Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Government Support For Smes In Response To Covid-19: Theoretical Model Using Wang Transform, Shaun Shuxun Wang, Jing Rong Goh, Didier Sornette, He Wang, Esther Yang

Research Collection School Of Economics

Purpose: Many governments are taking measures in support of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to mitigate the economic impact of the COVID-19 outbreak. This paper presents a theoretical model for evaluating various government measures, including insurance for bank loans, interest rate subsidy, bridge loans and relief of tax burdens. Design/methodology/approach: This paper distinguishes a firm's intrinsic value and book value, where a firm can lose its intrinsic value when it encounters cash-flow crunch. Wang transform is applied to (1) calculating the appropriate level of interest rate subsidy payable to incentivize banks to issue more loans to SMEs and to extend …

Adam Smith, Settler Colonialism, And Limits Of Liberal Anti-Imperialism, Onur Ulas Ince

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Recent scholarship has claimed Adam Smith's frontal attack on the mercantile system as a precocious expression of liberal anti-imperialism. This paper argues that settler colonialism in North America represented an important exception and limit to Smith’s anti-imperial commitments. Smith spared agrarian settler colonies from his invective against other imperial practices like chattel slavery and trade monopolies because of the colonies’ evidentiary significance for his “system of natural liberty.” Smith’s embrace of settler colonies involved him in an ideological conundrum insofar as the prosperity of these settlements rested on imperial expansion and seizure of land from the indigenous peoples. Smith navigated …

Balancing Sustainable Development And Cultural Heritage Preservation: Luxury Burial Legacies In Singapore, David Ocon

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Singapore tops multiple global rankings for the consumption of luxury products. In this land-scarce and densely-populated city-state, to purchase a high-end car, landed property, or to have a fine dining experience, ranks amongst the most expensive in all Asian cities. That luxurious approach in life, however, does not find a parallel in death. As this paper indicates, a life of luxuries in Singapore does not necessarily mean deluxe burials, graves, mausoleums, or shrines. In fact, due to scarcity of land and the tight control on its usage, there are limited options for the well-off to display the same sense of …

Who Is A Wise Person? Zhuangzi And Epistemological Discussions Of Wisdom, Shane Ryan, Karyn Lai

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This essay articulates the contribution that the Zhuangzi can make to contemporary epistemological discussions of wisdom. It suggests that wisdom in the Zhuangzi involves, in part, correctly distinguishing the "heavenly" (or the naturally given) from human artifice. It is important for humanity to understand naturally given conditions (e.g., seasons, climate, forces, mortality) to grasp what is within, and what beyond, our initiatives. To enable this, we need to be openly engaged with the world, rather than approach it with rigid convictions about outcomes or goals. We characterize such openness and readiness to engage as an attitude, that of "epistemic humility." …

The Evolving Chinese Luxury Consumer, Rane Xue, Xiaolei Gu

Perspectives@SMU

Chinese who travel frequently or have lived abroad will shape the perception and understanding of luxury consumption going forward

Up Close And Personal With Hugh Edmiston: Engineering Smu Towards Growth And Excellence, Hugh Edmiston

Oral History Collection

So what can a chartered engineer from the United Kingdom tell us about our aspirations to contribute to growth in Asia, as a young university in Singapore? As I found out…plenty. And then some. Meet SMU Senior Vice-President (Administration) Hugh Edmiston, who joined us just as COVID-19 hit our shores (“Little did I know there was a global pandemic on the horizon when I moved!”); and read on to learn more about his multiple roles and responsibilities in SMU as he drives our growth in Asia. This interview was published in the June 2021 edition of SMU CIRCLE.

Customer Satisfaction Index Of Singapore 2021: Q1 Results, Institute Of Service Excellence, Smu

Research Collection Institute of Service Excellence (2007-2024)

The Customer Satisfaction Index of Singapore (CSISG) computes customer satisfaction scores at the national, sector, sub-sector, and company levels. The CSISG serves as a quantitative benchmark of the quality of goods and services produced by the Singapore economy over time. 2021 marks the 15th year of measurement for the CSISG national study.

