Social and Behavioral Sciences | Open Access Articles

What The New Cabinet Line-Up Says About Leadership Continuity And Renewal, Tan K. B. Eugene

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In a commentary, SMU Associate Professor of Law Eugene Tan discussed three features that stood out in the new Cabinet line-up after the July 10 General Election, and explained what this says about leadership continuity and renewal.

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Learning Music Composers' Styles: To Block Or To Interleave?, Sarah Shi Hui Wong, Amanda Chern Min Low, Sean H. K. Kang, Stephen Wee Hun Lim

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The ability to recognize and distinguish among varying musical styles is essential to developing aural skills and musicianship. Yet, this task can be difficult for music learners, particularly nonexperts. To address this challenge and guide music education practice, this study drew on cognitive psychological principles to investigate the effect of interleaved presentation of music pieces by various classical music composers on learning to identify these composers’ styles. Participants with 4 or fewer years of musical experience were presented with music pieces from six composers in an interleaved manner (alternating between listening to different composers’ works) and music pieces from another …

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The Transnational Frontiers Of Japanese Education: Multiculturalism, Cosmopolitanism, And Global Isomorphism, Hiro Saito

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The Japanese education system today faces three transnationally created challenges. The first is multiculturalism. Given an increasing number of students whose parents are either migrants or naturalized citizens, the government needs to rethink the nature of public schools, which have traditionally catered to ethnic majority students, and explore how to make them culturally more inclusive. The second is cosmopolitanism. Although cosmopolitanism is regarded as a desirable disposition and competency in a globalizing world, the government has difficulty incorporating it into the education system that continues to function as a central vehicle of nation-building. The third is global isomorphism. While world …

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Legal Constraint In Emergencies: Reflections On Carl Schmitt, The Covid-19 Pandemic And Singapore | Symposium On Covid-19 & Public Law, Wei Yao, Kenny Chng

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The controversial legal theorist Carl Schmitt’s challenge to the possibility of meaningful legal constraint on executive power in emergencies could not be more relevant in a world struggling to deal with Covid-19. Scrambling against time, governments around the world have declared states of emergency and exercised a swathe of broad executive powers in an effort to manage this highly infectious disease. In times like these, if Schmitt is indeed right that emergencies cannot be governed by law, we are on the cusp of (or perhaps have already entered) a post-law world – where the business of government is characterised by …

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Individuals Responses To Economic Cycles: Organizational Relevance And A Multilevel Theoretical Integration, Nina Sirola

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The state of the economy represents a concern for individuals and shapes their behavior in profound ways. The current review of studies on how individuals respond to economic cycles reveals that organizational relevance of such responses has often not been considered, and the literature is characterized by a variety of seemingly disconnected explanations for how and why individuals respond to the perceived state of the economy. I develop a theoretical framework that systematizes the literature and accounts for the seemingly disparate findings, highlighting the underlying functionality of such responses for individuals. I then integrate the literature on individual responses to …

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Ge2020 Commentary: Assessing The Voters’ Message To Pap (And Other Parties), Tan K. B. Eugene

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Despite the “crisis of a generation”, the 2020 general election results point to a considered flight from the status quo, rather than a flight to safety. Singaporean voters, through their 2.54 million ballots cast, sent a nuanced message to all political parties and election candidates. It was a renewed, urgent expression of a vote for change, more so than in the 2011 election.

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Family Law, Wei Jing Tricia Ho, Siyuan Chen

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Two salient trends emerge from the decisions issued by the Singapore courts in 2019. First, cases with international elements are featured increasingly, with the Court of Appeal adjudicating its first case on financial relief consequential on foreign divorces and the High Court releasing a decision on sham marriages to obtain an immigration advantage. It is evident that the law is evolving to cater to the needs of a changing community in Singapore. There is a recognition of the increase in the number of Singapore citizens working abroad and marrying non-Singaporeans, which has prompted certain legislative changes that seek to provide …

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Violators, Virtuous, Or Victims? How Global Newspapers Represent The Female Member Of Parliament, Devin K. Joshi, Meseret F. Hailu, Lauren J. Reising

