We document different significant market- and characteristic-based predictors for coin and token failures. The introduction of Bitcoin futures and the outbreak of COVID19 affect the importance of many predictors. Investors require extra return for bearing high failure risk of crypto assets. The return difference across high and low failure risk crypto assets is not explained by the market, size and momentum factors in the cryptocurrency market. Finally, investors benefit from diversifying into high failure risk crypto assets that is little correlated with the stock market.


How Commonality Persists? (Through Investors' Sentiment And Attention), Chyng Wen Tee, Raja Velu, Zhaoque Zhou Dec 2023

How Commonality Persists? (Through Investors' Sentiment And Attention), Chyng Wen Tee, Raja Velu, Zhaoque Zhou

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Studies on commonality generally attribute the variation in asset returns to the variation in order flows. In this research study, we show that order flows do not predict asset returns, rather their relationship have been static over time. Thus we model both returns and the order flows as endogenous variables, and use investors' sentiment and attention as exogenous factors via a reduced-rank regression. We provide empirical evidence to demonstrate that cross-sectional commonality in attention (sentiment) is linearly (nonlinearly) associated with both returns and order flows at the intraday level, while the sentiment and attention measures themselvesexhibit a nonlinear mutual relationship, …


Within-Development Density And Housing Prices In Singapore, Eric Fesselmeyer, Haoming Liu, Louisa Poco Nov 2023

Within-Development Density And Housing Prices In Singapore, Eric Fesselmeyer, Haoming Liu, Louisa Poco

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

This paper measures how much more households pay for less density in their immediate surroundings. Using transaction and administrative data and exploiting the introduction of a regulation that restricted the number of housing units for certain land lots, we find that households discount density: a 10% increase in within-development density decreases the price per square meter by 5%. Further, the mean price per square meter of the average development increased by 1%–3% after the regulation was introduced, while the amount of built-up space remained constant. The increase in total revenue suggests developers may underestimate the externality caused by density.


Decomposability And Strategy-Proofness In Multidimensional Models, Shurojit Chatterji, Huaxia Zeng Nov 2023

Decomposability And Strategy-Proofness In Multidimensional Models, Shurojit Chatterji, Huaxia Zeng

Research Collection School Of Economics

We introduce the notion of a multidimensional hybrid preference domain on a (finite) set of alternatives that is a Cartesian product of finitely many components. We demonstrate that in a model of public goods provision, multidimensional hybrid preferences arise naturally through assembling marginal preferences under the condition of semi-separability - a weakening of separability. The main result shows that under a suitable “richness” condition, every strategy-proof rule on this domain can be decomposed into component-wise strategy-proof rules, and more importantly every domain of preferences that reconciles decomposability of rules with strategy-proofness must be a multidimensional hybrid domain.


Legal Protection Of Property Rights: A Dynamic Evolution Model, Fali Huang Nov 2023

Legal Protection Of Property Rights: A Dynamic Evolution Model, Fali Huang

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper presents an analysis of a dynamic evolution model of institutions, focusing on the factors affecting the security of property rights such as coercive capacity, political power, legal quality, and private protection. These factors are endogenously determined in equilibrium, allowing legal quality to serve as a summary indicator of property security. The primary finding of the study indicates that the legal protection of property rights tends to increase over time, driven by a decline in the economy's vulnerability to expropriation, particularly due to the growing importance of commercial and industrial activities relative to agriculture. Furthermore, the coexistence of the …


Financial Crisis And Female Entrepreneurship: Evidence From South Korea, Jungho Lee, Sunha Myong Nov 2023

Financial Crisis And Female Entrepreneurship: Evidence From South Korea, Jungho Lee, Sunha Myong

Research Collection School Of Economics

We document a drastic increase in female-owned manufacturing firms in South Korea after the 1997 financial crisis. During the crisis, a major banking sector reform was conducted, and many underperforming bank branches were forced to close down. Using a geographical variation of bank branch closures during the reform, we show that the banking sector reform resulted in a rise in female entrepreneurship. We present evidence that male-owned firms were preferred by the closeddown bank branches, despite female-owned firms exhibiting lower risks and higher returns. The banking sector reform, although not explicitly aimed at addressing gender disparities, substantially benefited female entrepreneurs …


