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Articles 1 - 30 of 105
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Childlessness And Sibling Positioning In Upward Intergenerational Support: Insights From Singapore, Dahye Kim, Christine Ho, Bussarawan Teerawichitchainan
Childlessness And Sibling Positioning In Upward Intergenerational Support: Insights From Singapore, Dahye Kim, Christine Ho, Bussarawan Teerawichitchainan
Research Collection School Of Economics
Objective:This brief report aims to explore the role of child-lessness and its interaction with sibling positioning (i.e., birthorder and gender) in upward intergenerational supportwithin the context of Asian familial and patrilineal values.Background:Despite the increasing rates of childlessnessin Asia, little is known about how childless individualsdeviate from or adhere to the patrilineal gendered prac-tices of supporting their older parents. Singapore, a rapidlyaging nation that emphasises Confucian familism valuesand patrilineal practices in guiding its welfare policies, pro-vides an ideal setting for this research investigation.\Method:We analysed a sample of 475 Singaporeans aged50 and above with at least one living parent from a recentnationwide …
Is Democracy Good For Growth? | Development At Political Transition Time Matters, Di Sima, Fali Huang
Is Democracy Good For Growth? | Development At Political Transition Time Matters, Di Sima, Fali Huang
Research Collection School Of Economics
Is democracy a better political regime for economic prosperity than autocracy? This paper shows that the answer depends on the initial economic development level during the democratic transition when the foundation of institutions was laid. Democracy facilitates growth only in countries that already have adequate development at transition time. These countries are more likely to create and sustain growth-enhancing institutions than others. Without appropriate development, democracy does not improve growth; this applies to about 40% of the third-wave democratized countries. These results are based on a sample of 153 countries in 1960–2010 and robust to various specifications and endogeneity issues.
Is Democracy Good For Growth? Development At Political Transition Time Matters, Di Sima, Fali Huang
Is Democracy Good For Growth? Development At Political Transition Time Matters, Di Sima, Fali Huang
Research Collection School Of Economics
Is democracy a better political regime for economic prosperity than autocracy? This paper shows that the answer depends on the initial economic development level during the democratic transition when the foundation of institutions was laid. Democracy facilitates growth only in countries that already have adequate development at transition time. These countries are more likely to create and sustain growth-enhancing institutions than others. Without appropriate development, democracy does not improve growth; this applies to about 40% of the third-wave democratized countries. These results are based on a sample of 153 countries in 1960–2010 and robust to various specifications and endogeneity issues.
Disentangling The Effects Of Gatt/Wto On Variable And Fixed Trade Costs: Trade Status, Trade Margins, And Export Sales Distribution, Pao-Li Chang, Renjing Chen, Wei Jin
Disentangling The Effects Of Gatt/Wto On Variable And Fixed Trade Costs: Trade Status, Trade Margins, And Export Sales Distribution, Pao-Li Chang, Renjing Chen, Wei Jin
Research Collection School Of Economics
In this paper, we develop an estimation procedure to identify the partial (direct) effects of the GATT/WTO membership on the variable and the fixed trade cost, re-spectively. This extends the techniques of Anderson and Van Wincoop (2003) on the structural relationship of multilateral resistance terms and of Helpman, Melitz and Rubinstein (2008) on the structural modelling of trade incidence. We then develop a general equilibrium framework (that allows the presence of zero trade) to simulate the impact of variable, fixed, and total trade cost changes on the firm-level trade structure (including bilateral export productivity cutoff, weighted/unweighted extensive margin of export, …
The Gatt/Wto Welfare Effects: 1950–2015, Pao-Li Chang, Wei Jin, Kefang Yao
The Gatt/Wto Welfare Effects: 1950–2015, Pao-Li Chang, Wei Jin, Kefang Yao
Research Collection School Of Economics
This paper evaluates the welfare effects of GATT/WTO-induced reductions in tariffs, vari-able and fixed trade costs, based on identified direct effects of membership indicators on trade flows via nonparametric matching estimations. The identification does not require the use of tariff data, which permits a comprehensive evaluation of the welfare impact of GATT/WTO for a long panel since its inception (1950–2015) of as many as 180 economies. The results indicate substantial (but highly dispersed) welfare gains across members of different development stages and increasing welfare losses of nonmembers in later decades by staying outside the system. An extensive set of robustness …
Bank, Stock Market Efficiency And Economic Growth: Panel Data Evidence From Asean-5, Asia-5 And Oecd-7 Countries, Swee Liang Tan
