Digital Commons Network^™

Essays On Weak Identification, Dennis Guo Wei Lim

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation presents a comprehensive examination of inference techniques for weak instrumental variable (IV) models, crucial in addressing endogeneity and bias in econometric analyses. Comprising two interconnected chapters, the research explores innovative methodologies to enhance the reliability and robustness of IV regression estimations. Chapter 1 is concerned with maximizing the power of tests in the many weak IVs setting. This is done by introducing a novel approach that considers a linear combination of jackknife Anderson-Rubin (AR), jackknife Lagrangian multiplier (LM), and orthogonalized jackknife
LM tests for inference in IV regressions with many weak instruments and heteroskedasticity. Following I. Andrews (2016), …

Study On The Influencing Factors And Performance Effects Of Donation Behavior Of Chinese Small And Medium-Sized Enterprises, Ling Zhou

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Since the implementation of the reform and opening-up policy, in tandem with the continuous evolution of the Chinese economy and society, there has been a mounting demand for enterprises to shoulder and fulfill social responsibilities. Corporate social donations have emerged as a crucial avenue for enterprises to discharge their societal duties. These donations support public welfare in education and healthcare, enhance enterprise image and brand value, foster consumer trust, and drive sustainable development and innovation.

Introduced in the 1990s in China, corporate social responsibility rapidly advanced, yet research on SMEs’ social donations remains scarce. Despite their economic significance, SMEs face …

Essays On Spatial Economics And International Trade, Naiyuan Hu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation consists of three papers on spatial economics and international trade. The first paper focuses on spatial inequalities. Educational resources are distributed unevenly and contribute to spatial inequality. A dynamic spatial model with life-cycle elements studies the impacts of location-specific educational resources. Individuals determine where to attend college, weighing distance, expected value of education, and available resources. Locations with more colleges attract more students. As mobility costs increase with age, many graduates stay in the city where they studied, affecting skill composition. Applied to China, it finds that the 2005- 2015 college expansion had minimal welfare impacts and suggests …

Improving The Performance Of Wi-Fi Indoor Localization In Both Dense And Unknown Environments, Quang Truong Hai

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Indoor localization is important for various pervasive applications, garnering considerable research attention over recent decades. Despite numerous proposed solutions, the practical application of these methods in real-world environments with high applicability remains challenging. One compelling use case for building owners is the ability to track individuals as they navigate through the building, whether for security, customer analytics, space utilization planning, or other management purposes. However, this task becomes exceedingly difficult in environments with hundreds or thousands of people in motion. Conversely, the need to track oneself’s location is also meaningful from the perspective of individuals traversing in crowded spaces. These …

Robo-Advisers And Investor Behavior, Benjamin Loos, Pengfei Ma, Alessandro Previtero, Andres Hackethal

Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics

Using data from a large German retail bank, we investigate the effects of the introduction of a robo-advisory tool on clients’ portfolios. Robo clients experience a significant increase in financial risk-taking and improve portfolio efficiency along several dimensions (more diversification, less home bias, more investment in passive funds, reduced investment fees). Our evidence is consistent with robo-advisers being a more cost-effective approach for offering financial advice, especially to less sophisticated investors.

Do Executive Functions Buffer Against Covid-19 Fear And Stress? A Latent Variable Approach, Tina Li Yi Ng, Nadyanna M. Majeed, Verity Yu Qing Lua, Andree Hartanto

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Levels of COVID-19 stress have soared worldwide as a result of the pandemic. Given the pernicious psychological and physiological effects of stress, there is an urgent need for us to protect populations against the pandemic’s psychological impact. While there exists literature documenting the prevalence of COVID-19 stress among various populations, insufficient research has investigated psychological factors that might mitigate this worrying trend. To address this gap in the literature, the current study seeks to examine executive functions as a potential cognitive buffer against COVID-19 stress. To do so, the study adopted a latent variable approach to examine three latent factors …

Can Confidence Influence Persuasiveness In Disagreements By Conveying Competence Versus Dominance? The Moderating Role Of Competitiveness, Laura Rees, Ming-Hong Tsai, Shirli Kopelman, Hsiu-Hua Hu

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Research has demonstrated that confident individuals gain social influence because their confidence signals competence rather than dominance in settings in which they do not experience a disagreement with others. We extend this research by exploring felt competitiveness, as reflected by perceptions of goal opposition between perceivers and others. In settings where people experience a disagreement, we explore the impact of felt competitiveness on the association between expressed confidence and social perceptions of the expresser’s competence and dominance, and how these shape persuasiveness. We conducted a field study examining dyadic interactions between coworkers (Study 1) and two experimentsmanipulating competitiveness and confidence …

