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Singapore Management University

2008

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Articles 1 - 30 of 170

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Dealing With 'Messy Policy Problems' In The Health Care Sector, Knowledge@Smu Dec 2008

Dealing With 'Messy Policy Problems' In The Health Care Sector, Knowledge@Smu

Knowledge@SMU

In his new book, Dealing with Messy Policy Problems, to be published in April 2009, political science professor Steven Ney of the Singapore Management University offers insights on how to make sense of complex, messy and often overlapping policy problems. Ney contends that having conflicts is a necessary part of the process of finding solutions to complex policy issues. He spoke to Knowledge@SMU on policy issues relating to the crisis in global health care. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Marketing And Librarians, Pin Pin Yeo Dec 2008

Marketing And Librarians, Pin Pin Yeo

Research Collection Library

Barbie Keiser, Information Resource Management Consultant, conducted a one day workshop titled “Substance beyond style: Marketing library and information services in the 21st century” in Singapore on 15 October. The workshop was organized by the Library Association of Singapore and the Singapore Management University. It was held at the Reading Room, Li Ka Shing Library, Singapore Management University. Ms. Keiser noted that she did her first marketing workshop in Singapore in 1989 and was pleased to be back twenty years later.

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Over S$17 Million Raised For The Sim Kee Boon Institute For Financial Economics At Singapore Management University, Singapore Management University Dec 2008

Over S$17 Million Raised For The Sim Kee Boon Institute For Financial Economics At Singapore Management University, Singapore Management University

SMU Press Releases

No abstract provided.

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Global Analysis Of An Expectations Augmented Evolutionary Dynamics, Angelo Antoci, Antonio Gay, Massimiliano Landi, Pier Luigi Sacco Dec 2008

Global Analysis Of An Expectations Augmented Evolutionary Dynamics, Angelo Antoci, Antonio Gay, Massimiliano Landi, Pier Luigi Sacco

Research Collection School Of Economics

We consider a deterministic evolutionary model where players form expectations about future play. Players are not fully rational and have expectations that change over time in response to current payoffs and feedback from the past. We provide a complete characterization of the qualitative dynamics so induced for a two strategy population game, and relate our findings to standard evolutionary dynamics and equilibrium selection when agents have rational forward looking expectations.

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Profitability Analysis Of Chinese Listed Firms: 1992-2004, Jianjun Niu, Heng Yue, Guohua Jiang Dec 2008

Profitability Analysis Of Chinese Listed Firms: 1992-2004, Jianjun Niu, Heng Yue, Guohua Jiang

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

This research collects and analyses the profitability data of Chineselisted companies from 1992 to 2004. Results show that, on average, theprofitability of Chinese listed companies has declined over the period. Post-IPOearnings also exhibit a downward trend. A further analysis reveals that changes inlisted firms’ profitability ratio follow a strong mean reversion pattern.

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A New Frontier In Internationalization: Singapore's Gambits In The Middle East, Wilfred Pow Ngee How, Caroline Yeoh Dec 2008

A New Frontier In Internationalization: Singapore's Gambits In The Middle East, Wilfred Pow Ngee How, Caroline Yeoh

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

No abstract provided.

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Impact Of Elaboration On Responding To Situational Judgment Test Items, Filip Lievens, Helga Peeters Dec 2008

Impact Of Elaboration On Responding To Situational Judgment Test Items, Filip Lievens, Helga Peeters

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Although faking has been identified as a potential problem in situational judgment tests (SJTs), no studies have investigated proactive approaches for controlling faking in SJTs. Therefore, this study examined the impact of elaboration on responding to SJT items. Elaboration was operationalized as reason-giving. Two hundred and forty-seven master students were assigned to either an honest or a fake condition, and to a non-elaboration or an elaboration condition. Results showed that elaboration decreased the effect of faking for items with high familiarity. Elaboration on familiar items also decreased the percentage of fakers in the top of the distribution. Next, participants in …

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Reasonable Suspicion Or Real Likelihood: A Question Of Semantics? Re Shankar Alan S/O Anant Kulkarni, Lionel Leo, Siyuan Chen Dec 2008

Reasonable Suspicion Or Real Likelihood: A Question Of Semantics? Re Shankar Alan S/O Anant Kulkarni, Lionel Leo, Siyuan Chen

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The law on apparent bias has been mired in some controversy following the High Court decision of Re Shankar Alan s/o Anant Kulkarni, where Sundaresh Menon J.C. seemingly departed from the tentative views of Andrew Phang J.C. (as he then was) in Tang Kin Hwa v. Traditional Chinese Medicine Practitioners Board on the issue of whether there were any material differences between the “reasonable suspicion of bias” test and the “real likelihood of bias” test, the two formulations of the test for apparent bias that have been variously adopted by different jurisdictions in the common law world. In Tang Kin …