Bank, Stock Market Efficiency And Economic Growth: Panel Data Evidence From Asean-5, Asia-5 And Oecd-7 Countries, Swee Liang Tan
Research Collection School Of Economics
This paper estimates bank and stock market efficiency associations with real per capita GDP growth by examining panel-data across three different regions using Beck-Katz Panel-Corrected Standard Errors (PCSE) regression. It allows heteroskedastic and/or contemporaneously correlated disturbances across panels, with to specify a common first-order autocorrelation within the panel. The results suggest efficiency effects on growth is not unambiguous. The results suggest a threshold beyond which increase in bank overhead cost hurts economic growth, for developing countries. Likewise, there is a threshold beyond which increase in stock market turnover ratio hurts economic growth, for developed countries. One policy implication of the …
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 …
Economic Forecasting In An Epidemic: A Break From The Past?, Hwee Kwan Chow, Keen Meng Choy
Economic Forecasting In An Epidemic: A Break From The Past?, Hwee Kwan Chow, Keen Meng Choy
Research Collection School Of Economics
This paper aims to investigate whether the predictive ability and behaviour of professional forecasters are different during the Covid-19 epidemic as compared with the global financial crisis of 2008 and normal times. To this end, we utilise a survey of professional forecasters in Singapore collated by the central bank to analyse the forecasting record for GDP growth and CPI inflation. We first examine the point forecasts to document the extent of forecast failure in the pandemic crisis and test for behavioural explanations of the possible sources of forecast errors such as leader following and herding behaviour. Using percentile-based summary measures …
What, Why And How Financial Development Matters: Evidence Of Asean-5, Asia-5 And Oecd-7 Economies, Swee Liang Tan
What, Why And How Financial Development Matters: Evidence Of Asean-5, Asia-5 And Oecd-7 Economies, Swee Liang Tan
Research Collection School Of Economics
This paper analysed the association between bank and capital markets financial development with income per capita in three regions; ASEAN-5 economies (Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia), Asia-5 (Japan, China, Hong Kong SAR, South Korea and India) and OECD-7 (Australia, Canada, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, UK and US) covering the period from 2000 to 2017 using panel data analysis. Fixed effect regression models with Driscoll-Kraay standard errors to account for the problem of heteroskedastic and autocorrelated error structure are used. What ASEAN-5 can learn from Asia-5 and OECD-7 experience is that bank size does matter for Asia-5 and OECD-7 despite digital disruptions …
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 …
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" …
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 …
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 and by the coastal-inland divide. We find a striking contrast in the migration patterns between years 2005 and 2015; rural people tended to move more to the coastal urban region in 2005, but more to the inland urban region in 2015. We calibrate a spatial quantitative model to the world economy in both years with China being divided into the rural, coastal urban, …
Mandarins Make Markets: Leadership Rotations And Inter-Provincial Trade In China, Junyan Jiang, Yuan Mei
Mandarins Make Markets: Leadership Rotations And Inter-Provincial Trade In China, Junyan Jiang, Yuan Mei
Research Collection School Of Economics
The careers of many public officials span multiple localities, yet the economic effects of their inter-regional movements are not well understood. This paper focuses on the rotation of provincial leaders in China and studies its impact on regional economic integration. Estimation results using the gravity framework indicate that when a provincial leader is appointed as the party secretary of a new province, the trade volume from the new province to the old province increases, but not vice versa. Additional analyses using two novel datasets that capture the intensity of inter-provincial socioeconomic activities in China corroborate this finding. We then construct …
Why Do Businesses Grow Faster In Urban Areas Than In Rural Areas?, Lee, Jungho, Jianhuan Xu
Why Do Businesses Grow Faster In Urban Areas Than In Rural Areas?, Lee, Jungho, Jianhuan Xu
Research Collection School Of Economics
We document that growth of business earnings is mostly observed among young firmsin metro areas. Three explanations are considered: metro areas attract more-productiveentrepreneurs, and reaching the optimal size takes time due to borrowing constraints;metro areas provide better learning opportunities; and high operating costs in metroareas allow only the productive firms to survive. We use a firm-dynamics model with alocation choice to quantify the extent to which the three theories explain the data. Wefind the first two theories largely explain the high growth among metro, young firms. Ourmodel also suggests the distortion in entrepreneurs’ location choice can induce substantialwelfare loss.