Obfuscation And Rational Inattention, Aljoscha Janssen, Johannes Kasinger Nov 2023

Obfuscation And Rational Inattention, Aljoscha Janssen, Johannes Kasinger

Research Collection School Of Economics

We study the behavior of duopolistic firms that can obfuscate their prices before competing on price. Obfuscation affects the rational inattentive consumers' optimal information strategy, which determines the probabilistic demand. Our model advances related models by allowing consumers to update their unrestricted prior beliefs with an informative signal of any form. We show that the game may result in an obfuscation equilibrium with high prices or a transparency equilibrium with low prices and no obfuscation, providing an argument for market regulation. Obfuscation equilibria cease to exist for low information costs and if one firm seems a priori considerably more attractive.


Information Loss In Volatility Measurement With Flat Price Trading, Peter C. B. Phillips, Jun Yu Nov 2023

Information Loss In Volatility Measurement With Flat Price Trading, Peter C. B. Phillips, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

A model of financial asset price determination is proposed that incorporates flat trading features into an efficient price process. The model involves the superposition of a Brownian semimartingale process for the effcient price and a Bernoulli process that determines the extent of price trading. The approach is related to sticky price modeling and the Calvo pricing mechanism in macroeconomic dynamics. A limit theory for the conventional realized volatility (RV) measure of integrated volatility is developed. The results show that RV is still consistent but has an inflated asymptotic variance that depends on the probability of flat trading. Estimated quarticity is …


Regulatory Protection And The Role Of International Cooperation, Yuan Mei Nov 2023

Regulatory Protection And The Role Of International Cooperation, Yuan Mei

Research Collection School Of Economics

I develop a general equilibrium framework to analyze the welfare consequences of product regulations and their international harmonization. In my model, raising product standards reduces a negative consumption externality, but also increases the marginal and fixed costs of production. When product standards are set noncooperatively, the effects of standards on other countries' wages and number of firms are not internalized, giving rise to an international inefficiency. The World Trade Organization's nondiscrimination principle of national treatment only partly addresses this inefficiency. Welfare losses from abandoning national treatment average 2.8%, whereas the maximum welfare gains from efficient cooperation average 11.8%.


Does Elite Quality Matter?, Alwyn Lim Nov 2023

Does Elite Quality Matter?, Alwyn Lim

Asian Management Insights

Yes, it can make or break a society. Elites are an inevitability in society. In recent years, emerging populist movements across different countries have highlighted stark problems with growing.


Estimating And Applying Autoregression Models Via Their Eigensystem Representation, Leo Krippner Oct 2023

Estimating And Applying Autoregression Models Via Their Eigensystem Representation, Leo Krippner

Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics

This article introduces the eigensystem autoregression (EAR) framework, which allows an AR model to be speciÖed, estimated, and applied directly in terms of its eigenvalues and eigenvectors. An EAR estimation can therefore impose various constraints on AR dynamics that would not be possible within standard linear estimation. Examples are restricting eigenvalue magnitudes to control the rate of mean reversion, additionally imposing that eigenvalues be real and positive to avoid pronounced oscillatory behavior, and eliminating the possibility of explosive episodes in a time-varying AR. The EAR framework also produces closed-form AR forecasts and associated variances, and forecasts and data may be …


Customer Capital And Trade Intermediaries: Evidence From China, Jungho Lee, Jianhuan Xu Oct 2023

Customer Capital And Trade Intermediaries: Evidence From China, Jungho Lee, Jianhuan Xu

Research Collection School Of Economics

Using a unique dataset that links the production and sales of Chinese exporting firms, we document that the value of export goods a firm produces often differs from the value of export goods that the firm sells in foreign markets. We show that this empirical pattern reflects that some exporters act as trade intermediaries, which we refer to as producer intermediaries. We further show that firms with higher accumulated marketing expenditures are more likely to become producer intermediaries. To understand the implications of our empirical findings, we develop a theoretical framework in which firms can lend and borrow customer capital …


