Social and Behavioral Sciences | Open Access Articles

Why Being A For-Profit In The Non-Profit Sector Makes Sense, Carolyn Seah

Social Space

In 2007, the Lien Centre for Social Innovation was commissioned by the Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports to study the social enterprise space in Singapore for the first time. Carolyn Seah summarises the study’s findings.

Go to article

Sleepless In Singapore, Jack Sim

Social Space

Is it time for Singapore to adopt a new social and business model? Jack Sim, the inimitable founder of World Toilet Organization, unveils his ‘not-so-wild-and-far-fetched’ vision of a timeless zone in Singapore.

Go to article

Exchange Rate Changes And Trade Balance: An Empirical Study Of The Case Of Japan, Ziwei Shao

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This paper attempts to identify the major economic factors that influence the bilateral trade balance between Japan and the US. Differing from conventional elasticities approach, one more variable--the net foreign assets--is added in the Vector Autoregression estimation using quarterly data from 1980: I to 2006: IV. The Johansen and Juselius result indicates three long-run relationships among five macro variables: trade balance, domestic income, foreign income, net foreign assets and real exchange rate. Short run adjustment parameters are identified as coefficients of the error correction terms. The variance in trade balance due to variations in the two macro variables--the exchange rate …

Go to article

Are De Jure Labor Laws Absolute? Formal Manufacturing In India, Gurmeet Singh Ghumman

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

We investigate the view that de facto labor market conditions are important in evaluating the effects of labor institutions in developing countries where enactment does not necessarily imply enforcement. Using India as a case study we empirically investigate the effects of labor markets on the organized manufacturing sector from 1970 to 1997. Recognizing that the state can intervene in the outcome of labor disputes we construct a measure to proxy the degree of the state legislature's prejudice towards pro-worker causes. We argue that leftist and communist political parties can interfere in the resolution of disputes in favor of workers through …

Go to article

Offshore Financial Havens: Their Role In International Capital Flows, Zhixiang Sun

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The purpose of this paper is to study the role of offshore financial havens in international capital flows. We examine the effects of being a tax haven, a money laundering centre or an offshore financial centre (OFC), which often overlap. We want to see whether these places are used as entrepots (which means temporary storage for funds) or as investment places or both. We mainly use two complementary data sets: bilateral cross-border asset holding and financial intermediation. One is a stock variable and the other one is a flow variable. We apply the gravity model to bilateral cross-border asset holding …

Go to article

Rolling Adf Tests: Detecting Rational Bubbles In Greater China Stock Markets, Peng Huang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Following Phillips, Wu and Yu (2007), this paper extends their bubble detecting work to several Greater China stock markets. Two alternative bubble detecting methods, the forward recursive ADF tests raised by Phillips et al. (2007) and the modified version, forward rolling ADF tests, are implemented and compared. Monte Carlo simulations are performed to determine the critical values of the ADF statistic under different sample size. Empirical results demonstrate that only rolling ADF tests are successful in detecting rational bubbles by overcoming the problem of periodically collapsing bubble. As we have expected, bubbles in China Mainland stock market are detected. Out …

Go to article

Stock Markets And Income Inequality: A Cross-Country Study, Elizabeth Mathew

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This paper conducts a comprehensive analysis to understand how stock market ratios affect net income inequality. The study of how finance impacts income distribution is relevant as the income distribution of a nation influences savings decisions, resource allocation, innovation incentives and public policy and hence impacts the process of economic development. Using a cross-sectional data set of 68 countries and panel data set of 61 countries from 1975 to 2005, I apply cross-sectional OLS and panel regressions to look at how stock market size, liquidity, and activity impact income inequality. While stock market size is found to strongly impact income …

Go to article

Flow-Performance Relationship And Tournament Behavior In The Mutual Fund Industry, Baoling Ma

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In this paper, we interpret the flow-performance relationship as an incentive scheme implicitly given to mutual fund managers by mutual fund investors. We show that the flow-performance relationship varies not only with economic activity but also across fund attributes. We provide evidence that the degree of convexity of the flow-performance relationship has a positive effect on the magnitude of tournament behavior. Different from the conventional tournament hypothesis, we show that although the convexity of the flow-performance relationship does produce implicit incentives for fund managers to modify risk-taking behavior as a function of their prior performance, whether or not the mid-year …

Go to article

Growing Civil Society In Singapore, Braema Mathi

Social Space

After some time in the wilderness, civl society is, once again, back in favour. Braema Mathi traces the incredible journey that it has taken in Singapore and asks what the future has in store.