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Previous research finds mass media often frames female members of parliament (FMPs) as novelties, violators, or deviants intruding in a masculine domain. However, most of these studies have focused on a small number of primarily Western nations. Inspired by new research on the normalization of women in politics, intersectionality, and violence against women in politics, this study undertakes a broad examination of how global newspapers represent FMPs to the public. Taking an inductive approach and drawing on a collection of 772 articles drawn from 265 newspapers in 48 countries over thirty years (from 1985 to 2014), we assess how media …

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The Effect Of State Gratitude On Cognitive Flexibility: A Within-Subject Experimental Approach, Andree Hartanto, Nadia C. H. Ong, Wee Qin Ng, Nadyanna M. Majeed

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Considerable research has examined the relationship between positive emotion and cognitive flexibility. Less is known, however, about the causal relationship between discrete positive emotions, specifically gratitude, and cognitive flexibility. Given that different positive emotions may dissimilarly affect cognitive functioning, we sought to examine the effect of state gratitude on cognitive flexibility. A pilot study with ninety-five participants was employed to ensure the effectiveness of our gratitude manipulation. One hundred and thirteen participants were recruited for the main study, which utilized a within-subject experimental approach. After the manipulation, participants completed a well-established task-switching paradigm, which was used to measure cognitive flexibility. …

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The Promises And Perils Of Insurtech, Lin Lin, Christopher C. H. Chen

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The insurance sector, in riding the wave of the FinTech phenomenon, has been rapidly expanding, with a slew of firms having emerged to provide so-called “InsurTech” services. These services incorporate concepts such as blockchain, artificial intelligence, digitalisation and the sharing economy to various aspects of the insurance industry. This profusion of technology brings with it the promise of various benefits including increasing efficiency and lowering costs for not only insurers and intermediaries, but also businesses or consumers as end-users of insurance. However, the development of InsurTech comes with corresponding risks and regulatory concerns not currently accounted for by the traditional …

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Soft Launch Of The Asian Principles For The Recognition And Enforcement Of Foreign Judgments, Adeline Chong

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In January 2018, we reported on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Judgments in Asia, a publication by the Asian Business Law Institute (ABLI).

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Busting Myths And Dispelling Doubts About Covid-19, Mark Findlay

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The Centre for AI and Data Governance (CAIDG) at Singapore Management University (SMU) has embarked over past months on a programme of research designed to confront concerns about the pandemic and its control. Our interest is primarily directed to the ways in which AI-assisted technologies and mass data sharing have become a feature of pandemic control strategies. We want to know what impact these developments are having on community confidence and health safety. In developing this work, we have come across many myths that need busting.

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Covid-19 And Management Education: Reflections On Challenges, Opportunities, And Potential Futures, Steve Brammer, Timothy Clark

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

COVID-19 is having profound impacts on tertiary education globally. Border closures, cuts to aviation capacity, mandatory quarantine on entering a country, restrictions on mass gatherings, and social distancing all pose challenges to higher education (HE) institutions. Business Schools (BSs) have larger and more internationally diverse cohorts of students and staff, generating particular challenges, but also often have more mature digital and remote education capabilities that enable responses to COVID-19. Therefore, exploring emergent evidence on how BSs are likely to be affected by COVID-19 over the short, medium, and long term is of significant importance to our community. In this commentary, …

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Job Duration And Match Characteristics Over The Business Cycle, Ismail Baydur, Toshihiko Mukoyama

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper studies the cyclical behavior of job separation and the characteristics of matches between workers and jobs. We estimate a proportional hazard model with competing risks, distinguishing between different types of separations. A higher unemployment rate at the start of an employment relationship increases the probability of job-to-job transitions, whereas its effect on employment-to-unemployment transitions is negative. We then build a simple job ladder model to interpret our empirical results. A model with two-dimensional heterogeneity in match (job) characteristics has the same qualitative features as the data. Once the model is extended to include cyclicality in the offered match …

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Forecasting Singapore Gdp Using The Spf Data, Tian Xie, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

In this article, we use econometric methods, machine learning methods, and a hybrid method to forecast the GDP growth rate in Singapore based on the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF). We compare the performance of these methods with the sample median used by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). It is shown that the relationship between the actual GDP growth rates and the forecasts from individual professionals is highly nonlinear and non-additive, making it hard for all linear methods and the sample median to perform well. It is found that the hybrid method performs the best, reducing the mean squared …

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Redundancy Insurance Is Not Unemployment Insurance, Zhengxiao Wu

Research Collection School Of Economics

In a commentary, SMU Senior Lecturer of Statistics Wu Zhengxiao discussed the difference between redundancy insurance and unemployment insurance. He shared Japan's example, where the cost for unemployment insurance is higher than redundancy insurance, and added that being an unprecedented policy, more care should be taken when implementing it.

