Digital Commons Network^™

Pierre Bayle's Philosophical Commentary On The Words Of Jesus Christ: Compel Them To Come In, John Kilcullen, Chandran Kukathas

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In this defence of religious toleration, Bayle discusses the words attributed to Jesus Christ in Luke 14:23, “And the Lord said unto the servant, Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be full.” Bayle contends that the word compel cannot mean “force.” From this perspective, he constructs his doctrine of toleration based on the singular importance of conscience. Bayle argues that if the orthodox have the right and duty to persecute, then every sect will persecute since every sect considers itself orthodox. The result will be mutual slaughter, something God …

Religious Processions: Urban Politics And Poetics, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In this paper, I will explore the ways in which processions, by their very visibility, foreground the relationships between the secular and the sacred, while contributing to a construction of identity and community, and simultaneously surfacing fractures therein. Using the example of multireligious yet secular Singapore, I will examine (a) the state's management of religious processions, including the regulation of time and space for such events, as well as regulations over noise production; (b) the tactics of adaptation, negotiation and resistance that participants engage in at an everyday level in response to the state's ideologies, policies, laws and strategies; (c) …

Equity Incentives And Earnings Management, Qiang Cheng, Terry Warfield

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

This paper examines the link between managers' equity incentives—arising from stock-based compensation and stock ownership—and earnings management. We hypothesize that managers with high equity incentives are more likely to sell shares in the future and this motivates these managers to engage in earnings management to increase the value of the shares to be sold. Using stock-based compensation and stock ownership data over the 1993–2000 time period, we document that managers with high equity incentives sell more shares in subsequent periods. As expected, we find that managers with high equity incentives are more likely to report earnings that meet or just …

The Role Of Analysts’ Forecasts In Accounting-Based Valuation: A Critical Evaluation, Qiang Cheng

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

This paper critically evaluates the use of analysts forecasts in accounting-based valuation. Specifically, I assess the usefulness and the limitation of analysts forecasts in predicting future earnings and in explaining the market-to-book ratio, in light of a comprehensive set of 22 explicit information items, including: economic rent proxies, conservative accounting proxies, earnings quality signals, transitory earnings proxies, industry characteristics, and risk and growth proxies. While analysts forecasts capture 45–83% of the information from these sources depending on model specifications, they do not appear to fully incorporate certain information items. In particular, proxies for conservative accounting and transitory earnings are incrementally …

What Determines Residual Income?, Qiang Cheng

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

This paper investigates the determinants of residual income scaled by book value of equity, i.e., abnormal return on equity (ROE), by analyzing the impact of value-creation (economic rents) and value-recording (conservative accounting) processes on abnormal ROE. I rely on economic theories to characterize economic rents and develop an empirical measure—the conservative accounting factor—to capture the effect of conservative accounting. As expected, industry abnormal ROE increases with industry concentration, industry-level barriers to entry, and industry conservative accounting factors. Also as expected, the difference between firm and industry abnormal ROE increases with market share, firm size, firm-level barriers to entry, and firm …

A Hundred Flowers Bloom: The Reemergence Of The Chinese Press In Post-Suharto Indonesia, Chang Yau Hoon

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

No abstract provided.

An Experience Sampling And Cross-Cultural Investigation Of The Relation Between Pleasant And Unpleasant Emotion, Christie N. Scollon, Ed Diener, Shigehiro Oishi, Robert Biswas-Diener

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The present study examined whether the relation between pleasant and unpleasant emotion varies across cultures and level of analysis (i.e., within-person vs. between-person). A total of 386 participants included European Americans, Asian Americans, Japanese, Indian, and Hispanic students. Momentary mood was assessed up to 7 times daily for one week. At the between-persons level, pleasant and unpleasant mood were positively correlated among Asian Americans and Japanese, but were uncorrelated among the other groups. Factor correlations at the within-person level were strongly negative in all cultures, suggesting that pleasant and unpleasant feelings are rarely experienced at the same time. Implications for …

Western Corporate Forms And The Social Origin Of Chinese Diaspora Entrepreneurial Networks, Wai Keung Chung

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

No abstract provided.

