Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Paso Del Norte Economic Indicator Review, September, Hunt Institute For Global Competitiveness

Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

Contemporary Issues In Nigeria's External Debt And Implications For National Sovereignty, Umar E. Mahmud, Yusuf A. Ogwuzebe

Bullion

The imperative of public borrowing to finance development, combat natural or artificial disasters, and for other reasons is incontrovertible. The diverse traumatic experience of debt-victim nations: Spain, Mexico, Egypt, Venezuela, et cetera, which narrowly escaped total loss of national sovereignty to foreign lenders, due to debt-induced bankruptcy, have been xr-ayed by literature: Magaji (2000) and Bature (2015), among others. The objectives of this paper are to examine the situation of Nigeria, vis-à-vis the nations which travelled the path of Nigeria's current adventure; and to proffer policy antidotes for averting the highly probable cataclysm which unsustainable external debt might precipitate, particularly …

Capital Structure And Political Connections: Evidence From Gcc Banks And The Financial Crisis, Fatma Ahmed, David Macmillan

Economics

Abstract Purpose – This paper investigates the effect of political connections on the capital structure of banks before and after the financial crisis in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. Design/methodology/approach – This paper employs the natural experiment that the financial crisis offers and uses a difference-in-differences model to investigate the effect of political connections on capital structure. Capital structure is measured by the total debt to total assets ratio. Control variables include bank size, growth, profitability, coverage ratio and volatility. The research sample includes all the banks in the GCC from 2005 to 2016. Findings – The authors find that …

An Empirical Assessment Of Liquidity Management Instruments In Nigeria, Ezra U. Kure, Shettima T. Zimboh, Damilola O. Okedigba, Itoro U. Ituen

Economic and Financial Review

The paper assesses the response of monetary policy target variables to liquidity management instruments, using a Non-linear Autoregressive Distributed Lag (NARDL) model. The analysis focuses on the short end of liquidity management and provides evidence of long-run asymmetric effects of liquidity management instruments, notably, the monetary policy rate (MPR) and excess reserves of banks on the inter-bank rate. The findings show that the impact of discretionary and autonomous liquidity factors remains symmetric. In addition, the policy target rate is more sensitive to a monetary contraction than accommodation.

Effect Of Public Debt On Private Investment In Nigeria: Evidence From An Asymmetric Dynamic Model, A. B. Abubakar, S. O. Mamman

Economic and Financial Review

This study examines the effect of public debt on private investment in Nigeria. The linear and non-linear ARDL models are employed to analyse the series spanning the period 1981 to 2018. The estimation results show that an increase in total debt, external debt, and debt service payment adversely affects private investment, with the effects being symmetric. On the other hand, the effect of domestic debt on private investment is found to be asymmetric. Although a negative shock in domestic debt greatly improves private investment, a positive shock leads to a meagre positive effect on private investment. This finding indicates that …

Non-Tax Incentives And Agricultural Output In Nigeria, Elias A. Udeaja, Elijah O. Akanni, Emomotimi M. Question, Peter F. Offum, Titoluwa P. Eyinla

Economic and Financial Review

This study investigates the impact of non-tax incentives on agricultural sector output in Nigeria from 1981 to 2019, using Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) Model/Bounds test technique. The findings of this study show that non-tax incentives have a significant positive impact on agricultural sector output growth in the long-run; however, the effect was negative and statistically insignificant in the short run. On the other hand, government expenditure on agriculture was negative and significant on agricultural sector output growth in the short-run, while its long-run impact was also negative but not significant. Therefore, the study recommends targeted expansion of non-tax incentives to …

Borderplex Business Barometer, Volume 5, Number 9, Thomas M. Fullerton Jr., Steven L. Fullerton

Border Region Modeling Project

No abstract provided.

Institutions, State Capacity, And Intra-State Conflict: Evidence From A Decade-Long Civil War In Nepal, Nishant Yonzan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

First, while mass armed civil conflicts predominantly occur in weak states, which are states that lack state capacity, it is unclear why not all weak states experience mass armed civil conflict. Second, political stability and highly unequal distribution of resources are opposing forces that are unlikely to coexist together. However, highly unequal societies have existed with relative stability. Indeed, cross-country literature on civil war finds little relationship between conflict and unequal distribution of resources. This dissertation attempts to address these issues using the Civil War in Nepal which lasted from 1996 to 2006.