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In-Fill Asymptotic Theory For Structural Break Point In Autoregressions, Liang Jiang, Xiaohu Wang, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

This article obtains the exact distribution of the maximum likelihood estimator of structural break point in the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process when a continuous record is available. The exact distribution is asymmetric, tri-modal, dependent on the initial condition. These three properties are also found in the finite sample distribution of the least squares (LS) estimator of structural break point in autoregressive (AR) models. Motivated by these observations, the article then develops an in-fill asymptotic theory for the LS estimator of structural break point in the AR(1) coefficient. The in-fill asymptotic distribution is also asymmetric, tri-modal, dependent on the initial condition, and delivers …

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Evaluating Human Versus Machine Learning Performance In Classifying Research Abstracts, Yeow Chong Goh, Xin Qing Cai, Walter Theseira, Giovanni Ko, Khiam Aik Khor

Research Collection School Of Economics

We study whether humans or machine learning (ML) classification models are better at classifying scientific research abstracts according to a fixed set of discipline groups. We recruit both undergraduate and postgraduate assistants for this task in separate stages, and compare their performance against the support vectors machine ML algorithm at classifying European Research Council Starting Grant project abstracts to their actual evaluation panels, which are organised by discipline groups. On average, ML is more accurate than human classifiers, across a variety of training and test datasets, and across evaluation panels. ML classifiers trained on different training sets are also more …

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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 …

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Realized Semicovariances, Tim Bollerslev, Jia Li, Andrew J. Patton, Rogier Quaedvlieg

Research Collection School Of Economics

We propose a decomposition of the realized covariance matrix into components based on the signs of the underlying high-frequency returns, and we derive the asymptotic properties of the resulting realized semicovariance measures as the sampling interval goes to zero. The first-order asymptotic results highlight how the same-sign and mixed-sign components load differently on economic information related to stochastic correlation and jumps. The second-order asymptotic results reveal the structure underlying the same-sign semicovariances, as manifested in the form of co-drifting and dynamic “leverage” effects. In line with this anatomy, we use data on a large cross-section of individual stocks to empirically …

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Bermudan Option In Singapore Savings Bonds, Kian Guan Lim

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The Singapore Savings Bonds (SSB) is a unique investment program offered by the Singapore government whereby retail investors can earn risk-free tax-free step-up interest closely matched to Treasury bond rates for up to 10 years and can redeem on any business day prior to maturity without any early redemption penalty. This study analyses the unique design of the SSB and provides a valuation of the Bermudan option for early redemption that is embedded in the SSB. The Black-Derman-Toy model is used to build the interest rate tree, and an iterative method is employed to avoid arbitrary specification of the pre-determined …

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Temporality And Acquiescent Immobility Among Aspiring Nurse Migrants In The Philippines, Yasmin Y. Ortiga, Romeo Luis A. Macabasag

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

While there is a considerable literature on how people decide to move from their places of origin, few studies have examined how aspiring migrants cope with immobility and eventually decide to let go of their migration aspirations. This paper uses the lens of migration temporalities to show how Filipino nurses unable to emigrate overseas eventually chose to remain in the Philippines. In particular, we discuss how nurses formulated these decisions as they experienced different forms of temporality: from an optimistic period of 'becoming a migrant' in nursing school to the precarious temporality of building work experience in a context of …

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Two Suggestions To Wp Mp Jamus Lim, Zhengxiao Wu

Research Collection School Of Economics

In a commentary, SMU Senior Lecturer of Statistics Wu Zhengxiao discussed the arguments presented by Workers’ Party’s candidate Associate Professor Jamus Lim during the live broadcast of a political debate, and put forth two suggestions for Assoc Prof Lim.