Go to article

Optimal Bandwidth Selection In Heteroskedasticity-Autocorrelation Robust Testing, Yixiao Sun, Peter C. B. Phillips, Sainan Jin

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper considers studentized tests in time series regressions with nonparametrically autocorrelated errors. The studentization is based on robust standard errors with truncation lag M = bT for some constant b âˆˆ (0, 1] and sample size T. It is shown that the nonstandard fixed-b limit distributions of such nonparametrically studentized tests provide more accurate approximations to the finite sample distributions than the standard small-b limit distribution. We further show that, for typical economic time series, the optimal bandwidth that minimizes a weighted average of type I and type II errors is larger by an order of magnitude than the …

Go to article

A Union Of Gender Equality And Pragmatic Patriarchy: International Marriages And Citizenship Laws In Singapore, Eugene K. B. Tan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

As a patriarchal society, government policies, societal norms and government regulations in Singapore mirror that normative ideal. Citizenship status and rights along gender lines, manifested in the legal recognition of children of international marriages, reflected this reality for much of Singapore's independence. However, the onslaught of globalization, the rise in international marriages, disconcerting declining birth rates, and an acceptance of 'foreign talent' have given the economic imperative and demographic impulse to grant citizenship (by descent) to a person born outside Singapore whose father or mother is a citizen of Singapore, by birth, registration or descent. Previously, such a person would …

Go to article

Refined Inference On Long Memory In Realized Volatility, Peter C. B. Phillips, Offer Lieberman

Research Collection School Of Economics

There is an emerging consensus in empirical finance that realized volatility series typically display long range dependence with a memory parameter around 0.4 (Andersen et al., 2001; Martens et al., 2004). The present article provides some illustrative analysis of how long memory may arise from the accumulative process underlying realized volatility. The article also uses results in Lieberman and Phillips (2004, 2005) to refine statistical inference about by higher order theory. Standard asymptotic theory has an error rate for error rejection probabilities, and the theory used here refines the approximation to an error rate of. The new formula is independent …

Go to article

Hong Kong's Money: The History, Logic And Operation Of The Currency Peg, Hwee Kwan Chow

Research Collection School Of Economics

No abstract provided.

Go to article

Birth Spacing Effect On Children's Attainments: Indentification Using Instrument Variables, Jing Xie

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In this study, I address the relationship between an often overlooked dimension of family structure--the spacing between children's births--and the degree of children's attainments such as Mathematics, Reading Cognition and Reading Comprehension. Comparing to the results of OLS estimation, 2SLS Estimation using Twin and Catholic as Instrument Variables shows less significant effects on children's attainments. Hausman Test shows that OLS estimators are not consistent with 2SLS estimators, which means there is endogenous problem in OLS estimation. As the result in 2SLS shows the different spacing effects in different spacing groups, it is possible to use nonlinear estimation (quadratic form of …

Go to article

Test For Infinite Variance In Stock Returns, Xian Ning Yan

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The existence of second order moment or the finite variance is a commonly used assumption in financial time series analysis. We examine the validation of this condition for main stock index return series by applying the extreme value theory. We compare the performances of the adaptive Hill's estimator and the Smith's estimator for the tail index using Monte Carlo simulations for both i.i.d data and dependent data. The simulation results show that the Hill's estimator with adaptive data-based truncation number performs better in both cases. It has not only smaller bias but also smaller MSE when the true tail index …

Go to article

Target Saving In An Overlapping Generations Model, Ashok S. Guha, Brishti Guha

Research Collection School Of Economics

We examine a model in which the utility function has been engineered so that it is optimal for consumers to aim for a fixed target level of retirement resources. In this case consumption displays excess sensitivity to current income as well as perfect old age insurance. In an overlapping generations model, this leads naturally to multiple and unstable equilibria. Under static expectations, it also leads to a well-defined dynamics, including possible historical traps, implosions involving ever-diminishing capital stock and ever-increasing interest rates, and the feasibility of optimal one-time interventions.

Go to article

Two-Sample Estimation Of Poverty Rates For Disabled People: An Application To Tanzania, Tomoki Fujii

Research Collection School Of Economics

Estimating poverty measures for disabled people in developing countries is di cult, partly because relevant data are not available. We develop two methods to estimate poverty by the disability status of the household head. We extend the small-area estimation proposed by Elbers, Lanjouw and Lanjouw (2002, 2003) so that we can run a regression on head's disability status even when such information is unavailable in the survey. We do so by aggregation and by moment adjusted two sample instrumental variable estimation. Our results from Tanzania show that both methods work well, and that disability is indeed associated with poverty.