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Maximum Likelihood And Gaussian Estimation Of Continuous Time Models In Finance, Peter C. B. Phillips, Jun Yu Dec 2008

Maximum Likelihood And Gaussian Estimation Of Continuous Time Models In Finance, Peter C. B. Phillips, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper overviews maximum likelihood and Gaussian methods of estimating continuous time models used in finance. Since the exact likelihood can be constructed only in special cases, much attention has been devoted to the development of methods designed to approximate the likelihood. These approaches range from crude Euler-type approximations and higher order stochastic Taylor series expansions to more complex polynomial-based expansions and infill approximations to the likelihood based on a continuous time data record. The methods are discussed, their properties are outlined and their relative finite sample performance compared in a simulation experiment with the nonlinear CIR diffusion model, which …

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Unintended Consequences Of Repression: Alliance Formation In South Korea's Democracy Movement (1970-1979), Paul Y. Chang Dec 2008

Unintended Consequences Of Repression: Alliance Formation In South Korea's Democracy Movement (1970-1979), Paul Y. Chang

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Research regarding the impact of repression on social movements has yielded conflicting findings; some argue that repression decreases the total quantity of protest events while others argue that it motivates protest. To move beyond this impasse, various scholars have suggested exploring how repression influences the quality of social movements. This study assesses the impact repression had on the information of alliances between different social groups participating in South Korea's democracy movement. Results from negative binomial regression analyses show that repression facilitated the formation of alliances between movement actors at a time when the overall number of protest events decreased. This …

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Bibliometrics: From "Bean Counting" To Academic Accountability, Ruth A. Pagell Nov 2008

Bibliometrics: From "Bean Counting" To Academic Accountability, Ruth A. Pagell

Research Collection Library

No abstract provided.

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Connecting The Dots Within: Creative Performance And Identity Integration, Chi-Ying Cheng, Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks, Fion Lee Nov 2008

Connecting The Dots Within: Creative Performance And Identity Integration, Chi-Ying Cheng, Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks, Fion Lee

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In two studies drawing from social identity theory and the creative-cognition approach, we found that higher levels of identity integration - perceived compatibility between two social identities - predict higher levels of creative performance in tasks that draw on both identity-relevant knowledge domains. Study 1 showed that Asian Americans with higher identity integration were more creative in developing new dishes using a given set of ingredients, but only when both Asian and American ingredients were available. Study 2 showed that female engineers with higher identity integration were more creative in designing a product, but only when the product was targeted …

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Changes In Women's Choice Of Dress Across The Ovulatory Cycle: Naturalistic And Laboratory Task-Based Evidence, Kristina M. Durante, Norman P. Li, Martie G. Haselton Nov 2008

Changes In Women's Choice Of Dress Across The Ovulatory Cycle: Naturalistic And Laboratory Task-Based Evidence, Kristina M. Durante, Norman P. Li, Martie G. Haselton

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The authors tested the prediction that women prefer clothing that is more revealing and sexy when fertility is highest within the ovulatory cycle. Eighty-eight women reported to the lab twice: once on a low-fertility day of the cycle and once on a high-fertility day (confirmed using hormone tests). In each session, participants posed for full-body photographs in the clothing they wore to the lab, and they drew illustrations to indicate an outfit they would wear to a social event that evening. Although each data source supported the prediction, the authors found the most dramatic changes in clothing choice in the …

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Prison’S Spoilt Identities: Racially Structured Realities Within And Beyond, Nafis Hanif Nov 2008

Prison’S Spoilt Identities: Racially Structured Realities Within And Beyond, Nafis Hanif

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This article begins by seeking an explanation for the solidarity between Malay inmates and guards in perpetrating abusive and discriminatory treatment towards Malay transvestites. In the course of explaining an empirical phenomenon in the Singapore prison, this article has examined Singapore's history and ethnic demography, the ethnic Malay minority's lack of socio-economic development and modernisation vis-a-vis the ethnic Chinese majority, geo-politics, the ideology and strategic choices of the state's political elite and their implications for inter-ethnic interactions between Malays and Chinese. As this article will argue, prison culture, rather than being divorced from larger society, is in effect able to …

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Growth Is Good For Whom, When, How? Economic Growth And Poverty Reduction In Exceptional Cases, John A. Donaldson Nov 2008

Growth Is Good For Whom, When, How? Economic Growth And Poverty Reduction In Exceptional Cases, John A. Donaldson

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Economic growth and liberal economic policies often help the poor, but what about the numerous cases in which they do not? This article analyzes two types of cases: those in which income growth of the poor was significantly lower than expectations (negative exceptions) and those in which income growth of the poor significantly exceeded expectations (positive exceptions). Insights from these cases inform our theoretical understanding of poverty reduction. In addition, this article contributes a typology of strategies used in these cases, including alternative pathways to economic growth and neoliberal prescriptions for poverty reduction.

