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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

International Economics

Singapore Management University

2007

Articles 1 - 6 of 6

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Modeling Country Risks: An Asian Perspective, Swee Liang Tan, G. K. Randolph Tan Sep 2007

Modeling Country Risks: An Asian Perspective, Swee Liang Tan, G. K. Randolph Tan

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper investigates the use of the Markov Regime Switching Model (MRSM) as a means to track changes in the levels of investor confidence. It also assesses the probabilities of a country switching between different regimes using the transition probability matrix. A maximum of three possible levels or regimes of risk – low, intermediate and high volatility regimes, is considered. From the smoothed probabilities calculated for different regimes, this paper makes inferences about timings of debt crisis. Comparing Brazil, Mexico, the Philippines and Indonesia in particular, we date the onset and subsequent dissolution of crisis-induced panic. We give interpretations of …

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The Wto Trade Effect, Pao Li Chang, Myoung-Jae Lee Sep 2007

The Wto Trade Effect, Pao Li Chang, Myoung-Jae Lee

Research Collection School Of Economics

Rose (2004) showed that the WTO or its predecessor, the GATT, did not promote trade, based on conventional econometric analysis of gravity-type equations of trade. We argue that conclusions regarding the GATT/WTO trade effect based on gravity-type equations are arbitrary and subject to parametric misspecifications. We propose using nonparametric matching methods to estimate the 'treatment effect' of GATT/WTO membership, and permutation-based inferential procedures for assessing statistical significance of the estimated effects. A sensitivity analysis following Rosenbaum (2002) is then used to evaluate the sensitivity of our estimation results to potential selection biases. Contrary to Rose (2004), we find the effect …

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Protection For Sale Under Monopolistic Competition: An Empirical Investigation, Pao Li Chang Aug 2007

Protection For Sale Under Monopolistic Competition: An Empirical Investigation, Pao Li Chang

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper proposes a general empirical framework to estimate the protection-for-sale model, where the protection regime shifts according to a sector's market structure (perfectly or monop-olistically competitive). We base the protection structure on Grossman and Helpman (1994) for the subset of perfectly competitive sectors and on Chang (2005) for the subset of monop- olistically competitive sectors. The two protection regimes are simultaneously estimated with joint constraints. The results of the J-test consistently reject the homogeneous (perfect compe- tition) protection-for-sale model often adopted in previous literature and suggest a direction of improvement toward the proposed heterogeneous protection structure model.

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A Welfare Analysis Of Capital Account Liberalization, Jürgen Von Hagen, Haiping Zhang Aug 2007

A Welfare Analysis Of Capital Account Liberalization, Jürgen Von Hagen, Haiping Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

We develop a model of a small open economy with credit market frictions to analyze the consequences of capital account liberalization. We show that nancial opening facilitates the in ows of cheap foreign funds and improves production e ciency. Reforms increasing labor market exibility can further improve such e ciency gains. However, capital account liberalization also has important distributional consequences. Speci cally, it may be impossible to use public transfers to fully compensate the loss of those negatively a ected by capital account liberalization. This explains why nancial opening often meets erce opposition even though it leads to e ciency …

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The Evolution And Utilization Of The Gatt/Wto Dispute Settlement Mechanism, Pao-Li Chang Jul 2007

The Evolution And Utilization Of The Gatt/Wto Dispute Settlement Mechanism, Pao-Li Chang

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper provides a theoretical framework of dispute settlement to explain the surge in blocking incidence of GATT panel reports during the 1980s and the variations in withdrawn incidence versus total disputes across different decades of the GATT regime. The study first suggests the role of the degree of legal controversy over a panel ruling in determining countries' incentives to block (appeal) a panel report under the GATT (WTO) regime. The study then analyzes the effects of political power on countries' incentives to use, and their interactions in using, the dispute settlement mechanism, when two-sided asymmetric information exists regarding panel …

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Trade Agreements With Domestic Policies As Disguised Protection, Gea Myoung Lee Mar 2007

Trade Agreements With Domestic Policies As Disguised Protection, Gea Myoung Lee

Research Collection School Of Economics

WTO rules prohibit “disguised protection” in the form of domestic policies. How then do governments cooperate over trade and domestic policies when none can verify whether a nation's domestic tax reduction is a protective measure or a reaction to a production externality? In this paper, each government privately observes whether a production externality associated with its import-competing good is high or low. This paper finds that in an optimal agreement, disguised protection with domestic policies is never used by governments with a high externality, and is never commonly realized. Moreover, in an optimal agreement, tariffs may be conditional on domestic …

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