Connecting The (Dirty) Dots: Current Account Surplus And Polluting Production, Jungho Lee, Shang-Jin Wei, Jianhuan Xu Oct 2023

Connecting The (Dirty) Dots: Current Account Surplus And Polluting Production, Jungho Lee, Shang-Jin Wei, Jianhuan Xu

Research Collection School Of Economics

According to the existing open-economy macroeconomics literature, a current account surplus is associated with a welfare loss only when distortions exist in either savings or investment. We propose a new welfare effect even in the absence of such distortions. In our theory, a trade imbalance − the largest component of a current account imbalance − interacts with a country’s pollution control (“cleanness”) regime to generate welfare effects outside the standard channels. In particular, a trade surplus alters the shipping costs and composition of a country’s imports, producing a welfare loss associated with greater pollution.


Tackling Misperceptions About Immigrants With Fact-Checking Interventions: A Randomized Survey Experiment, Syngjoo Choi, Chung-Yoon Choi, Kim Oct 2023

Tackling Misperceptions About Immigrants With Fact-Checking Interventions: A Randomized Survey Experiment, Syngjoo Choi, Chung-Yoon Choi, Kim

Research Collection School Of Economics

We conduct a randomized online survey experiment to study the impact of fact-checking offers and financial incentives on misperceptions about immigrants. We find that natives overestimate the number of immigrants and the social and economic costs of immigration. Offering a free check of the factual information about immigrants reduces these misperceptions; it becomes more effective when combined with financial incentives. However, more than half of the participants never took up offers to check factual information. Using a model of information search with limited attention, we identify the presence of non-negligible costs of information search and processing, which limits the effectiveness …


Cross-Border Technology Investments In Recession, Juliana Yu Sun, Huanhuan Zheng Oct 2023

Cross-Border Technology Investments In Recession, Juliana Yu Sun, Huanhuan Zheng

Research Collection School Of Economics

Utilizing industry-level foreign direct investment (FDI) from 72 source markets to 122 destination markets between 2003 to 2018, we evaluate how cross-border technology investments respond to economic recessions. We find that FDI embedded with intensive research and development (R&D) drops when the destination market is in a recession and the source market is in a normal state and recovers to the pre-recession levels when both destination and source markets are in recession. However, there is little evidence that recessions affect cross-border investments in other aspects of technology measured by the penetration of robots, intellectual property products and information and communications …


Do Government Subsidies Promote Green R&D Efficiency? Empirical Evidence From China, Huimin Wu Oct 2023

Do Government Subsidies Promote Green R&D Efficiency? Empirical Evidence From China, Huimin Wu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

How to evaluate the effects of government policy on encouraging innovations? Existing studies strongly argue to reduce subsidies compared to indirect policy tools, such as tax rebate. However, direct government grants are popular and keep gaining momentum in China. Such a discrepancy between academic research and common practice is interesting and calls for further investigations. In the meantime, is there any difference for this issue if considering green attributes? In this article, we use data from Chinese A-share listed companies to study the effect of government subsidies on R&D activities, with a special focus on comparing green and non-green inventions. …


How To Understand China's Approach To Central Bank Digital Currency?, Heng Wang Sep 2023

How To Understand China's Approach To Central Bank Digital Currency?, Heng Wang

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

China's central bank digital currency (CBDC), digital yuan or e-CNY, is likely to profoundly affect the international financial system. China's CBDC is fast evolving. Understanding the influencing factors of China's CBDC will likely be crucial to explore its future direction. Major influencing factors include (i) China's perception and conception of regulation and technology, (ii) complementarity between China's preferences and CBDC development, (iii) domestic and international legitimacy, and (iv) institutional development. This paper argues that these influencing factors contribute to China's likely approach of selectively reshaping the international financial system. Given the potential wide-ranging implications of the introduction of CBDC globally, …


What Drives The Value Of Financial Analysts’ Advice? The Role Of Earnings And Growth Forecasts, Ohad Kadan, Leonardo Madureira, Rong Wang, Tzachi Zach Sep 2023