The Influence Of Masculinity And The Moderating Role Of Religion On The Workplace Well-Being Of Factory Workers In China, Quan Gao, Orlando Woods, Xiaomei Cai

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This paper explores how the intersection of masculinity and religion shapes workplace well-being by focusing on Christianity and the social construction of masculinity among factory workers in a city in China. While existing work on public and occupational health has respectively acknowledged masculinity’s influences on health, and the religious and spiritual dimensions of well-being, there have been limited efforts to examine how variegated, and especially religious, masculinities influence people’s well-being in the workplace. Drawing on ethnography and in-depth interviews with 52 factory workers and 8 church leaders and factory managers, we found that: (1) Variegated masculinities were integrated into the …

The Missing Middle In Product Price Distribution, Pao-Li Chang, Xin Yi, Haeyeon Yoon

SMU Economics and Statistics Working Paper Series

The IO literature has typically studied the supply-side factors that determine the price structure of products/services competing in a market. This paper pro-poses that the demand-side demographics could play an important role in shaping the product price structure. In particular, we document a “missing middle” phe-nomenon in both the income and the product price distributions in the U.S., based on the IPUMS ACS dataset (2005–2017) and the Nielsen Retail Scanner Data (2006–2017), for a large set of goods sold in the U.S. at the national, state, or commuting-zone level. We show that the lagged population share of the middle-income class …

To Switch Or Not To Switch: Individual Differences In Executive Function And Emotion Regulation Flexibility, Wei Xing Toh

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Emotion regulation (ER) constitutes strategies that modulate the experience and expression of emotions. While past work has predominantly focused on each ER strategy independently, recent research has begun to examine individual-difference factors that are associated with the flexible implementation of ER strategies in line with environmental demands (i.e., ER flexibility). Considering that ER processes generally implicate executive function (EF)—a collection of adaptive, general-purpose control processes—it is plausible that EF could be involved in ER flexibility. Using a latent-variable approach based on a comprehensive battery of EF tasks, the present study investigated how the various aspects of EF (i.e., common EF, …

How-To Present News On Social Media: A Causal Analysis Of Editing News Headlines For Boosting User Engagement, Kunwoo Park, Haewoon Kwak, Jisun An, Sanjay Chawla

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To reach a broader audience and optimize traffic toward news articles, media outlets commonly run social media accounts and share their content with a short text summary. Despite its importance of writing a compelling message in sharing articles, the research community does not own a sufficient understanding of what kinds of editing strategies effectively promote audience engagement. In this study, we aim to fill the gap by analyzing media outlets' current practices using a data-driven approach. We first build a parallel corpus of original news articles and their corresponding tweets that eight media outlets shared. Then, we explore how those …

The Digital Void Of Voluntourism: Here, There And New Currencies Of Care, Orlando Woods, Siew Ying Shee

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This paper explores some of the ways in which “care” is being transformed in response to the mediatory role of digital technologies. Digital mediation has caused care to become an increasingly cross-border practice, and a more expansive construct, that destabilises the assumption of presence (“here”) and absence (“there”). Indeed, as the physical and digital merge into one integrated way of being in the world, they enable connectivity across geographical distance, but so too can they create emotional distance within situations of geographical proximity. These outcomes reflect the “digital void” within which caregivers, and society more generally, are implicated. Digital voids …

Three Essays On Preferential Trade Agreement And Trade Policy, Kefang Yao

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation consists of three chapters on Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) and trade policies. Increasing in numbers rapidly since 1990s, PTAs have extended their traditional focus on tariff reduction to deeper policy integration in areas such as competition policy, intellectual property rights, investment, and movement of capital. The first chapter of the dissertation uses a recently released dataset of PTA contents to quantify impacts of the horizontal depth of trade agreements on bilateral trade flows and national welfare for the period of 1980-2015. The results indicate that agreements that are deeper (covering a wider range of policy areas) contribute to …

Essays On Economic Development And Environmental Sustainability, Rohan Ray

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The first chapter is a randomized controlled trial study that uses loss framing and information nudges to increase secondary school attendance in Bangladesh. Conditional cash transfers (CCTs) have become one of the most common policy interventions to increase school attendance, but the cost-effectiveness of such interventions has not attracted the attention it deserves. Hence, in addition to a standard CCT implementation, our rich unique dataset on daily attendance allows us to experimentally study two potential ways to improve the cost-effectiveness of school attendance interventions: (i) SMS information nudges and (ii) loss framing in CCTs. The former provides school attendance information …

Three Essays On Panel And Factor Models, Ji Feng

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The dissertation includes three chapters on panel and factor models.