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Testing For Parameter Stability In Quantile Regression Models, Liangjun Su, Zhijie Xiao Nov 2008

Testing For Parameter Stability In Quantile Regression Models, Liangjun Su, Zhijie Xiao

Research Collection School Of Economics

We propose a test for structural change of conditional distribution in dynamic regression models. The test is constructed based on time series regression quantile estimates and complements conventional parameter instability tests in least-square type regression models. Asymptotic distribution for our test under the null hypothesis is derived.

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Directed Altruism And Enforced Reciprocity In Social Networks, Stephen Leider, Markus M. Mobius, Tanya S. Rosenblat, Quoc-Anh Do Nov 2008

Directed Altruism And Enforced Reciprocity In Social Networks, Stephen Leider, Markus M. Mobius, Tanya S. Rosenblat, Quoc-Anh Do

Research Collection School Of Economics

We conducted online field experiments in large real-world social networks in order to decompose prosocial giving into three components: (1) baseline altruism toward randomly selected strangers, (2) directed altruism that favors friends over random strangers, and (3) giving motivated by the prospect of future interaction. Directed altruism increases giving to friends by 52% relative to random strangers, whereas future interaction effects increase giving by an additional 24% when giving is socially efficient. This finding suggests that future interaction affects giving through a repeated game mechanism where agents can be rewarded for granting efficiency-enhancing favors. We also find that subjects with …

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Beware Of Radical Change: China’S Agrarian Revolution, John A. Donaldson, Forrest Q. Zhang Nov 2008

Beware Of Radical Change: China’S Agrarian Revolution, John A. Donaldson, Forrest Q. Zhang

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

No abstract provided.

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Future Fiscal And Budgetary Shocks, Hian Teck Hoon, Edmund S. Phelps Nov 2008

Future Fiscal And Budgetary Shocks, Hian Teck Hoon, Edmund S. Phelps

Research Collection School Of Economics

We study the effects of future tax and budgetary shocks in a non-monetary and possibly non-Ricardian economy. An (unanticipated) temporary labor tax cut to be effective on a given future date—a delayed “debt bomb”—causes at once a drop in the (unit) value placed on the firms' business asset, the customer, with the result that share prices, the hourly wage, and employment drop in tandem. This paradox of reduced activity through announcement of future “stimulus” does not hinge on an upward jump of long interest rates. A future tax-rate cut lacking a “sunset” provision has the same negative effects.

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Interactive Effects Of Multicultural Experiences And Openness To Experience On Creativity, Angela K.-Y. Leung, Chi-Yue Chiu Nov 2008

Interactive Effects Of Multicultural Experiences And Openness To Experience On Creativity, Angela K.-Y. Leung, Chi-Yue Chiu

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Extensiveness of multicultural experiences and Openness to Experience were used to predict European American undergraduates' performance on two measures of creative potential: (a) generation of unusual uses of garbage bags and (b) retrieval of nonprototypical or normatively inaccessible exemplars in the conceptual domain of occupation. The results showed that having extensive multicultural experiences predicted better performance on both measures of creative potential only among participants who were open to experience. Among those who were not open, having more extensive multicultural experiences was associated with a lower level of creative potential. Implications of these findings for promoting creativity in schools are …

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Can A Representative Agent Model Represent A Heterogeneous Agent Economy?, Sungbae An, Yongsung Chang, Sun-Bin Kim Nov 2008

Can A Representative Agent Model Represent A Heterogeneous Agent Economy?, Sungbae An, Yongsung Chang, Sun-Bin Kim

Research Collection School Of Economics

Accounting for observed fluctuations in aggregate employment, consumption, and real wage using the optimality conditions of a representative household requires preferences that are incompatible with economic priors. In order to reconcile theory with data, we construct a model with heterogeneous agents whose decisions are difficult to aggregate because of incomplete capital markets and the indivisible nature of labor supply. If we were to explain the model-generated aggregate time series using decisions of a stand-in household, such a household must have a nonconcave or unstable utility as is often found with the aggregate US data.

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Audit Profile: The Auditor-General's Office Of Singapore, Soo Ping Lim Oct 2008

Audit Profile: The Auditor-General's Office Of Singapore, Soo Ping Lim

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

No abstract provided.

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The Changes And Non-Changes Of China's Rural Land, Qian Forrest Zhang, John A. Donaldson Oct 2008

The Changes And Non-Changes Of China's Rural Land, Qian Forrest Zhang, John A. Donaldson

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

No abstract provided.