Scrutinizing Public Expenditures - Assessing The Performance Of Public Accounts Committees, Rick Stapenhurst, Vinod Sahgal, William Woodley, Riccardo Pelizzo

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

No abstract provided.

Trust (And Social Capital) In Cultural Theory, Marco Verweij

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

No abstract provided.

Partnering For Perfection: An Economics Perspective On B2b Electronic Market Strategic Alliances, Qizhi Dai, Robert J. Kauffman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

New technological innovations have made it possible for new intermediaries to create value in business processes that involve the procurement of manufacturing and services supplies. Associated with these innovations is the emergence of business-to-business (B2B) electronic markets. These act as digital intermediaries that aim to reduce the transaction costs and mitigate the risks inherent in procurement. They improve buyers’ capabilities to search for attractive prices and also serve to increase the liquidity of sellers’ products. In this chapter, the authors explore the evolution of B2B e-market firms in terms of the strategies they employ to “perfect” their value propositions and …

The Micro-Foundations Of Intertemporal Price Discrimination, Winston T. H. Koh

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper investigates the optimality of intertemporal price discrimination for a durable-good monopoly in a model where infinitely-lived households face an intertemporal budget constraint, and consume both durable goods and non-durable goods. We prove that the optimal price of the durable good is not constant, and may decrease or increase over time. Some households may choose to purchase the durable good at a later date, and pay lower or higher prices, since the gain in discounted utility of consuming more of the non-durable good more than compensates for the loss in utility from delaying the consumption of the durable good.

The Creation And Economic Regulation Of Housing Markets: A Comparison Of The Experiences Of Singapore And Korea, Sock-Yong Phang

Research Collection School Of Economics

Privatization, creation of markets and economic regulation are terms that few would immediately associate with the housing sector. Mainstream housing markets in most of the free market economies of the developed world are regarded as competitive markets, with little need for economic regulation of the market. Regulations that attempt to control behavior directly are generally limited to policies relating to rent control, the provision of rental housing or rental allowances for lower income groups, as well as land use regulations and building controls.

The housing sectors of Singapore and Korea are highly unusual in the extent of government involvement and …

Contract Law, Chee Ho Tham, Pearlie Koh, Pey Woan Lee

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The rudimentary principle that a contract is only concluded upon the unconditional acceptance of an offer was applied in Koon Seng Construction Pte Ltd v Siem Seng Hing & Co (Pte) Ltd [2005] SGHC 8, where the alleged contract failed in the absence of an unqualified acceptance.

Future Job Prospects In Singapore, Hian Teck Hoon

Research Collection School Of Economics

What forces have shaped our nation’s employment and remuneration record so far? Where is Singapore’s unemployment rate headed? What should policy-makers do about it? These are the questions tackled in this paper.

Education, Technological Progress And Economic Growth, Winston T. H. Koh, Hing-Man Leung

Research Collection School Of Economics

An important role of education – and the resultant accumulation of human capital – for a less-developed economy is to facilitate technology diffusion in order for it to catch up with developed economies. This paper presents a model linking education, the accumulation of physical capital and technological progress. In the model, investment in education and the accumulation of physical capital are complementary, and intertwine with the technology progress through related effects on technology diffusion and the expansion of the technology frontier. The allocation of effort to education, the optimal savings rate and the technology gap are endogenously determined in the …

Analysis Of Job-Training Effects On Korean Women, Myoung-Jae Lee, S. J. Lee

Research Collection School Of Economics

We analyse job-training effects on Korean women for the period January 1999 to March 2000, using a large data set of size about 52,000. We employ a number of estimation techniques: Weibull MLE and accelerated failure time approach, which are both parametric; Cox partial likelihood estimator, which is semiparametric; and two pair-matching estimators, which are in essence nonparametric. All of these methods gave the common conclusion that job training for Korean women increased their unemployment duration. The trainings were not cost-effective in the sense that they took too much time 'locking in' the trainees during the training span, compared with …