Common Power Laws For Cities And Spatial Fractal Structures, Tomoya Mori, Tony E. Smith, Wen-Tai Hsu
Common Power Laws For Cities And Spatial Fractal Structures, Tomoya Mori, Tony E. Smith, Wen-Tai Hsu
Research Collection School Of Economics
City-size distributions are known to be well approximated by power laws across a wide range of countries. But such distributions are also meaningful at other spatial scales, such as within certain regions of a country. Using data from China, France, Germany, India, Japan, and the United States, we first document that large cities are significantly more spaced out than would be expected by chance alone. We next construct spatial hierarchies for countries by first partitioning geographic space using a given number of their largest cities as cell centers and then continuing this partitioning procedure within each cell recursively. We find …
Innovation, Growth, And Dynamic Gains From Trade, Wen-Tai Hsu, Raymond G. Riezman, Ping Wang
Innovation, Growth, And Dynamic Gains From Trade, Wen-Tai Hsu, Raymond G. Riezman, Ping Wang
Research Collection School Of Economics
How large are the welfare gains from trade? Would such gains be significantly amplified in the long run when productivity is endogenously enhanced? To address these questions, we focus on the dynamic effect of trade, in particular, how trade affects the incentives for technological advancement. We construct an innovation-based endogenous growth model of North-South trade. There are two types of innovation: one by the North to upgrade the general purpose technology (GPT) and another by all countries to advance entrepreneurial knowledge for developing differentiated products. We find sizable welfare gains from trade, about 5.3% when compared to autarky. The gains …
Does India's Growth Matter? Evidence From The Saarc Nations, Rohan Ray, Cledwyn Fernandez
Does India's Growth Matter? Evidence From The Saarc Nations, Rohan Ray, Cledwyn Fernandez
Research Collection School Of Economics
The study estimates the extent of spillover effects that India's real per capita gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate has on the growth rates of other countries in the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) region for the period 2003–2016. It also identifies whether the conventional trade channel is the means through which growth is transmitted from India to her neighboring countries. Using a random effects model, we conclude that on average, a 1 percentage point increase in India's real per capita GDP growth rate results in 0.46 percentage point increase in the per capita GDP growth rates of …
Illusion Of Gender Parity In Education: Intrahousehold Resource Allocation In Bangladesh, Sijia Xu, Abu S. Shonchoy, Tomoki Fujii
Illusion Of Gender Parity In Education: Intrahousehold Resource Allocation In Bangladesh, Sijia Xu, Abu S. Shonchoy, Tomoki Fujii
Research Collection School Of Economics
A target in the Millennium Development Goals—gender parity in all levels of education—is widely considered to have been attained. However, measuring gender parity only through school enrollment is misleading, as girls may lag behind boys in other educational measures. We investigate this with four rounds of surveys from Bangladesh by decomposing households’ education decisions into enrollment, education expenditure, and share of the education expenditure allocated for the quality of education like private tutoring. We find a strong profemale bias in school enrollment but promale bias in the other two decisions. This contradirectional gender bias is unique to Bangladesh and partly …