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Unpacking Sources Of Comparative Advantage: A Quantitative Approach, Davin Chor Oct 2008

Unpacking Sources Of Comparative Advantage: A Quantitative Approach, Davin Chor

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper develops an approach for quantifying the relative importance of different sources of comparative advantage for country welfare in a global trade equilibrium. To explain the pattern of specialization, I present a multi-country, perfectly-competitive Ricardian model that extends Eaton and Kortum (2002) to predict industry trade flows. In this framework, comparative advantage is determined by the interaction of country and industry characteristics, with countries specializing in industries whose specific production needs they are best able to meet with their factor endowments, institutional environment, and technological strengths. I estimate the model parameters using a large dataset of bilateral trade flows, …

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How Well Can We Target Aid With Rapidly Collected Data? Empirical Results For Poverty Mapping From Cambodia, Tomoki Fujii Oct 2008

How Well Can We Target Aid With Rapidly Collected Data? Empirical Results For Poverty Mapping From Cambodia, Tomoki Fujii

Research Collection School Of Economics

We compare commune-level poverty rankings in Cambodia based on three different methods: small-area estimation, principal component analysis using aggregate data, and interviews with local leaders. While they provide reasonably consistent rankings, the choice of the ranking method matters. In order to assess the potential losses from moving away from census-based poverty mapping, we used the concentration curve. Our calculation shows that about three-quarters of the potential gains from geographic targeting may be lost by using aggregate data. The usefulness of aggregate data in general would depend on the cost of data collection.

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The More Kids, The Less Mom's Divvy: Impact Of Childbirth On Intrahousehold Resource Allocation, Tomoki Fujii, Ryuichiro Ishikawa Oct 2008

The More Kids, The Less Mom's Divvy: Impact Of Childbirth On Intrahousehold Resource Allocation, Tomoki Fujii, Ryuichiro Ishikawa

Research Collection School Of Economics

We investigate how the impact of childbirth on intrahousehold allocation for married Japanese couples. We developed reduced‐form and structural‐form specifications from a unified theoretical framework. Under a weak set of assumptions, we can focus on private goods to track the changes in intrahousehold resource allocation. Our estimation results show that that allocation of resources within household tend to move to the disadvantage of women after a childbirth. One additional child is associated with a reduction in the wife's private expenditure share. Our estimation results reject the income-pooling hypothesis, and show that women are more risk averse than men.

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The Labor Market Of Italian Politicians, Antonio Merlo, Vincenzo Galasso, Massimiliano Landi, Andrea Mattozzi Oct 2008

The Labor Market Of Italian Politicians, Antonio Merlo, Vincenzo Galasso, Massimiliano Landi, Andrea Mattozzi

Research Collection School Of Economics

We analyze the career profiles of Italian legislators in the post-war period. Using a unique, newly collected dataset that contains detailed information on all the politicians who have been elected to the Italian Parliament between 1948 and 2008, we address a number of important issues that pertain to their career paths prior to election to Parliament, their parliamentary careers, and their post-Parliament employment. Our data span two institutional regimes: Italy's First Republic (1948-1994) and the Second Republic (1994-present), characterized by different electoral rules and party structures. We first present a brief overview of the Italian political system. We then provide …

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Utility Functions, Future Consumption Targets And Subsistence Thresholds, Ashok Guha, Brishti Guha Oct 2008

Utility Functions, Future Consumption Targets And Subsistence Thresholds, Ashok Guha, Brishti Guha

Research Collection School Of Economics

If the consumer’s risk aversion behavior varies intertemporally and if the risk aversion coefficient on future consumption becomes very large, the consumer tends to aim at a fixed future consumption target. A by-product is a reinterpretation of subsistence theories of consumption.

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A Comparative Account Of Statutory Interpretation In Singapore, Yihan Goh Oct 2008

A Comparative Account Of Statutory Interpretation In Singapore, Yihan Goh

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In 1993, the Singapore Parliament enacted legislative provisions adapted from Australian legislation directing, inter alia, that the courts apply the purposive approach in statutory interpretation. Those provisions also allowed for the extended use of extrinsic materials in the interpretative process. Fifteen years on, there is now a considerable body of Singapore case law to which a meaningful analysis may be undertaken. Indeed, from an initially cautious application of the enacted legislation, the courts began to read the enactments expansively, eventually providing for a statutory interpretation regime that is largely free of the confines of old. Nonetheless, the Singapore position does …

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Endogenous Transaction Cost, Specialization, And Strategic Alliance, Juyuan Zhang, Yi Zhang Oct 2008

Endogenous Transaction Cost, Specialization, And Strategic Alliance, Juyuan Zhang, Yi Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

In property rights theory, firm is an organizational response to reduce transaction cost associated with hold-up of using market mechanism. We claim that strategic alliance { without changing firm boundaries or asset ownership { is another type of organizational response. We construct a model to investigate individual firms' strategic choice on specialization or diversification when producing intermediate products and their further choice of organizational form: autarchy or forming strategic alliance. We introduce fixed learning costs as an indicator of scales of economy and show that only if fixed learning costs are large enough, will firms have incentive to be specialization …

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