What Drives The Value Of Financial Analysts’ Advice? The Role Of Earnings And Growth Forecasts, Ohad Kadan, Leonardo Madureira, Rong Wang, Tzachi Zach

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We offer a parsimonious index at the individual analyst level to measure the extent to which an analyst relies on earnings and long-term growth forecasts in producing her advice. Using this index, we evaluate the contribution of earnings and growth forecasts to the investment value of analysts’ stock recommendations. We find that the fraction of analysts’ advice attributed to forecasts varies considerably across analysts and sectors. The investment value of recommendations is higher for analysts who rely less on their forecasts and more on other sources of information when forming investment advice. Investors recognize the superiority of recommendations from analysts …


The Cost Of Cheap Talk: How Campaign Promises And Default Contributions Affect Donation-Based Crowd Funding Success., Tianci Leon Qiu Sep 2023

The Cost Of Cheap Talk: How Campaign Promises And Default Contributions Affect Donation-Based Crowd Funding Success., Tianci Leon Qiu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Non-profit organisations (NPOs) find it increasingly harder to engage donors and raise funds from the public. Post-pandemic: the emphasis on tactics to raise funds online through donation-based crowdfunding (DCF) platforms has surged in importance for both NPO survival and continued beneficiary aid. However, unlike equity-based crowdfunding platforms where campaign organisers are obligated to provide investors with tangible returns based on funding milestones, NPOs on DCF platforms do not have to adhere to any funding milestones or are beholden to any tangible obligations towards donors. Consequently, NPOs are greatly incentivised to deploy cheap talk – non-binding, unverifiable messages and claims to …


Does Abstract Thinking Facilitate Information Processing? Evidence From Financial Analysts, Frank Weikai Li, Rong Wang, Yang Yu, Gloria Yang Yu Sep 2023

Does Abstract Thinking Facilitate Information Processing? Evidence From Financial Analysts, Frank Weikai Li, Rong Wang, Yang Yu, Gloria Yang Yu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We study whether abstract thinking – an essential cognitive trait established by psychological and neuroscientific studies – facilitates analysts’ information processing. Exploiting analysts’ questions during earnings calls, we construct an Abstract Thinking Index (ATI) that measures their tendency to involve abstract words, logical reasoning, broader topics, and future outlooks. We find that abstract thinking improves analysts’ forecast accuracy and recommendation informativeness. Consistent with abstract thinking featuring identifying central characteristics and comprehending intangible things, ATI has stronger effects for firms with fundamentals co-moving more with peers and less tangible information. Additional analyses suggest that ATI captures analysts’ cognitive traits rather than …


Housing Fever In Australia 2020-23: Insights From An Econometric Thermometer, Shuping Shi, Peter C. B. Phillips Sep 2023

Housing Fever In Australia 2020-23: Insights From An Econometric Thermometer, Shuping Shi, Peter C. B. Phillips

Research Collection School Of Economics

Australian housing markets experienced widespread and, in some cases, extraordinary growth in prices between 2020 and 2023. Using recently developed methodology that accounts for fundamental economic drivers, we assess the existence and degree of speculative behaviour, as well as the timing of exuberance and downturns in these markets. Our findings indicate that speculative behaviour was indeed present in six of the eight capital cities at some time over the period studied. The sequence of events in this nation-wide housing bubble began in the Brisbane market and concluded in Melbourne, Canberra, and Hobart following the interest rate rise implemented by the …


Self-Financing, Parental Transfer, And College Education, Jungho Lee, Sunha Myong Sep 2023

Self-Financing, Parental Transfer, And College Education, Jungho Lee, Sunha Myong

Research Collection School Of Economics

We show that financial constraints can affect the human capital accumulation of college students by influencing students’ labor supply. We document that many college students work a substantial number of hours at low-skill jobs, and students who have fewer financial resources (in particular, parental transfer) tend to work more. We develop a model that incorporates college students’ labor supply and its interaction with parental transfer in the presence of financial constraints. By estimating the model, we quantify the trade-off between self-financing and human capital accumulation and discuss the implications of a wage subsidy policy.