In the first chapter, we introduce a two-way linear random coefficient panel data models with fixed effects and the cross-sectional dependence. We follow the idea of the within-group fixed effects estimator to estimate parameters of interests. We establish the limiting distributions of the estimates and also propose the two-way heterogeneity bias test to check the desirability of the estimation strategy. The specification tests then are constructed to examine the existence of the slope heterogeneity and time-varyingness. We study the asymptotic properties of the specification tests and employ two bootstrap schemes …

Forces Of Corruption: Effects Of Power On Perceptions Of Openness And Information-Sharing, Jiaying Li

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In considering the power relations that characterize a manager-subordinate relationship, upward information-sharing is often constrained by relative power differentials. However, a burgeoning volume of research has established that power holders are more attuned to situational goals, thus exhibit greater flexibility in behaviour than powerless persons. This paper therefore proposed a model with epistemic motivation as an intervening variable that enhances information-sharing between dyadic counterparts who have unequal power. However, this model was not supported by findings. Nonetheless, this can be attributed to experimental settings – which future studies should address with construct replication.

On Financial Quotient: Theory And Empirical Analysis, Gang Sun

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Financial Quotient (FQ) has become a common topic of concern in the global academic, business and social communities, but at this stage, academic research on FQ and its education are still immature, theoretical depth and empirical support basis are shortage, and influence factors of FQ and the degree of influence of each factor have not been systematically studied. Therefore, there is a large gap between research and practice.

The purpose of this Paper is to construct a set of scientific and reasonable FQ index for individuals, to find factors that can influence or predict personal financial quotient (PFQ), and to …

Fuelling Effects Of Unique Opinion Holder’S Emotions On Team Creativity: A Collective Information Processing Perspective, Hui Si Oh

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Building on past studies that have found positive influence of minority member on team creativity, this research examined an underexplored yet crucial topic of a unique opinion holder’s happy and anger emotions on team creativity. Using a collective information processing perspective, this study examined whether the expression of anger and happiness would be beneficial for team creativity by spurring team members to respond qualitatively differently to each other’s ideas during the discussion. Additionally, this study examined whether the influence of a unique opinion holder’s emotions on team creativity through information-processing pathways would depend on individual members’ working memory capacities. Three …

How To Talk About Racism, Benjamin Joshua Ong

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In a commentary, SMU Assistant Professor of Law Benjamin Joshua Ong wrote that recent debates about race and race relations have reminded him that using a single word to describe something can lead to quibbles over the precise definition, while discussion of the thing itself is neglected. He believes that in addressing important questions related to race, we should not reduce the potentially rich discussion to a simplistic argument over whether the incidents are "racist" or not, but should keep an open mind when having difficult conversations.

Why Do Robots Have Smiley Faces?, Mark Findlay

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The author discussed why engineers and designers provide machines with the semblance of friendliness, and why it takes more than that for humans to trust AI. The ground-breaking AI in community research and policy initiative by CAIDG, supported by the National Research Foundation Singapore under its Emerging Areas Research Projects Funding Initiative, seeks to understand how and why trust can be established when humans and machines come together.

Running Bodies And The Affective Spaces Of Health In And Beyond Marathon Running In China, Xiaomei Cai, Orlando Woods, Quan Gao

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This paper explores the affective formation of health and space/place through an examination of the affective, bodily and digital practices of marathon runners in China. By elaborating on the idea of “affective spaces of health”, we investigate not only the affective potential of running bodies that enables a therapeutic and individualised form of selfhood in response to the post-socialist transformation but also the affective atmospheres that condition and discipline runners’ affective capacities of health. The paper therefore questions the simplistic association of health with particular qualities of place and calls for studying the affective and fluid spaces of health.

(Un)Tethered Masculinities, (Mis)Placed Modernities: Queering Futurity In Contemporary Singapore, Orlando Woods

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This paper considers how socio-political prescriptions can bring about the queering of futurity in Singapore. In Singapore, state-sponsored narratives of progress view futurity in terms that are bound to place, and reproduced through the heteronormative family unit. These factors have caused constructions of masculinity to be tethered to the family, and placed within public housing. Recently, this narrative has become an increasingly inflexible and marginalizing construct that can cause straight males to be queered by their prescribed futures. In contrast, gay males are more likely to be untethered from their families, and thus occupy “unplaced” positions in Singapore’s social structure.

Social Psychology Of Climate Change In The Asian Context: Introduction To Special Issue, Kim-Pong Tam, Angela K. Y. Leung, Susan Clayton

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Climate change is one of the biggest challenges facing many countries in the Asia Pacific. Asia as a whole is a primary contributor to carbon emissions. According to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2020, the Asia Pacific region alone accounts for more than half of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions. This represents an increase in consumption of oil, gas, and coal in Asia Pacific from 44.5% in 2009 to 50.5% in 2019. According to the review, compared to the rest of the world, Asia Pacific had the highest growth rate (2.7%) of carbon emissions between 2008 and …

Divide And Conquer: A Hygienic, Efficient, And Reliable Assembly-Line For Housekeeping, Xiao Alison Chen, Rowan Wang, Jianghua Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Problem definition: This work focuses on the hotel housekeeping process. In a field study, a possible channel of disease transmission between consecutive guests in hotel rooms is revealed. In order to prevent the transmission, an innovative assembly-line housekeeping method is developed. Academic/practical relevance: The transmission of infectious diseases during hotel stays (e.g., by touching unclean towels or bed linens) has been reported globally. Under the current COVID-19 pandemic, having contact with saliva or mucus left by an infected person could cause infection. The standard housekeeping process used by the majority of hotels leaves a channel for new towels and bed …

Research On Climate Change In Social Psychology Publications: A Systematic Review, Kim-Pong Kam, Angela K. Y. Leung, Susan Clayton

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

There is a strong scientific consensus that anthropogenic climate change is happening and that its impacts can put both ecological and human systems in jeopardy. Social psychology, the scientific study of human behaviours in their social and cultural settings, is an important tool for understanding how humans interpret and respond to climate change. In this article, we offered a systematic review of the social psychological literature of climate change. We sampled 130 studies on climate change or global warming from 80 articles published in journals indexed under the “Psychology, social” category of Journal Citation Reports. Based on this sample, …

Flight, Patrick Luiz Sullivan De Oliveira

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The history of flight presents a seemingly straightforward linear narrative. Before the eighteenth century, humans could only aspire to fly—an unfulfillment that promoted a rich mythology in antiquity that includes, most famously, the Hellenic warning against Icarian hubris. What followed were centuries of tinkering by eccentric geniuses such as Leonardo da Vinci—experiments that proved practically unfeasible but nevertheless indicated a rationalization of the aerial milieu. Then, in 1783, the invention of the hot-air balloon by the Montgolfier brothers in France allowed humans to ascend into the sky for the first time. However, this form of flight proved to be a …

Arbitration By Ssos As A Preferred Solution For Solving The Frand Licensing Of Seps?, Kung-Chung Liu

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In the last decade, the licensing of standard essential patents (SEPs) on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms has been a thorny issue for SEP holders in the US and Europe on the one hand, and major SEP implementers in major Asian economies on the other, such as Japan, Korea, the PRC, Taiwan and even India. With the rise of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, driven by the Internet of Things (IoT), 5G, driverless vehicles, and artificial intelligence (AI), which relies even more on interconnectivity, more and more new standards and SEPs will emerge, and the issue of FRAND licensing of …

Wto Reform And China: Defining Or Defiling The Multilateral Trading System?, Henry S. Gao

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In November 2001, China finally acceded to the World Trade Organization, in a deal described by then WTO Director-General Mike Moore as a “defining moment in the history of the multilateral trading system”. In recent years, however, China has been accused of defiling the letter and spirt of WTO rules with its unique economic model. Believing that existing WTO rules are inadequate in dealing with the China challenge, key WTO Members have launched a new round of WTO reform, which is the subject of this article. Contrary to popular belief, most of the problems concerning China are not new but …

The Curious Case Of Horseracing Data Caught In A Tangled Web Of Relationships – The Racing Partnership Ltd V. Sports Information Services Ltd [2020] Ewca Civ 1300, Cheng Lim Saw

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This paper comments on the recent split decision of the English Court of Appeal in The Racing Partnership Ltd v. Sports Information Services Ltd [2020] EWCA Civ 1300 concerning the common law action for misuse of confidential information. Although the majority overturned the decision of the trial judge and found in favour of the defendant, this author will explain why the conclusion reached by the dissenting judge is the more compelling.

The Ccp At 100: Can It Lead China To Be The Wave Of The Future?, Eugene K. B. Tan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The author discussed about the foremost geopolitical challenge China is facing as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) marks its centenary on July 1. He pointed out that bilateral ties between US and China are patently lacking in trust, but believes both can find convergence and achieve mutual respect if determined efforts are channelled towards policies, institutions, norms, and cooperation that seek to incrementally enhance security and cooperation for both countries even as they robustly engage each other on the issues.