Innovation, Firm Size Distribution, And Gains From Trade, Yi-Fan Chen, Wen-Tai Hsu, Shin-Kun Peng
Innovation, Firm Size Distribution, And Gains From Trade, Yi-Fan Chen, Wen-Tai Hsu, Shin-Kun Peng
Research Collection School Of Economics
We study a trade model with monopolistic competition a la Melitz (2003) that is standard except that firm heterogeneity is endogenously determined by firms innovating to enhance their productivities. We show that the equilibrium productivity and firm-size distributions exhibit power-law tails under rather general conditions on demand and technology. In particular, the emergence of the power laws is essentially independent of the underlying primitive heterogeneity among firms. We investigate the model’s welfare implications, and conduct a quantitative analysis of welfare gains from trade. We find that, conditional on the same trade elasticity and values of the common parameters, our model …
Dynamic Poverty Decomposition Analysis: An Application To The Philippines, Tomoki Fujii
Dynamic Poverty Decomposition Analysis: An Application To The Philippines, Tomoki Fujii
Research Collection School Of Economics
In this paper, we propose a new method of poverty decomposition. Our method remedies the shortcomings of existing methods and has some desirable properties such as time-revision consistency and subperiod additivity. It integrates the existing methods of growth-redistribution decomposition and sector based decomposition, because it allows us to decompose poverty change into growth and redistribution components for each group (e.g., regions or sectors) in the economy. We extend out method to have six components and provide empirical application to the Philippines for the period of 1985 to 2009.
Growing Through The Merger And Acquisition, Jianhuan Xu
Growing Through The Merger And Acquisition, Jianhuan Xu
Research Collection School Of Economics
The paper studies with an endogenous growth model how the merger and acquisition (M&A) affects the aggregate growth rate. We model the M&A as a capital reallocation process, which can increase both productivity and growth rates of firms. The model is tractable and greatly consistent with patterns observed in the M&A at the micro level. Matching our model to the data, we find that prohibiting the M&A would lead to the reduction of the aggregate growth rate of US economy by 0.1% and the reduction of the aggregate TFP by 5%.
Growing Through The Merger And Acquisition, Jianhuan Xu
Growing Through The Merger And Acquisition, Jianhuan Xu
Research Collection School Of Economics
The paper studies with an endogenous growth model how the merger and acquisition (M&A) affects the aggregate growth rate. We model the M&A as a capital reallocation process, which can increase both productivity and growth rates of firms. The model is tractable and greatly consistent with patterns observed in the M&A at the micro level. Matching our model to the data, we find that prohibiting the M&A would lead to the reduction of the aggregate growth rate of US economy by 0.1% and the reduction of the aggregate TFP by 5%.
