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- China (3)
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- Bangladesh (1)
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- Global value chain participation (1)
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Articles 1 - 16 of 16
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Natural Disasters And Domestic Violence: A Study Of The 2015 Nepal Earthquake, Arpita Khanna, Tomoki Fujii
Natural Disasters And Domestic Violence: A Study Of The 2015 Nepal Earthquake, Arpita Khanna, Tomoki Fujii
Research Collection School Of Economics
This study explores the link between exposure to an earthquake and the incidence of intimate partner violence using two rounds of Demographic and Health Surveys data in Nepal. Using a differences-in-differences estimation, we find that exposure to the earthquake lead to a statistically and economically significant increase in the incidence of intimate partner violence in urban areas, which is attributable to the increase in stress felt by the victims. We argue that the heterogeneity of the impact between the urban and rural areas would be partly due to the differences in the reconstruction processes and assistance provided.
Firm Productivity And The Variety Of Inputs And Outputs: Evidence From Chinese Trade Data, Ken Onishi, Jianhuan Xu, Guang Yang
Firm Productivity And The Variety Of Inputs And Outputs: Evidence From Chinese Trade Data, Ken Onishi, Jianhuan Xu, Guang Yang
Research Collection School Of Economics
This paper studies how the trade liberalization in China changes the firm productivity. We develop a framework to estimate revenue productivity (TFPR) and real productivity (TFPQ) with multi-product firms. We find that the aggregate TFPR increases 30\% from 2002-2007 and TFPQ increases 22\%, suggesting that the observed TFPR increase is mainly driven by real productivity change rather than the markup change. We further decompose the change of productivity into three channels: (1) access to foreign inputs; (2) technology upgrade; (3) resource re-allocation within the firm. We find the most significant channel is the last one, which explains half of the …
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 …
Housing Equity And Household Consumption In Retirement: Evidence From The Singapore Life Panel©, Lipeng Chen, Liang Jiang, Sock Yong Phang, Jun Yu
Housing Equity And Household Consumption In Retirement: Evidence From The Singapore Life Panel©, Lipeng Chen, Liang Jiang, Sock Yong Phang, Jun Yu
Research Collection School Of Economics
Housing affordability for elderly homeowners involves an entirely different set of issues as compared to housing affordability for first-time homeowners. To afford to ‘age-in-place’ may require homeowners to access channels that enable them to withdraw their housing equity to finance consumption in retirement. We utilize data from the Singapore Life Panel© survey to empirically investigate the impact of housing equity on the consumption of elderly households. Based on panel analysis, we find housing equity value has no significant impact on non-durable consumption for elderly people. The conclusion holds for a battery of robustness checks. Moreover, heterogeneity analyses based on subsamples …
Does Early Access To Pension Wealth Improve Health?, Seonghoon Kim, Kanghyock Koh
Does Early Access To Pension Wealth Improve Health?, Seonghoon Kim, Kanghyock Koh
Research Collection School Of Economics
We examine the health impacts of early access to public pension wealth by exploiting a unique policy in Singapore allowing individuals to withdraw a proportion of their pension savings after their 55th birthday. For the identification, we employ a regression discontinuity design by comparing individuals before and after their 55th birthday. To address anticipated and lagged health impacts, we adopt the donut regression discontinuity approach. Using nationally representative monthly panel data, we find that early access to pension wealth improves self‐reported overall health.
Universal Minimum Wage Is Not Suitable For Singapore, Zhengxiao Wu
Universal Minimum Wage Is Not Suitable For Singapore, Zhengxiao Wu
Research Collection School Of Economics
In a commentary, SMU Senior Lecturer of Statistics Wu Zhengxiao examined the concept of a universal minimum wage, and discussed how it is not suitable for Singapore.
Spending Impact Of Covid-19 Stimulus Payments: Evidence From Card Transaction Data In South Korea, Kim, Kanghyock Koh, Wonjun Lyou
Spending Impact Of Covid-19 Stimulus Payments: Evidence From Card Transaction Data In South Korea, Kim, Kanghyock Koh, Wonjun Lyou
Research Collection School Of Economics
Various countries have implemented transfer programs to individuals since the Covid-19 outbreaks. However, the extent to which such transfers alleviate economic recessions is unclear. This paper analyzes a South Korean program, which provided vouchers redeemable only at small local businesses. We find that, due to the program, over 30% of households across all income groups increased their food and overall household spending, but the usage restriction may have affected consumer choice, distorting business competition. While the employment and sales of small businesses improved, the program’s fiscal sustainability is in question because of the large tax exemption.
Digital Payments And Consumption: Evidence From The 2016 Demonetization In India, Sumit Agarwal, Pulak Ghosh, Jing Li, Tianyue Ruan
Digital Payments And Consumption: Evidence From The 2016 Demonetization In India, Sumit Agarwal, Pulak Ghosh, Jing Li, Tianyue Ruan
Research Collection School Of Economics
We study how consumer spending responds to digital payments, using the differential switch to digital payments across consumers induced by the sudden 2016 Indian Demonetization for identification. Usage of digital payments rose by 3.38 percentage points and monthly spending increased by 3% for an additional 10 percentage points in prior cash dependence. Spending remained elevated even when cash availability recovered. Robustness analyses show that the spending response is not driven by income shocks, credit supply, price changes, or consumers' moving to the formal market. We provide evidence that digital payments increase consumer spending due to subdued salience.
Globalization And Top Income Shares, Lin Ma, Dimitrije Ruzic
Globalization And Top Income Shares, Lin Ma, Dimitrije Ruzic
Research Collection School Of Economics
This paper documents empirically that access to global markets is associated with a higher executive-to-worker pay ratio within the firm. It then uses China's 2001 accession to the World Trade Organization as a trade shock to show that firms that exported to China prior to 2001 subsequently exported more, grew larger, and grew more unequal in terms of executive-to-worker pay. To evaluate analytically and quantitatively the impacts of globalization on top income inequality, this paper builds a model with heterogeneous firms, occupational choice, and executive compensation. In the model, executive compensation grows with the size of the firm, while the …
Foreign Direct Investment And Industrial Agglomeration: Evidence From China, Wen-Tai Hsu, Yi Lu, Xuan Luo, Lianming Zhu
Foreign Direct Investment And Industrial Agglomeration: Evidence From China, Wen-Tai Hsu, Yi Lu, Xuan Luo, Lianming Zhu
Research Collection School Of Economics
This paper studies the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) on industrial ag-glomeration. Using the differential effects of FDI deregulation in 2002 in China on different industries, we find that FDI actually affects industrial agglomeration neg-atively. As FDI brings technological spillovers and various agglomeration benefits, other forces must be at work to drive our empirical finding. We propose a simple theory that FDI may discourage industrial agglomeration due to fiercer competition pressure. We find various evidence on this competition mechanism. We also examine an alternative theory based on spatial political competition, but find no evidence sup-porting it. On industrial growth, …
Fertility And Rural Electrification In Bangladesh, Tomoki Fujii, Abu S. Shonchoy
Fertility And Rural Electrification In Bangladesh, Tomoki Fujii, Abu S. Shonchoy
Research Collection School Of Economics
We use contemporaneous and retrospective panel datasets to examine the household-level relationship between fertility and access to electricity in Bangladesh. We find that access to electricity reduces fertility by about 0.2 children over a period of five years or total fertility rate by about 1.2 in most estimates. This finding is robust with respect to the choice of the estimation method, the choice of sample, and potential presence of endogeneity. The finding also corroborates the theoretical predictions on time use and consumption pattern derived from our model of electrification and fertility. The results also suggest that television is an important …
Welfare Consequences Of Access To Health Insurance For Rural Households: Evidence From The New Cooperative Medical Scheme In China, Jessica Ya Sun
Welfare Consequences Of Access To Health Insurance For Rural Households: Evidence From The New Cooperative Medical Scheme In China, Jessica Ya Sun
Research Collection School Of Economics
This study evaluates the welfare benefits of the New Cooperative Medical Scheme (NCMS), the main public health insurance plan for the rural population in China. The findings show that the value of the NCMS to recipients is slightly lower than the government's costs of implementation, ranging from 0.79 to 0.97 per RMB of the resource cost of the NCMS. The estimated moral hazard costs are low compared with the total benefits. It is also estimated that the benefits originating from the NCMS's insurance function only constitute 20% of the total benefits, suggesting a need for higher generosity levels among rural …
Geography, Trade, And Internal Migration In China, Lin Ma, Yang Tang
Geography, Trade, And Internal Migration In China, Lin Ma, Yang Tang
Research Collection School Of Economics
This paper quantitatively studies the local welfare impacts of inter-city migration in China. We structurally estimate a trade model with endogenous migration decisions using data from 279 prefecture-level cities. The results suggest that inflows of migrant workers increase welfare in the destination cities between 2000 and 2005 despite their negative impacts on congestion and nominal wage. The positive local impacts of migration depend crucially on the endogenous firm entry. The positive impacts in the destination cities also spill over to the neighboring cities through inter-city trade, often leading to higher welfare gains in the nearby cities than the destination cities …
Competition, Markups, And Gains From Trade: A Quantitative Analysis Of China Between 1995 And 2004, Wen-Tai Hsu, Yi Lu, Guiying Laura Wu
Competition, Markups, And Gains From Trade: A Quantitative Analysis Of China Between 1995 And 2004, Wen-Tai Hsu, Yi Lu, Guiying Laura Wu
Research Collection School Of Economics
This paper provides a quantitative analysis of gains from trade in a model with head-to-head competition using Chinese firm-level data from Economic Censuses in 1995 and 2004. We find a significant reduction in trade cost during this period, and total gains from such improved openness during this period is 7.1%. The gains are decomposed into a Ricardian component and two pro-competitive ones. The pro-competitive effects account for 20% of the total gains. Moreover, the total gains from trade are 13 − 31% larger than what would result from the formula provided by ACR (Arkolakis et al., 2012), which nests a …
Singapore In The Global Value Chains, Pao-Li Chang, Tran Bao Phuong Nguyen
Singapore In The Global Value Chains, Pao-Li Chang, Tran Bao Phuong Nguyen
Research Collection School Of Economics
In this chapter, we analyze the participation of Singapore in the global value chains (GVC): how much of its gross exports are GVC-related trade, how downstream it is, and which countries are its key upstream and downstream trade partners. This is done at both the country aggregate and at the sector level. New formulas are proposed in the gross export decomposition framework of Koopman, Wang and Wei (2014) and Borin and Mancini (2017), to characterize a country/industry’s downstreamness in the GVC and the importance of each trade partner in its backward/forward linkages. Singapore is found to start off with a …