An Analytical Framework Of Science Parks And Technology Districts With An Application To Singapore, Francis Koh, Winston T. H. Koh, Ted Feichin Tschang

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper analyzes the question: What does it take for science parks and technology districts to evolve and grow? We propose an analytical framework to examine the gestation, evolution, and sustainability of science parks and related but broader regional phenomena such as technology districts. The framework comprises three aspects of a science park's development: growth mechanisms, level of technological capabilities, and nature of its integration with national or global markets. The main growth mechanisms we identify are government-led infrastructure provision, agglomeration effects, and continual self-renewal through the creation of new businesses. We apply this framework to analyze Singapore's science park …

Bank Lending And Real Estate In Asia: Market Optimism And Asset Bubbles, Winston T. H. Koh, Roberto S. Mariano, Andrey Pavlov, Sock-Yong Phang, Augustine H. H. Tan, Susan M. Wachter

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper investigates the Asian real estate price run-up and collapse in the 1990s. We identify financial intermediaries’ underpricing of the put option imbedded in non-recourse mortgage loans as a potential cause for the observed price behavior. This underpricing is due to behavioral causes (lender optimism and disaster myopia) and/or rational response of lenders to market incentives (agency conflicts, deposit insurance, or limited liability of bank shareholders). The empirical evidence suggests that underpricing occurred in Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Consequently, these countries experienced a more severe market crash than Hong Kong and Singapore, where underpricing was kept under control by …

Simultaneous Equations In Ordered Discrete Responses With Regressor-Dependent Thresholds, Myoung-Jae Lee, A. Kimhi

Research Collection School Of Economics

The parameters of ordered discrete response (ODR) models are identified only up to a positive scale. In this paper, we examine the identification issue for simultaneous equations with ODR, where the well-known identification problem in simultaneous equations of recovering structural-form parameters from reduced-form parameters is compounded with the ODR identification problem. We allow the thresholds in ODR to be regressor dependent as well as constant; the former is particularly challenging because threshold parameters get mixed with regression parameters, adding one more dimension to the identification problem. We also explore a cross-equation restriction on threshold differences, under which the structural form …

Future Job Prospects In Singapore, Hian Teck Hoon

Research Collection School Of Economics

No abstract provided.

A Bootstrap Test For Conditional Symmetry, Liangjun Su, Sainan Jin

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper proposes a simple consistent non-parametric test of conditional symmetry based on the principle of characteristic functions. The test statistic is shown to be asymptotically normal under the null hypothesis of conditional symmetry and consistent against any conditional asymmetric distributions. We also study the power against local alternatives, propose a bootstrap version of the test, and conduct a small Monte Carlo simulation to evaluate the finite-sample performance of the test.

Ontology-Assisted Mining Of Rdf Documents, Tao Jiang, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Resource description framework (RDF) is becoming a popular encoding language for describing and interchanging metadata of web resources. In this paper, we propose an Apriori-based algorithm for mining association rules (AR) from RDF documents. We treat relations (RDF statements) as items in traditional AR mining to mine associations among relations. The algorithm further makes use of a domain ontology to provide generalization of relations. To obtain compact rule sets, we present a generalized pruning method for removing uninteresting rules. We illustrate a potential usage of AR mining on RDF documents for detecting patterns of terrorist activities. Experiments conducted based on …

Systems Analysis And Design: Should We Be Researching What We Teach?, A. Bajaj, D. Batra, A. Hevner, J. Parsons, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A guiding premise of academic scholarship is that knowledge gained from first-hand research experience is disseminated to students via the classroom. However, that valuable connection is lost when professors are not researching what they teach. In this paper, we explore issues of mismatch between teaching and research in the Information Systems (IS) discipline. Specifically, while systems analysis and design (SA&D) is an integral topic in IS curricula, this topic is the research specialty of few IS professors. This situation is reflected by the low number of research publications in this area; particularly in the leading mainstream IS journals. We characterize …

Robust Temporal Constraint Networks, Hoong Chuin Lau, Thomas Ou, Melvyn Sim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose the Robust Temporal Constraint Network (RTCN) model for simple temporal constraint networks where activity durations are bounded by random variables. The problem is to determine whether such temporal network can be executed with failure probability less than a given 0 ≤ E ≤ 1 for each possible instantiation of the random variables, and if so. how one might find a feasible schedule with each given instantiation. The advantage of our model is that one can vary the value of ∊ to control the level of conservativeness of the solution. We present a computationally tractable and …

Exploring Bit-Difference For Approximate Knn Search In High-Dimensional Databases, Bin Cui, Heng Tao Shen, Jialie Shen, Kian-Lee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we develop a novel index structure to support effcient approximate k-nearest neighbor (KNN) query in high-dimensional databases. In high-dimensional spaces, the computational cost of the distance (e.g., Euclidean distance) between two points contributes a dominant portion of the overall query response time for memory processing. To reduce the distance computation, we first propose a structure (BID) using BIt-Difference to answer approximate KNN query. The BID employs one bit to represent each feature vector of point and the number of bit-difference is used to prune the further points. To facilitate real dataset which is typically skewed, we enhance …

Contract Formation And Mistake In Cyberspace – The Singapore Experience, Andrew B.L. Phang

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The present article analyses the many important issues that are raised by what is probably the first case on Internet mistake – the Singapore High Court decision of Chwee Kin Keong v Digilandmall.com Pte Ltd [2004] 2 SLR 594. In addition to the law of (especially, unilateral) mistake, issues relating to the formation of a contract will be considered (including the law relating to offer and acceptance with regard to both website advertisements as well as electronic mail transactions, and the weakness of (and, hence, need to reform) the doctrine of consideration).

Linear Correlation Discovery In Databases: A Data Mining Approach, Cecil Chua, Roger Hsiang-Li Chiang, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Very little research in knowledge discovery has studied how to incorporate statistical methods to automate linear correlation discovery (LCD). We present an automatic LCD methodology that adopts statistical measurement functions to discover correlations from databases’ attributes. Our methodology automatically pairs attribute groups having potential linear correlations, measures the linear correlation of each pair of attribute groups, and confirms the discovered correlation. The methodology is evaluated in two sets of experiments. The results demonstrate the methodology’s ability to facilitate linear correlation discovery for databases with a large amount of data.

Applying Scenario-Based Design And Claim Analysis To The Design Of A Digital Library Of Geography Examination Resources, Yin-Leng Theng, Dion Hoe-Lian Goh, Ee Peng Lim, Zehua Liu, Ming Yin, Natalie Lee-San Pang, Patricia Bao-Bao Wong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper describes the application of Carroll’s scenario-based design and claims analysis as a means of refinement to the initial design of a digital library of geographical resources (GeogDL) to prepare Singapore students to take a national examination in geography. GeogDL is built on top of G-Portal, a digital library providing services over geospatial and georeferenced Web content. Beyond improving the initial design of GeogDL, a main contribution of the paper is making explicit the use of Carroll’s strong theory-based but undercapitalized scenario-based design and claims analysis that inspired recommendations for the refinement of GeogDL. The paper concludes with an …

Security Of An Ill-Posed Operator Based Scheme For Image Authentication, Yongdong Wu, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This letter analyzes the security of an image authentication scheme which exploits the instability of an ill-posed operator. Since the ill-posed operator produces only a limited number of authentic images regardless of the number of watermarks, an attacker can impersonate an image owner to generate authentic images at a high probability. Our experiments demonstrate that our attack is both practical and effective.