Institutions are fundamental for the proper functioning …

Does Low Income Effects 5-Year Mortality Of Hepatocellular Carcinoma Patients?, Dong Jun Kim, Ji Won Yoo, Jong Wha Chang, Takashi Yamashita, Eun-Cheol Park, Kyu-Tae Han, Seung Ju Kim, Sun Jung Kim

School of Medicine Faculty Research

Background: In Korea, the universal health system offers coverage to all members of society. Despite this, it is unclear whether risk of death from hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) varies depending on income. We evaluated the impact of low income on HCC mortality. Methods: The Korean National Health Insurance sampling cohort was used to identify new HCC cases (n = 7325) diagnosed between 2004 and 2008, and the Korean Community Health Survey data were used to investigate community-level effects. The main outcome was 5-year all-cause mortality risk, and Cox proportional hazard models were applied to investigate the individual- and community-level factors associated …

The Banality Of Corporate Evil, Amina Dessouki

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis critiques the notion of corporate social responsibility (CSR) through tracing the multiple dynamics between a multinational corporation and a development consultancy working on a recycling project in collaboration with the Zabaleen in Mansheyet Nasser, Egypt. The thesis looks at the ways in which actors negotiate their different positions, the harmonies and discordances that unfold through various agendas coming together, the silences produced, and the ways in which structural violence is intensified under the guise of development. The thesis contrasts the detached efforts of corporate workers and development consultants with the lives of the zabaleen, who live in a …

México Ante Los Retos Del Futuro: Una Perspectiva Norte-Centro-Sur: Eje Norte, Thomas M. Fullerton Jr., Steven L. Fullerton

Border Region Modeling Project

No abstract provided.

When Running For Office Runs In The Family: Horizontal Dynasties, Policy And Development In The Philippines, Dean C. Dulay, Laurence Go

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Political dynasties exist in practically every variant of democracy, but take different forms in different places. Yet the types of dynastic structures have remained unexplored. We argue that horizontal dynasties—multiple members from the same political family holding different political offices concurrently— affect policymaking by replacing potential political rivals, who may oppose an incumbent’s policy choices, with a member of the family. But in developing countries, the policy change that accrues from dynastic status may not lead to higher levels of economic development. We test this argument’s implications in the Philippines. Employing a close elections regression discontinuity design on a sample …

The Perceived Impact Of Covid-19 Pandemic On Healthcare Cost In Bangladesh, Hasibul Islam, Fatema Johora, Asma A. Abbasy, Masud Rana, Niyungeko Antoine

Journal of Global Business Insights

The study showed the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on healthcare expenses including the price of medicines, protective equipment, medical devices, healthcare facilities, and food. A self-administered questionnaire was used as the data collection tool and 400 people from different Bangladesh divisions (Dhaka, Chittagong, Barisal, Khulna, Mymensingh, Rajshahi, and Sylhet) participated in this study. Multiple regression analysis was used to estimate the impact of independent variables on dependent variables. R programming environment was used to perform the statistical analysis. Cronbach’s alpha was used for determination of reliability and found acceptable internal consistency. The price of protective equipment (POPE), the price …

Conflict In The Pool: A Field Experiment, Loukas Balafoutas, Marco Faravelli, Roman Sheremeta

ESI Working Papers

We conduct a field experiment on conflict in swimming pools. When all lanes are occupied, an actor joins the least crowded lane and asks one of the swimmers to move to another lane. The lane represents a contested scarce resource. We vary the actor’s valuation (high and low) for the good through the message they deliver. Also, we take advantage of the natural variation in the number of swimmers to proxy for their valuation. Consistent with theoretical predictions, a swimmer’s propensity to engage in conflict increases in scarcity (incentive effect) and decreases in the actor’s valuation (discouragement effect). We complement …