Firm Boundaries And Financing With Opportunistic Stakeholder Behaviour, Madhav S. Aney, Elie Appelbaum, Sanjay Banerji
Firm Boundaries And Financing With Opportunistic Stakeholder Behaviour, Madhav S. Aney, Elie Appelbaum, Sanjay Banerji
Research Collection School Of Economics
We explore the impact of strategic behaviour between three major stakeholders, namelyequity holders, debt holders, and a supplier of a critical input, on the choice of a firm’s capitalstructure and its organisational design, determining in-house production versus outsourcing theprocurement of the critical input. We show that an opportunistic coalition of the supplierand debt holders can trigger strategic bankruptcy even when the firm is solvent. Equity holdersrespond to this by either eliminating the supplier by producing the input in-house, or by reducingthe exposure to debt by funding the firm’s capital requirement through equity. Both responsescreate inefficiency since production of the input …
Local And Global Sd-Strategy-Proofness Of Ordinal Mechanisms On Block-Connected Domains, Peng Liu
Local And Global Sd-Strategy-Proofness Of Ordinal Mechanisms On Block-Connected Domains, Peng Liu
Research Collection School Of Economics
The adjacency by Monjardet (2009) is weakened to a flip between two adjacently ranked blocks and called block-adjacency. The connectedness defined accordingly, blockconnectedness, covers some interesting unconnected domains. An ordinal mechanism on a block-connected domain is block-adjacent sd-strategy-proof if reporting the true preference always leads to a lottery that stochastically dominates the lottery delivered by reporting any preference block-adjacent to the sincere one.A condition on a block-connected domain called path-nestedness is proposed and shown sufficient for the equivalence between sd-strategy-proofness and block-adjacent sd-strategy-proofness. The sequentially dichotomous domain by Liu (2017) is an application. In addition, we systematically search for the …
Invitation Strategy For Cutting Edge Industries Through Mncs And Global Talents: The Case Of Singapore, Kim Song Tan
Invitation Strategy For Cutting Edge Industries Through Mncs And Global Talents: The Case Of Singapore, Kim Song Tan
Research Collection School Of Economics
Singapore presents an interesting case of how a country achieves dynamic economic development and innovation through the "invitation" strategy of a business hub. Despite being a small city-state with limited domestic market size and no meaningful hinterland or natural resources to speak of, Singapore has managed to transform its economy dramatically over the past 50 years by leveraging the strengths of other economies. Specifically, it has been able to attract (or "invite") various types of productive resources, including foreign capital, foreign technology and foreign workers (both skilled and unskilled) to make up for what it lacks. This has helped Singapore …
New Skills At Work: Managing Skills Challenges In Asean-5, Kim Song Tan, James T. H. Tang
New Skills At Work: Managing Skills Challenges In Asean-5, Kim Song Tan, James T. H. Tang
Research Collection School Of Economics
The dynamic economies of Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines (ASEAN-5) boasts a growth rate of close to 5% a year despite the sluggish global economy. However, whether ASEAN-5 can grow to be significant players in the global economy will depend critically on their abilities to train workers with relevant job skills required by growth-driving industries. This challenge requires governments and employers to work together and develop coherent policies and targeted incentive structures for workers to acquire general and job-specific skills. The report Managing Skills Challenges in ASEAN-5 provides insights and recommendations on how the ASEAN-5 countries can respond …
Uniform Consistency Of Nonstationary Kernel-Weighted Sample Covariances For Nonparametric Regression, Degui Li, Peter C. B. Phillips, Jiti Gao
Uniform Consistency Of Nonstationary Kernel-Weighted Sample Covariances For Nonparametric Regression, Degui Li, Peter C. B. Phillips, Jiti Gao
Research Collection School Of Economics
We obtain uniform consistency results for kernel-weighted sample covariances in a nonstationary multiple regression framework that allows for both fixed design and random design coefficient variation. In the fixed design case these nonparametric sample covariances have different uniform asymptotic rates depending on direction, a result that differs fundamentally from the random design and stationary cases. The uniform asymptotic rates derived exceed the corresponding rates in the stationary case and confirm the existence of uniform super-consistency. The modelling framework and convergence rates allow for endogeneity and thus broaden the practical econometric import of these results. As a specific application, we establish …
Investment-Specific Technical Change And Growth Around The World, Roberto M. Samaniego, Juliana Yu Sun
Investment-Specific Technical Change And Growth Around The World, Roberto M. Samaniego, Juliana Yu Sun
Research Collection School Of Economics
Investment-specific technical change (ISTC) contributes little to growth in most countries. This is because in many countries the investment process does not become notably more efficient over time. Still, cross-country differences in the contribution of ISTC to growth are significant. Differences in the rate of ISTC appear due to cross-country variation in the use of R&D intensive capital goods, as well as trade costs.