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Quantile Treatment Effects And Bootstrap Inference Under Covariate-Adaptive Randomization, Yichong Zhang, Xin Zheng

Research Collection School Of Economics

In this paper, we study the estimation and inference of the quantile treatment effect under covariate‐adaptive randomization. We propose two estimation methods: (1) the simple quantile regression and (2) the inverse propensity score weighted quantile regression. For the two estimators, we derive their asymptotic distributions uniformly over a compact set of quantile indexes, and show that, when the treatment assignment rule does not achieve strong balance, the inverse propensity score weighted estimator has a smaller asymptotic variance than the simple quantile regression estimator. For the inference of method (1), we show that the Wald test using a weighted bootstrap standard …

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Chinese Temple Networks In Southeast Asia: A Webgis Digital Humanities Platform For The Collaborative Study Of The Chinese Diaspora In Southeast Asia, Yingwei Yan, Kenneth Dean, Chen-Chieh Feng, Guan Thye Hue, Khee-Heong Koh, Lily Kong, Chang Woei Ong, Arthur Tay, Yi-Chen Wang, Yiran Xue

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This article introduces a digital platform for collaborative research on the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, focusing on networks of Chinese temples and associations extending from Southeast China to the various port cities of Southeast Asia. The Singapore Historical Geographic Information System (SHGIS) and the Singapore Biographical Database (SBDB) are expandable WebGIS platforms gathering and linking data on cultural and religious networks across Southeast Asia. This inter-connected platform can be expanded to cover not only Singapore but all of Southeast Asia. We have added layers of data that go beyond Chinese Taoist, Buddhist, and popular god temples to also display …

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Impacts Of Green Infrastructure On Flood Risk Perceptions In Hong Kong, Seung Kyum Kim, Paul Joose, Mia M. Bennett, Terry Van Gevelt

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

To better address climate unpredictability, green infrastructure is increasingly deployed alongside gray infrastructure as an alternative strategy for flood risk mitigation. Previous research has not clearly distinguished the flood-mitigation effects of green infrastructure at the local scale due to its complex range of functions including socioeconomic benefits, ecosystem services, and amenity value. Using data on 3768 housing sales from 2009 to 2019 in Hong Kong, we employ a difference-in-differences framework to examine the effect of green infrastructure on perceptions of flood risk mitigation, with housing prices as a proxy for risk perception. We find a positive effect of green infrastructure …

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Executive Function And Subjective Well-Being In Middle And Late Adulthood, Wei Xing Toh, Hwajin Yang, Andree Hartanto

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Objectives: A growing body of research has investigated psychosocial predictors of subjective well-being (SWB), a key component of healthy ageing, which comprises life satisfaction and affective well-being. However, few studies have examined how executive function (EF)-a collection of adaptive, goal-directed control processes-could affect SWB in middle and late adulthood. Methods: By analyzing a nationally representative adult cohort ranging from early 30s to early 80s from the Midlife Development in the United States 2 study, we examined two potential mediators (i.e., sense of control versus positive reappraisal) that could underlie the relation between EF and SWB. Further, we assessed how these …

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How To Make Critical Decisions Amid Covid-19 Pressures, David Chan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Time pressure and ambivalence are common when people make decisions in a crisis. Understanding the psychological dynamics helps us slow down to make better decisions.

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Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search For Vehicle Routing Problem With Cross-Docking, Aldy Gunawan, Audrey Tedja Widjaja, Pieter Vansteenwegen, Vincent F. Yu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cross-docking is considered as a method to manage and control the inventory flow, which is essential in the context of supply chain management. This paper studies the integration of the vehicle routing problem with cross-docking, namely VRPCD which has been extensively studied due to its ability to reducethe overall costs occurring in a supply chain network. Given a fleet of homogeneous vehicles for delivering a single type of product from suppliers to customers through a cross-dock facility, the objective of VRPCD is to determine the number of vehicles used and the corresponding vehicle routes, such that the vehicleoperational and transportation …

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Big Data, Spatial Optimization, And Planning, Kai Cao, Wenwen Li, Richard Church

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Spatial optimization represents a set of powerful spatial analysis techniques that can be used to identify optimal solution(s) and even generate a large number of competitive alternatives. The formulation of such problems involves maximizing or minimizing one or more objectives while satisfying a number of constraints. Solution techniques range from exact models solved with such approaches as linear programming and integer programming, or heuristic algorithms, i.e. Tabu Search, Simulated Annealing, and Genetic Algorithms. Spatial optimization techniques have been utilized in numerous planning applications, such as location-allocation modeling/site selection, land use planning, school districting, regionalization, routing, and urban design. These methods …