Dynamic Resource Allocation With Cost Externality, Hao Zhao, David Porter

ESI Working Papers

The inter-temporal resource allocation efficiency of a property rights-based common-pool resource system is challenged by a cost externality when one user’s extraction raises the extraction cost for others. This paper builds a dynamic resource allocation model to illustrate the efficiency loss from a standard property rights market. We then create a novel inter-temporal allocation mechanism that preserves dynamic efficiency. Our dynamic resource allocation mechanism includes an optimal planning stage where the agents collectively determine a binding extraction target for each period and a market stage where agents can exchange their extraction rights assigned within each period. The theoretical model demonstrates …

Increasing Access To Finance By Collateral Reform: Evidence From The West Bank And Gaza (Proceedings Version), Zachary Hrenko, Jeffrey B. Nugent

Topics in Middle Eastern and North African Economies

Although capital has long been believed to be an engine of economic growth, making widespread access to credit a crucial ingredient to success in stimulating development, all too frequently firms in developing countries face serious obstacles in getting access to credit, their most important source of finance. Many studies have shown that access to finance is an especially strong obstacle to the development of small- and medium-sized enterprises (or “SMEs”), which contribute greatly to private sector employment and growth across the world (Ayyagari, Beck, and Demirgüç-Kunt, 2007 and Ayyagari, Demirgüç-Kunt, and Maksimovic, 2011). As a result, it is important for …

Towards Better Data Augmentation Using Wasserstein Distance In Variational Auto-Encoder, Zichuan Chen, Peng Liu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

VAE, or variational auto-encoder, compresses data into latent attributes, and generates new data of different varieties. VAE based on KL divergence has been considered as an effective technique for data augmentation. In this paper, we propose the use of Wasserstein distance as a measure of distributional similarity for the latent attributes, and show its superior theoretical lower bound (ELBO) compared with that of KL divergence under mild conditions. Using multiple experiments, we demonstrate that the new loss function exhibits better convergence property and generates artificial images that could better aid the image classification tasks.

Media Connection And Return Comovement, Zilin Chen, Li Guo, Jun Tu, Jun Tu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Media news may cover multiple firms in one article, which establishes a media connection across firms. We propose a media connection strength (MCS) measure between two given firms, which is defined as the number of news articles co-mentioning these two firms. We show that the MCS measure can significantly explain and forecast return comovement of media-connected firm-pairs. Further analyses show that our results are robust to various alternative explanations. We argue that the MCS measure can capture comprehensive and complex correlated fundamental information among media-connected firms and hence may provide a new mechanism for return comovement beyond the existing rational- …

Singapore In The Global Value Chains, Pao-Li Chang, Tran Bao Phuong Nguyen

Research Collection School Of Economics

This chapter analyses 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. The analysis is carried out both at the country aggregate level 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 characterise a country/industry’s downstreamness in the GVC and the importance of each trade partner in its backward/forward linkages. Singapore started off with a very high …

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

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" …

Achieving Price Stability, Hwee Kwan Chow, Taojun Xie

Research Collection School Of Economics

The aim of delivering medium-term price stability is the stated objective of the Monetary Authority of Singapore. To this end, the central bank adopted an unusual exchange rate–based monetary policy framework that has served the economy well over the past decades. However, the shift from the phase of catch-up growth to a mature economy raises the question of whether the current monetary policy framework needs reformulation. Moreover, as global financial integration deepens, surges in cross-border capital flows impact Singapore’s exchange rate and asset prices, which has implications for economic dynamism and inclusion. Since a large and persistent deviation of the …

Rationalizable Implementation In Finite Mechanisms, Y-C Chen, Takashi Kunimoto, Y Sun, S. Xiong

Research Collection School Of Economics

We prove that the Maskin monotonicity condition (proposed by Bergemann et al. (2011)) fully characterizes exact rationalizable implementation in an environment with lotteries and transfers. Different from previous papers, our approach possesses many appealing features simultaneously, e.g., finite mechanisms with no integer game or modulo game are used; no transfers are made in any rationalizable profile; the message space is small; the implementation is robust to information perturbations in the sense of Oury and Tercieux (2012).

Providing Childcare, Christine Ho, Sunha Myong

Research Collection School Of Economics

Women’s economic empowerment has been hailed as one of the most remarkable revolutions in the past 50 years. Yet, women still face the lion’s share of the burden of childcare despite major progress in their education and earnings capacity. This is particularly salient in many Asian countries. This chapter proposes a synthesis of the state of knowledge on childcare and discusses policy-relevant issues applicable to the Singapore context. Selected policies are documented and lessons from the international landscape are discussed. Raising children incurs both direct costs in the form of childcare and opportunity costs in the form of career costs. …

Singapore As A Sustainable City: Past, Present And The Future, Tomoki Fujii, Rohan Ray

Research Collection School Of Economics

Singapore has achieved impressive economic growth over the last half-century. This chapter provides an overview of the major sustainability challenges Singapore has experienced and the policies that have been adopted to address them, particularly in the areas of land use, transportation, waste management, water, and energy. It argues that Singapore has been successful in addressing these challenges owing to sound long-term vision and planning as well as flexibility in the implementation of the policies to tackle them. The chapter provides some discussion on policy options, challenges, and opportunities for making Singapore more sustainable and liveable. Leaders of Singapore have recognised …

Entrepreneurship In Singapore, Jungho Lee

Research Collection School Of Economics

Singapore has completed its catch-up growth phase and needs to find a new growth engine. Entrepreneurship can contribute to a nation’s productivity growth. The purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, a theoretical framework is presented, along with empirical evidence, to understand government interventions aimed at boosting entrepreneurship. Second, using the framework, the chapter discusses whether Singapore’s current policies are suitable for helping entrepreneurship. The theory demonstrates four reasons why government intervention is needed: (1) resource misallocation, (2) positive externality, (3) entrepreneurial human capital, and (4) tax and default policies. Singapore’s government has implemented various policies that potentially fix market …

Equal-Quantile Rules In Resource Allocation With Uncertain Needs, Yan Long, Jay Sethuraman, Jingyi Xue

Research Collection School Of Economics

A group of agents have uncertain needs on a resource, which must be allocated before uncertainty re-solves. We propose a parametric class of division rules we call equal-quantile rules. The parameter lambda of an equal-quantile rule is the maximal probability of satiation imposed on agents - for each agent, the prob-ability that his assignment is no less than his realized need is at most lambda. It determines the extent to which the resource should be used to satiate agents. If the resource is no more than the sum of the agents' lambda-quantile assignments, it is fully allocated and the rule …

A Political Reciprocity Mechanism, Roland Pongou, Jean-Baptiste Tondji

School of Economics and Finance Faculty Publications

We consider the problem of designing legislative mechanisms that guarantee equilibrium existence, Pareto-efficiency, and inclusiveness. To address this question, we propose a finite-horizon voting procedure that embeds clauses of reciprocity. These clauses grant voters the right to oppose actions that are not in their interest, retract actions that face opposition, and punish harmful actions. We study voters' strategic behavior under this voting procedure using two classical approaches. Following the blocking approach, we introduce two related solution concepts---the reciprocity set and the sophisticated reciprocity set---to predict equilibrium policies. We then show that these solution concepts (1) are always non-empty; (2) only …

From Displaced To Our Place: Using An Educational Narrative To Build Community In A Displaced Community, Morgan Frederick

Symposium of Student Scholars

Thomasville heights is a displacement neighborhood for people pushed out by Atlanta’s Urban Renewal projects. Thomasville Heights remains a casualty of a system of economic segregation. Under this system of segregation these neighborhoods are left in detrimental states. It is in places like Thomasville Heights where the phrase “place matters” becomes a call to action. A town of 6000 residents and only one elementary school, Thomasville heights is bordered by multiple freight yards, a cemetery, landfills, and Atlanta’s US penitentiary, just a 5-minute walk from that one elementary school. There remains a vast difference between that of low-income urban, and …

Student Loan Debt Impacts On Choosing A Field Of Study, Lance Mcgonigle

Symposium of Student Scholars

Student Loan Debt Impacts on Choosing a Field of Study

Abstract

Lance McGonigle – Email: [email protected]

Student loan debt has been steadily rising over the last handful of decades, and many students who take these loans have little to no knowledge about the financial challenges that these loans can bring. This research is aimed to understand how student loan debt impacts a students’ field of study choice during their time as a college student, or if this has any affect at all. In doing a qualitative, humanistic study; exploratory research was conducted using inductive reasoning along with the use of …