Evaluating Mental Health Outcomes In Covid-19 Icu Survivors: A Scoping Review Of Measurement Tools, Kimberly T'Ng, Justin Kenardy, Andree Hartanto

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Objective: The objective of this scoping review was to map the range of measurement tools used to study the prevalence of common mental health conditions in COVID-19 ICU survivors. Introduction: Increased rates of admission to and survivorship from intensive care units (ICUs) have been observed in recent years, particularly during the global pandemic. ICU patients are at a higher risk of developing depressive, anxiety, and PTSD symptoms. Due to the high burden of disease, an accurate understanding of long-term mental health challenges for this population is key. Unfortunately, there is significant variability in reported prevalence rates. Heterogeneity in measurement tools …

The Governance Of Director Compensation, Lily Fang, Sterling Huang

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

The average total compensation of directors in U.S.-listed companies was $342,030 in 2020, 5.06 times the median household income. Directors set their own pay, giving rise to potential self-dealing. We argue and document that in the presence of self-dealing, external mechanisms such as legal standards act as effective means of governance. Following a landmark Delaware court ruling that subjected director pay to a more stringent legal standard, Delaware-incorporated firms reduced director compensation relative to non-Delaware firms and experienced positive and non-transient stock price reactions. Our results indicate that proper governance of director compensation enhances firm value.

The Role Of Cosmopolitan Orientation In Covid-19-Related Attitudes: Perceived Threats And Opportunities, Vaccination Willingness, And Support For Collective Containment Efforts, Angela K. Y. Leung, Brandon Koh, Verity Yu Qing Lua, James H. Liu, Sarah Y. Choi, I-Ching Lee, Michelle Lee, Mei-Hua Lin, Darrin Hodgetts, Sylvia X. Chen

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Cosmopolitan individuals identify themselves as "citizens of the world." In the present research, we tested the idea that endorsing a cosmopolitan orientation (CO) is adaptive in the COVID-19 crisis. Cosmopolitan individuals more readily transcend national parochialism, show greater concern for all humanity, and prioritize collective interests. In a two-wave multi-region investigation with six samples from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, and the U.S., we first established longitudinal and cross-cultural measurement invariance of the CO scale. Next, we found that people with a higher CO tended to perceive over time a greater threat posed by COVID-19, take more safety measures, …

The Regenerative Playbook: Fintech’S Bold Approach To Sustainability, Simon J.D. Schillebeeckx, Ryan Merrill

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Fintechs are struggling to attract and retain Gen Z and Millennial customers. Research has shown that this demographic is demanding purpose and climate action. As a result, companies are responding by integrating nature-positive actions into fintech activities. Captivating Gen Z and Millennial customers attention with tangible impact, fosters long-term loyalty, retention and business growth.

Do Firms With Technological Capabilities Rush In? Evidence From The Timing Of Licensing Of Stanford Inventions, Young-Choon Kim, Reddi Kotha, Mooweon Rhee

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This study investigates the influence of licensees’ technological capabilities on the timing of technology licensing in university technology commercialization. Drawing on the appropriation-collaboration tension from the literature on university technology licensing and intellectual property management, we propose that while the licensee’s technological capabilities drive early licensing by averting technological obsolescence, this effect diminishes significantly with an overlap in the technological domain of the focal invention due to expropriation concerns. Cox regression analysis of Stanford University’s invention dataset confirmed our hypotheses. This research reveals that technology licensing experiences delays with the most suitable licensees, namely, those with strong technological capabilities in …

Research On The Impact Of Ai Technology Adoption On Organizational Resilience Of Service Enterprises, Jianlin Deng

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In a time of frequent global economic fluctuations, understanding how service enterprises can sustain stability amid fluctuating environments, and even thrive during crises, has become a significant research focus within the current economic context. Advancements in the digital economy provide service enterprises with new digital technology support, leading to their reduced operational costs and heightened efficiency. Among them, artificial intelligence (AI) technology is highly praised by service enterprises. AI technology is extensively integrated into service enterprises’ daily operations and management decision-making. However, limited research has been conducted on how AI technology can assist these enterprises in navigating external environmental disruptions. …

Using Pre-Trained Models For Vision-Language Understanding Tasks, Rui Cao

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In recent years, remarkable progress has been made in Artificial Intelligence (AI), with an increasing focus on integrating AI systems into people’s daily lives. In the context of our diverse world, research attention has shifted towards applying AI to multimodal understanding tasks. This thesis specifically addresses two key modalities, namely, vision and language, and explores Vision-Language Understanding (VLU).