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

What The New Cabinet Line-Up Says About Leadership Continuity And Renewal, Tan K. B. Eugene

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Learning Music Composers' Styles: To Block Or To Interleave?, Sarah Shi Hui Wong, Amanda Chern Min Low, Sean H. K. Kang, Stephen Wee Hun Lim

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The Transnational Frontiers Of Japanese Education: Multiculturalism, Cosmopolitanism, And Global Isomorphism, Hiro Saito

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Legal Constraint In Emergencies: Reflections On Carl Schmitt, The Covid-19 Pandemic And Singapore | Symposium On Covid-19 & Public Law, Wei Yao, Kenny Chng

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Individuals Responses To Economic Cycles: Organizational Relevance And A Multilevel Theoretical Integration, Nina Sirola

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Ge2020 Commentary: Assessing The Voters’ Message To Pap (And Other Parties), Tan K. B. Eugene

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Family Law, Wei Jing Tricia Ho, Siyuan Chen

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Violators, Virtuous, Or Victims? How Global Newspapers Represent The Female Member Of Parliament, Devin K. Joshi, Meseret F. Hailu, Lauren J. Reising

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The Effect Of State Gratitude On Cognitive Flexibility: A Within-Subject Experimental Approach, Andree Hartanto, Nadia C. H. Ong, Wee Qin Ng, Nadyanna M. Majeed

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The Promises And Perils Of Insurtech, Lin Lin, Christopher C. H. Chen

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Soft Launch Of The Asian Principles For The Recognition And Enforcement Of Foreign Judgments, Adeline Chong

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Busting Myths And Dispelling Doubts About Covid-19, Mark Findlay

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Covid-19 And Management Education: Reflections On Challenges, Opportunities, And Potential Futures, Steve Brammer, Timothy Clark

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Job Duration And Match Characteristics Over The Business Cycle, Ismail Baydur, Toshihiko Mukoyama

Research Collection School Of Economics

Forecasting Singapore Gdp Using The Spf Data, Tian Xie, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

Redundancy Insurance Is Not Unemployment Insurance, Zhengxiao Wu

Research Collection School Of Economics

In-Fill Asymptotic Theory For Structural Break Point In Autoregressions, Liang Jiang, Xiaohu Wang, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

Evaluating Human Versus Machine Learning Performance In Classifying Research Abstracts, Yeow Chong Goh, Xin Qing Cai, Walter Theseira, Giovanni Ko, Khiam Aik Khor

Research Collection School Of Economics

Globalization And Top Income Shares, Lin Ma, Dimitrije Ruzic

Research Collection School Of Economics

Realized Semicovariances, Tim Bollerslev, Jia Li, Andrew J. Patton, Rogier Quaedvlieg

Research Collection School Of Economics

Bermudan Option In Singapore Savings Bonds, Kian Guan Lim

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Temporality And Acquiescent Immobility Among Aspiring Nurse Migrants In The Philippines, Yasmin Y. Ortiga, Romeo Luis A. Macabasag

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Two Suggestions To Wp Mp Jamus Lim, Zhengxiao Wu

Research Collection School Of Economics

Quantile Treatment Effects And Bootstrap Inference Under Covariate-Adaptive Randomization, Yichong Zhang, Xin Zheng

Research Collection School Of Economics

Chinese Temple Networks In Southeast Asia: A Webgis Digital Humanities Platform For The Collaborative Study Of The Chinese Diaspora In Southeast Asia, Yingwei Yan, Kenneth Dean, Chen-Chieh Feng, Guan Thye Hue, Khee-Heong Koh, Lily Kong, Chang Woei Ong, Arthur Tay, Yi-Chen Wang, Yiran Xue

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Impacts Of Green Infrastructure On Flood Risk Perceptions In Hong Kong, Seung Kyum Kim, Paul Joose, Mia M. Bennett, Terry Van Gevelt

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Executive Function And Subjective Well-Being In Middle And Late Adulthood, Wei Xing Toh, Hwajin Yang, Andree Hartanto

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

How To Make Critical Decisions Amid Covid-19 Pressures, David Chan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search For Vehicle Routing Problem With Cross-Docking, Aldy Gunawan, Audrey Tedja Widjaja, Pieter Vansteenwegen, Vincent F. Yu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Big Data, Spatial Optimization, And Planning, Kai Cao, Wenwen Li, Richard Church

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems