Digital Commons Network^™

Enhancing Asean-Eu Relations Through Cultural Cooperation: Realities And Unexplored Potential, David Ocon, Lluís Bonet

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Multilateral cultural exchanges are important to foster mutual understanding and address global challenges. With data gathered through historical analysis, targeted surveys, and expert interviews, the study provides targeted recommendations for policymakers in ASEAN and the EU in developing sustainable cultural cooperation at the multilateral level. How can culture serve as a bridge between Southeast Asian and European societies? How can multilateral cultural cooperation strengthen ASEAN-EU ties and complement existing bilateral cultural cooperation? How can culture support other forms of cooperation?

Commentary: No One Wants An Asian Nato, Except Japan’S New Pm Ishiba, Benjamin Ho, William A. Callahan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In a joint commentary, SMU Professor of Political Science William A Callahan discussed the reluctance of Southeast Asian nations, excluding Japan under its new Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, to embrace a collective defense system aimed at countering China. They explained why Mr Ishiba's proposal for an Asian North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would benefit Japan, how it works in Europe, and why it is unlikely to gain strong support in Southeast Asia.

How “Ceremonial Openness” Prevents Organizational Change : An Analysis Of Corporate Earnings Calls In The Oil And Gas Industry, 2007–2020, Isak Ladegaard, Annika Marie Rieger

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Incumbent firms resist change as they have much to lose if things go wrong. But inertia can also be costly, particularly in times of crisis. In a world on fire, does corporate transparency foster engagement with external threats to future organizational success? To answer this question, we conduct a mixed-methods analysis of 887 public earnings-calls meetings between executives, investors, and outside analysts from 24 major oil and gas companies in 2007-2020, a period marked by extreme weather events and increased popular and political pressure to slow global warming. We find that formal rituals that promote openness and debate to protect …

Nuanced Relationships Between Indices Of Smartphone Use And Psychological Distress: Distinguishing Problematic Smartphone Use, Phone Checking, And Screen Time, Yue Qi Germaine Tng, Hwajin Yang

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Recent theoretical and empirical accounts maintain that different indices of smartphone use—including problematic smartphone use, phone-checking, and screen time—tap distinct facets of smartphone use. This highlights the importance of disentangling potentially unique associations between facets of smartphone use and psychological distress outcomes. The present study examined fine-grained relationships between several smartphone-use indices and facets of psychological distress. Further, we probed whether sex modulated the relationships between smartphone-mediated behaviours and distress outcomes. Using structural equation modelling, we analysed data from young adults (N = 364) and evaluated the associations of smartphone-related behaviours—problematic use, phone checking, and overall screen time—with depression, anxiety, …

Essays On Corporate Finance, Su Hee Yun

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Chapter 1. The impact of ESG disasters on Green and Brown firms

I investigate the effect of a firm’s prior ESG reputation on the market impact of ESG incidents. I find that firms with a better ESG reputation, i.e., higher ESG ratings, experience less negative stock-market reactions and analysts' forecast revisions compared to firms with a poorer ESG reputation. But managers of Greener firms, when producing earnings guidance, do not forecast a lower impact of these incidents on future earnings. Similarly, actual decreases in future earnings following these incidents are not significantly different between Green and Brown firms. Altogether, the …

The Impact Of Instrumental Attribution In Ai-Enabled Monitoring On Counterproductive Work Behavior, Qiang Zhang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

AI-enabled monitoring tools are theoretically expected to suppress unethical employee behavior. However, in practice, employees may perceive such monitoring as being driven by leaders' instrumental motives, primarily focused on personal performance evaluation and self-interest. This perception can foster feelings of job insecurity and moral disengagement, ultimately leading to counterproductive work behavior (CWB), which includes unethical employee behavior and turnover. These outcomes may undermine the intended effectiveness of AI-enabled monitoring tools. This study aims to explore the impact of Instrumental Attribution in AIenabled Monitoring (IAAIM) on CWB, specifically focusing on unethical employee behavior and turnover, through both theoretical and empirical lenses. …

(Trade) War And Peace: How To Impose International Trade Sanctions, Gustavo De Souza, Naiyuan Hu, Haishi Li, Yuan Mei

Research Collection School Of Economics

What is the most cost-efficient way to impose trade sanctions against Russia? We build a quantitative model of international trade with input–output connections. Sanctioning countries choose import tariffs to simultaneously maximize their income and minimize Russia's income, with different weights placed on these objectives. We find, first, that for countries with low willingness to pay for sanctions against Russia, the most cost-efficient sanction is an approximately 20% tariff on all Russian products. Second, if countries are willing to pay at least US$0.70 for each US$1 drop in Russian welfare, an embargo on Russia's mining and energy products is the most …

Family Size And Child Migration: Do Daughters Face Greater Trade-Offs Than Sons?, Christine Ho, Yutao Wang, Sharon Xuejing Zuo

Research Collection School Of Economics

We show that, conditional on family size, rural boys and girls are equally likely to migrate with parents in China. Nevertheless, daughters’ migration may still be compromised because they tend to have more siblings in societies with strong son preference, and larger families are more likely to leave all children behind. We find that a one unit increase in sibship size decreases the probability that a daughter migrates by 12.5 percentage points—with stronger effects when migration restrictions are more stringent—but has negligible effects on sons. The results suggest that gender-neutral migration constraints may generate gendered family size trade-offs.

Associative Networks In Decision Making, Jiangtao Li, Rui Tang, Mu Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

We present a model of associative networks that captures how a decision maker expands her consideration set through mental associations between alternatives. This model serves as a tool to understand the influence of association on decision making. As a proof of concept, we characterize this model within a random attention framework and demonstrate that all the relevant parameters are uniquely identifiable. Notably, in a novel choice domain where not all observable alternatives are available, the presence of unavailable alternatives can affect the choice frequencies of other alternatives through association.

Financial Crises, Bailouts And Monetary Policy In Open Economies, Yang Jiao

Research Collection School Of Economics

I jointly study the optimal bailout policy and monetary policy in open economies that borrow in foreign currency from international lenders. A policy dilemma emerges during financial crises. Policymakers trade off the benefit of more bailouts alleviating firms’ financial constraints against the cost of larger currency devaluation, which tightens firms’ financial constraints. I embed the optimal bailout in an otherwise standard “sudden stop” model with nominal rigidities. The model sheds light on the role of bailouts and currency mismatch in driving the exchange rate dynamics, firms’ balance sheets and economic recovery. Quantitatively, the model matches key business cycle moments. A …

Quantifying Delay Propagation In Airline Networks, Liyu Dou, Jakub Kastl, John Lazarev

Research Collection School Of Economics

We develop a framework for quantifying delay propagation in airline networks by integrating structural modeling and machine learning methods to estimate causal effects. Using a comprehensive dataset on actual delays and a model-selection algorithm (elastic net), we estimate a weighted directed graph of delay propagation for each major airline in the United States and establish conditions under which the propagation coefficients are causal. These estimates enable a decomposition of airline performance into "luck" and "ability." Our findings indicate that luck accounts for approximately 38% of the performance difference between Delta and American Airlines in our data. Additionally, we leverage these …

Recruitment Of Cxcr4+Type 1 Innate Lymphoid Cells Distinguishes Sarcoidosis From Other Skin Granulomatous Diseases, S. Sati, J. Huang, A.E. Kersh, P. Jones, O. Ahart, C. Murphy, S.M. Prouty, M.L. Hedberg, V. Jain, S.G. Gregory, Leung, Denis H. Y., J.T. Seykora, M. Rosenbach, T.H. Leung

Research Collection School Of Economics

Sarcoidosis is a multiorgan granulomatous disease that lacks diagnostic biomarkers and targeted treatments. Using blood and skin from patients with sarcoid and non-sarcoid skin granulomas, we discovered that skin granulomas from different diseases exhibit unique immune cell recruitment and molecular signatures. Sarcoid skin granulomas were specifically enriched for type 1 innate lymphoid cells (ILC1s) and B cells and exhibited molecular programs associated with formation of mature tertiary lymphoid structures (TLSs), including increased CXCL12/CXCR4 signaling. Lung sarcoidosis granulomas also displayed similar immune cell recruitment. Thus, granuloma formation was not a generic molecular response. In addition to tissue-specific effects, patients with sarcoidosis …

Enhancing Stance Classification On Social Media Using Quantified Moral Foundations, Hong Zhang, Quoc-Nam Nguyen, Prasanta Bhattacharya, Wei Gao, Liang Ze Wong, Brandon Siyuan Loh, Joseph J. P. Simons, Jisun An

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This study enhances stance detection on social media by incorporating deeper psychological attributes, specifically individuals’ moral foundations. These theoretically-derived dimensions aim to provide an interpretable profile of an individual’s moral concerns which, in recent work, has been linked to behaviour in a range of domains including society, politics, health, and the environment. In this paper, we investigate how moral foundation dimensions can contribute to detecting an individual’s stance on a given target. Specifically, we incorporate moral foundation features extracted from text, along with semantic features, to classify stances at both message-and user-levels using traditional machine learning and Large Language Models …

Ai Coders Are Among Us : Rethinking Programming Language Grammar Towards Efficient Code Generation, Sun Zhensu, Du Xiaoning, Yang Zhou, Li Li, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Artificial Intelligence (AI) models have emerged as another important audience for programming languages alongside humans and machines, as we enter the era of large language models (LLMs). LLMs can now perform well in coding competitions and even write programs like developers to solve various tasks, including mathematical problems. However, the grammar and layout of current programs are designed to cater the needs of human developers -- with many grammar tokens and formatting tokens being used to make the code easier for humans to read. While this is helpful, such a design adds unnecessary computational work for LLMs, as each token …

Several Us Trade ‘Deals’ Later, There Are Still More Questions Than Answers, Locknie Hsu

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

For ASEAN countries, the immediate question is not whether United States President Donald Trump’s tariffs are legal but how to get greater clarity about trade agreements, says SMU law professor Locknie Hsu.

Certified Continual Learning For Neural Network Regression, Hong Long Pham, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

On the one hand, there has been considerable progress on neural network verification in recent years, which makes certifying neural networks a possibility. On the other hand, neural network in practice are often re-trained over time to cope with new data distribution or for solving different tasks (a.k.a. continual learning). Once re-trained, the verified correctness of the neural network is likely broken, particularly in the presence of the phenomenon known as catastrophic forgetting. In this work, we propose an approach called certified continual learning which improves existing continual learning methods by preserving, as long as possible, the established correctness properties …

Low/No-Code And Traditional Code Integration In Digital Banking, Kim Siang Yeo, Alan @ Ali Madjelisi Megargel

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper seeks to combine the merits of Low/No-Code Programming (LNCP) with Traditional Programming (TP) systems to achieve true “agility” when creating banking infrastructure. While it is easy to fall prey to Shiny Object Syndrome in today’s dynamic and fast-paced banking technology world, it is not easy to pick out the right technology for today and tomorrow’s financial industry. Instead, LNCPs allow us to hedge all bets by equally lowering the technical entry barriers for each technology. The added integration of TP, when needed, also rounds out the faults related to sole LNCP use and provides any bank with a …

Recruitment Of Cxcr4+ Type 1 Innate Lymphoid Cells Distinguishes Sarcoidosis From Other Skin Granulomatous Diseases, Satish Sati, Jianhe Huang, Anna E. Kersh, Parker Jones, Olivia Ahart, Christina Murphy, Stephen M. Prouty, Matthew L. Hedberg, Vaibhav Jain, Simon G. Gregory, Leung, Denis H. Y., John T. Seykora, Misha Rosenbach, Thomas H. Leung

Research Collection School Of Economics

Sarcoidosis is a multiorgan granulomatous disease that lacks diagnostic biomarkers and targeted treatments. Using blood and skin from patients with sarcoid and non-sarcoid skin granulomas, we discovered that skin granulomas from different diseases exhibit unique immune cell recruitment and molecular signatures. Sarcoid skin granulomas were specifically enriched for type 1 innate lymphoid cells (ILC1s) and B cells and exhibited molecular programs associated with formation of mature tertiary lymphoid structures (TLSs), including increased CXCL12/CXCR4 signaling. Lung sarcoidosis granulomas also displayed similar immune cell recruitment. Thus, granuloma formation was not a generic molecular response. In addition to tissue-specific effects, patients with sarcoidosis …

The Joint Statement On E-Commerce: Is This Glass Half Empty Or Half Full?, Henry S. Gao

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

On July 26, 2024, participants in the Joint Statement Initiative (JSI) on E-commerce released the “stabilised text” of the Agreement on Electronic Commerce (“the agreement”) after a marathon negotiation spanning more than five years. The process leading up to what is the first global agreement on e-commerce has been rife with surprises from beginning to end. The biggest initial surprise was China’s last-minute decision to join when the negotiation was launched in January 2019: China wanted to shape the rules from the inside and avoid the cold shoulder it faced when trying to join the Trade in Services Agreement negotiations …

A Regulatory Focus Theory Perspective On The Dynamics Between Action And Power, Shereen Fatimah, Hun Whee Lee, Lance D.. Ferris, Henry R. Young

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Building on the strong consensus that the experience of power motivates individuals to take action, prior research postulates a positively reinforcing cycle wherein taking action leads to power, which in turn leads to subsequent actions. Applying regulatory focus theory, we differentiate between promotion-oriented and prevention-oriented actions to develop a within-person theory of when and why promotion-oriented and prevention-oriented actions should relate to power, and vice-versa. Across two studies, we find that when employees engaged in promotive voice behaviors, they were more likely to experience a sense of power; this effect was amplified for employees with trait promotion focus. When employees …

Contract Law, Chee Ho Tham, Tan Zhong Xing

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

No abstract provided.

Territorialising The Cloud Or Clouding The Territory? Volumetric Vulnerabilities And The Militarised Conjunctures Of Singapore's Smart City-State, Orlando Woods, Tim Bunnell, Lily Kong

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

This article explores how the volumetric characteristics of cloud computing can create new expressions of territoriality, which in turn can reveal new axes of vulnerability and threat. Whilst recent work in political geography has sought to “locate” the cloud through analyses of data centre geographies and data-driven processes of smart urbanism, we look beyond the material plane and consider the amorphous territorialities of voluminous data instead. As much as these data are acted on by the legal-regulatory mechanics of the state in a bid to territorialise them, so too do these data volumes serve to cloud, and thus obscure, territory. …

A Comparison Of Four Approaches To Modeling Information Insufficiency, Pengya Ai, Sonny Rosenthal

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Information insufficiency, or the disparity between the level of knowledge needed to confidently judge an issue and the perceived level of current knowledge, is a key motivator of risk information seeking and processing. This study compared 4 approaches to modeling information insufficiency within the planned risk information seeking model. These approaches included the raw difference score, regression approach, partial variance score, and direct measure. Statistical modeling used data from large samples in Singapore (n = 2,124) and the United States (n = 2,125). The results of ordinary least squares regression analysis and structural equation modeling pointed to several issues. First, …

Urban Heat And Within-City Residential Sorting, Stefan Borsky, Eric Fesselmeyer, Lennart Vogelsand

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

This study presents new causal evidence on how urban heat contributes to sorting within a city. We estimate a discrete choice residential sorting model that includes census-tract fixed effects and controls for open space and green coverage to analyze how differences in urban heat at the census-tract level influence the location choices of New York City homeowners given their race, ethnicity, and income. Our results show clear patterns of residential sorting, with whites and high-income households outcompeting other racial/ethnic groups and low-income households for housing in cooler neighborhoods. Our counterfactual exercise, inspired by Cool Neighborhoods NYC, reveals that heat-mitigation policies …

The Sacred Dimensions Of The Bri's Infrastructural Commons, Orlando Woods, David A. Palmer

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Whilst the idea of infrastructure has animated scholarship for the past twenty years at least, there remains a need for more expansive understandings of what infrastructure is, and what it can be. The speed, scale and material disruptiveness with which many of the infrastructural megaprojects that constitute China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) have been developed both underpin and validate this need. Whilst the effects of the BRI are both manifold and diffuse, all of them expose situations of infrastructural complexity. Rather than considering the BRI simply as the imposition of new material infrastructures on a landscape, we posit the …

Toward Equitable Micromobility: Lessons From Austin E-Scooter Sharing Program, Shunhua Bai, Junfeng Jiao

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

This study revealed the inequitable societal impacts of E-scooters on disadvantaged populations. The study conducted a population distribution analysis to compare the use opportunities and space intrusion burdens of E-scooter sharing on four vulnerable population groups in Austin, Texas. Nearly all minority population experienced fewer E-scooter use opportunities. Ten percent of the minority population waited for a disproportionately longer time before a disturbance could be resolved. Ten percent of the low-income population were in a disadvantaged position in high opportunities and moderate burdens. Twenty percent of the physically disabled population faced more moderate-level burdens. The result did not show significant …

Analyzing Racial Disparities In The United States Homeownership: A Socio-Demographic Study Using Machine Learning, Arya Farahi, Junfeng Jiao

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

While increasing homeownership has been a focal point for policymakers in the United States, the distribution of access to homeownership opportunities across all families within the country has not been equitable. The complex relation between social factors and economic conditions has significantly shaped the journey toward homeownership. Of particular concern is the persistent disparity in homeownership rates among Black households in the United States. Effectively addressing these disparities within urban communities necessitates comprehensive policy interventions and social initiatives. However, the success of such endeavors hinges upon a comprehensive grasp of the underlying causes of these inequalities. Drawing upon machine learning …

Developer Reactions To Protestware In Open Source Software: The Cases Of Color.Js And Es5.Ext, Youmei Fan, Dong Wang, Supatsara Wattanakriengkrai, Hathaichanok Damrongsiri, Christoph Treude, Hideaki Hata, Raula Gaikovina Kula

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

There is growing concern about maintainers self-sabotaging their work in order to take political or economic stances, a practice referred to as “protestware”. Our objective is to understand the discourse around discussions on such an attack, how it is received by the community, and whether developers respond to the attack in a timely manner. We study two notable protestware cases i.e., colors.js and es5-ext. Results indicate that protestware discussions are spread more quickly on the GitHub platform, while security vulnerabilities are faster on social media. By establishing a taxonomy of protestware discussions, we identify posts that express stances and provide …

Unraveling The Dynamics Of Stable And Curious Audiences In Web Systems, Rodrigo Alves, Antoine Ledent, Renato Assunção, Pedro Vaz-De-Melo, Marius Kloft

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose the Burst-Induced Poisson Process (BPoP), a model designed to analyze time series data such as feeds or search queries. BPoP can distinguish between the slowly-varying regular activity of a stable audience and the bursty activity of a curious audience, often seen in viral threads. Our model consists of two hidden, interacting processes: a self-feeding process (SFP) that generates bursty behavior related to viral threads, and a non-homogeneous Poisson process (NHPP) with step function intensity that is influenced by the bursts from the SFP. The NHPP models the normal background behavior, driven solely by the overall popularity of the …

Certified Quantization Strategy Synthesis For Neural Networks, Yedi Zhang, Guangke Chen, Jun Sun, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Quantization plays an important role in deploying neural networks on embedded, real-time systems with limited computing and storage resources (e.g., edge devices). It significantly reduces the model storage cost and improves inference efficiency by using fewer bits to represent the parameters. However, it was recently shown that critical properties may be broken after quantization, such as robustness and backdoor-freeness. In this work, we introduce the first method for synthesizing quantization strategies that verifiably maintain desired properties after quantization, leveraging a key insight that quantization leads to a data distribution shift in each layer. We propose to compute the preimage for …