In the past, addressing VLU tasks involved training distinct models from scratch using task-specific data. However, limited by the amount of training data, models may easily overfit the training data and fail to generalize. A recent breakthrough is the development of Pre-trained …

Recommender System Design And Multi-Channel Pricing: Personalization Strategies For Online Platforms, Hao Zhang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The advancement of mobile technology and rising consumer demands have contributed to the unprecedented growth of online platforms. In online platforms, recommender systems connect with multistakeholders who have different interests. Designing recommender systems to balance the benefit of multistakeholders is important for these platforms. In addition, price is an important factor influencing consumers’ purchase decisions. An increasing number of online platforms introduce multiple sales channels. Optimizing multiple-channel prices is vital for these platforms. Thus, this thesis designs multistakeholder recommender systems and multi-channel pricing strategies for online platforms through the following two works.

The first work focuses on designing multistakeholder recommender …

Corporate Technological Patent And Financing Accessibility - An Empirical Analysis Based On Startups, Tao Xu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Technological innovation is not only central to competition among firms but also a crucial driver of economic growth. The process of corporate technological innovation often demands substantial financial support. However, due to information asymmetry and capital constraints, tech startups encounter numerous obstacles in sustaining innovation. Venture capital is instrumental in fostering continuous corporate innovation, providing essential financial support for innovative activities, and playing a key role in achieving core technological breakthroughs. As a significant manifestation of corporate innovative technology, patents can mitigate the information asymmetry between startups and investors by creating a positive patent signal from diverse perspectives. Therefore, investigating …

Enabling And Optimizing Multi-Modal Sense-Making For Human-Ai Interaction Tasks, Dulanga Kaveesha Weerakoon Weerakoon Mudiyanselage

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The rapid pace of adoption of mixed-reality in tandem with advances in NLP and computer vision have opened up unprecedented opportunities for more naturalistic interaction interfaces which underpin Human-AI collaborative applications such as spatial computing and interactive conversational agents. One notable example is the emergence of interactive virtual assistants, which facilitate more natural communication of instructions and queries through modalities like voice and text. This trend is driving the development of innovative ubiquitous, mixed-reality computing applications. Such interactive, natural communication is also critical to support advances in human-robot interactive co-working, across a variety of industrial, commercial and home environments. Conventional …

Essays On High-Frequency Financial Econometric, Qiyuan Li

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation consists of three papers contributing to the theory of estimation and inference of high-frequency financial data. In the second chapter, a general framework is introduced for optimal nonparametric spot volatility estimation based on intraday range data, comprised of the first, highest, lowest, and last prices over a given time interval. Employing a decisiontheoretic approach together with a coupling-type argument, the form of the nonparametric estimator is directly tailored to the specific volatility measure of interest and the relevant loss function. The resulting new optimal estimators offer substantial efficiency gains compared to existing commonly used range-based procedures. The third …

Enabling Criticality-Aware Optimized Machine Perception At The Edge, Ila Nitin Gokarn

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Cyber-physical systems and applications have fundamentally changed people and processes in the way they interact with the physical world, ushering in the fourth industrial revolution. Supported by a variety of sensors, hardware platforms, artificial intelligence and machine learning models, and systems frameworks, CPS applications aim to automate and ease the burden of repetitive, laborious, or unsafe tasks borne by humans. Machine visual perception, encompassing tasks such as object detection, object tracking and activity analysis, is a key technical enabler of such CPS applications. Efficient execution of such machine vision perception tasks on resource-constrained edge devices, especially in terms of ensuring …

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%.

Allocating Vehicle Registration Permits, Massimiliano Landi, Domenico Menicucci

Research Collection School Of Economics

We compare social welfare, consumer surplus and profits in two different institutional settings in which an item whose quantity is fixed and controlled (vehicle registration permit) is allocated to the buyers of a complementary good (car). In the first setting, which resembles the way in which vehicle registration permits are allocated in Singapore, the central planner runs a uniform price auction for permits in which the consumers who bid the highest receive the permits and pay the highest losing bid. Then each winning consumer purchases a car from a seller. In the alternative setting, the central planner first allocates the …

The Balance Of Concessions In Trade Agreements, Mostafa Beshkar, Pao-Li Chang, Shenxi Song

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper introduces a quantitative framework to analyze the WTO’s reciprocity principle. Utilizing two polar bargaining environments, we measure terms-of-trade concessions among WTO members and examine how shifts in applied tariffs and economic fundamentals affect bilateral and multilateral balance of concessions. We find significant disparities in concessions, largely driven by the rise in trade imbalances since the early 1990s. Notably, although US-China bilateral tariffs suggest considerable terms-of-trade benefits for China, under a hypothetical balanced trade scenario, their relationship evolves towards near reciprocity following China’s accession to the WTO. Furthermore, in contrast to the significant gains in its relationship with the …

Analyzing And Revivifying Function Signature Inference Using Deep Learning, Yan Lin, Trisha Singhal, Debin Gao, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Function signature plays an important role in binary analysis and security enhancement, with typical examples in bug finding and control-flow integrity enforcement. However, recovery of function signatures by static binary analysis is challenging since crucial information vital for such recovery is stripped off during compilation. Although function signature recovery using deep learning (DL) is proposed in an effort to handle such challenges, the reported accuracy is low for binaries compiled with optimizations. In this paper, we first perform a systematic study to quantify the extent to which compiler optimizations (negatively) impact the accuracy of existing DL techniques based on Recurrent …

Better The Devil You Know: Improved Forecasts From Imperfect Models, Dong Hwan Oh, Andrew John Patton

Research Collection School Of Economics

Many important economic decisions are based on a parametric forecasting model that is known to be good but imperfect. We propose methods to improve out-of-sample forecasts from a misspecified model by estimating its parameters using a form of local M estimation (thereby nesting local OLS and local MLE), drawing on information from a state variable that is correlated with the misspecification of the model. We theoretically consider the forecast environments in which our approach is likely to offer improvements over standard methods, and we find significant forecast improvements from applying the proposed method across four distinct empirical analyses including volatility …

The Constitution As Symbol Or Operating Manual: A Rejoinder On Constitutional Literacy, Brian Christopher Jones, De Maartje Visser

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Assessing constitutional functionality often brings forward questions that go to the heart of the constitutional project, and this is certainly the case with constitutional literacy. After all, constitutions serve as national symbols and in a related vein, some have even likened them to a country’s autobiography. As Mounk points out, constitutional values and civic cultures have at times defined democracies, and many states have used their founding documents as key symbols to produce a shared identity or civic patriotism. At the same time, constitutions will also set out the legal and political structures of, and constraints on, institutions, and as …

The Implementation Of The Model Law On Cross-Border Insolvency: International Divergences And Challenges Ahead, Aurelio Gurrea-Martinez

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The Model Law on Cross-Border Insolvency (‘MLCBI’) was enacted by the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (‘UNCITRAL’) in 1997. Since then, it has been adopted by 62 jurisdictions and has led to many debates and interpretations about its potential, scope and limits. This article provides a general overview of some of the international divergences existing in the implementation of the MLCBI across jurisdictions. It also discusses some of the challenges that need to be overcome to make the MLCBI a more effective tool to deal with cross-border insolvency.

Achieving Financial Inclusion Through Digital Currencies, Heng Wang

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Welcome to our new blog series on “Central Bank Digital Currencies for Financial Inclusion” co-authored by Professor Heng Wang of the Yong Pung How School of Law, Singapore Management University.In this series, we delve into the world of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and their potentially profound implications for financial inclusion. What are CBDCs? CBDCs are digital versions of countries’ official currencies issued by the central bank or the like. They could be the digital representation of physical cash. To date, over 110 central banks around the world are engaged in some form of CBDC-related work, and the Eastern Caribbean …

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.

Big Infrastructure And/As Flexibility: The Sites Reservoir Story, Sarah Priscilla Randle, David Linville

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

If constructed as planned, the Sites Reservoir Project will add roughly 1.85 billion m3 (1.5 million acre-feet) of storage capacity to California's water system. Per project proponents, however, the reservoir complex should be understood as infrastructure that would not only increase available water supply but also provide the state's water network with an infusion of a vital systemic quality: flexibility. This article considers such discourses of flexibility through a case study of the Sites project, grounded in analysis of planning documents, government, think tank, and NGO reports, and media coverage from outlets across California. The resulting account shows how the …

Opening The Black Box: Towards Inherently Interpretable Energy Data Imputation Models Using Building Physics Insight, Antonio Liguori, Matias Quintana, Chun Fu, Clayton Miller, Jérôme Frisch, Christoph Van Treeck

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Missing data are frequently observed by practitioners and researchers in the building energy modeling community. In this regard, advanced data-driven solutions, such as Deep Learning methods, are typically required to reflect the non-linear behavior of these anomalies. As an ongoing research question related to Deep Learning, a model's applicability to limited data settings can be explored by introducing prior knowledge in the network. This same strategy can also lead to more interpretable predictions, hence facilitating the field application of the approach. For that purpose, the aim of this paper is to propose the use of Physics-informed Denoising Autoencoders (PI-DAE) for …