Go to article

Education And Trade, Pao Li Chang, Fali Huang

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper examines the inherent link between a countryís education system and its comparative advantage in trade. It suggests that di§erences in education systems across countries are probably a stable equilibrium result that is compatible with and reinforced by trade patterns. In equilibrium, two distinct types of countries emerge, one that exports creativity-intensive products and has an education system encouraging diversity (as illustrated by the US), and the other one that exports high-quality manufactured products and has an education system promoting homogeneity in student quality (as illustrated by Japan). Our Öndings present a novel explanation for the coexistence of low …

Go to article

Estimating The Dynamics Of Mutual Fund Alphas And Betas, Harry Mamaysky, Matthew Spiegel, Hong Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This article develops a Kalman filter model to track dynamic mutual fund factor loadings. It then uses the estimates to analyze whether managers with market-timing ability can be identified ex ante. The primary findings are as follows: (i) Ordinary least squares (OLS) timing models produce false positives (nonzero alphas) at too high a rate with either daily or monthly data. In contrast, the Kalman filter model produces them at approximately the correct rate with monthly data; (ii) In monthly data, though the OLS models fail to detect any timing among fund managers, the Kalman filter does; (iii) The alpha and …

Go to article

Sanctions Against Belarus: Normative Unintended, Clara Portela

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The goals pursued by the EU vis-à-vis Belarus through its sanctions policies are unequivocally normative. The EU refers to the ‘violations of international electoral standards’ in the 2006 presidential elections and the ‘crackdown on civil society and democratic opposition’ as the primary reasons for the imposition of sanctions. The EU sanctions strategy against Belarus has followed an incrementalist logic, unfolding in parallel to the evolution of the Belarusian state towards authoritarianism.

Go to article

Ethnic Differentials In Parental Health Seeking For Childhood Illness In Vietnam, Bussarawan Teerawichitchainan, James F. Phillips

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Vietnam's sustained investment in primary healthcare since the onset of socialism has lowered infant and childhood mortality rates and improved life expectancy, exceeding progress achieved in other poor countries with comparable levels of income per capita. The recent introduction of user fees for primary healthcare services has generated concern that economic policies may have adversely affected health-seeking behavior and health outcomes of the poor, particularly among impoverished families who are members of socially marginalized minority groups. This paper examines this debate by analyzing parental recall of illness and care-seeking for sick children under the age of 5 years recorded by …

Go to article

The Stress-Affiliation Paradigm Revisited: Do People Prefer The Kindness Of Strangers Or Their Attractiveness?, Norman P. Li, Rose A. Halterman, Margaret J. Cason, George P. Knight, Jon K. Maner

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Two studies employed a classic affiliation-under-stress paradigm and examined people's preferences for affiliating with kind versus attractive same- and opposite-sex targets. When men were under default conditions of low stress, they preferred to affiliate with attractive women. However, men placed in a high stress situation instead preferred to interact with kind women. Regardless of stress level, women preferred to affiliate with kind, rather than attractive, men. When choosing among interaction partners of their own sex, participants uniformly chose to interact with kind others, regardless of stress level. This research builds on traditional stress-affiliation research, which has focused on whether people …

Go to article

The Asean Charter As "Legs To Go Places": Ideational Norms And Pragmatic Legalism In Community Building In Southeast Asia, Eugene K. B. Tan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The Charter of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has been hailed as a legal instrument that would integrate the ten constituent members as a community and a regional organization. Ostensibly, the Charter has three strategic thrusts in support of the vision of the ASEAN Community. The first is to formalize ASEAN as an institution while streamlining its decision-making processes. Secondly, the Charter seeks to strengthen ASEAN institutions. Thirdly, it seeks to establish mechanisms to monitor compliance and settle disputes. The article considers the extent to which the Charter will help ASEAN achieve its aims. This is especially pertinent …

Go to article

Adaptive Estimation Of Autoregressive Models With Time-Varying Variances, Ke-Li Xu, Peter C. B. Phillips

Research Collection School Of Economics

Stable autoregressive models are considered with martingale differences errors scaled by an unknown nonparametric time-varying function generating heterogeneity. An important special case involves structural change in the error variance, but in most practical cases the pattern of variance change over time is unknown and may involve shifts at unknown discrete points in time, continuous evolution or combinations of the two. This paper develops kernel-based estimators of the residual variances and associated adaptive least squares (ALS) estimators of the autoregressive coefficients. Simulations show that efficiency gains are achieved by the adaptive procedure.

Go to article

On Being A Mindful Authoritarian: Is Need For Cognition Always Associated With Greater Tolerance Of Deviant And Stigmatized Groups?, Kim-Pong Tam, Angela K. Y. Leung, Chi-Yue Chiu

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Previous research shows that the motivation to be mindful is associated with less intolerance toward deviant and stigmatized groups. The present research examines authoritarianism as a possible moderator of this seemingly robust finding. We obtained consistent evidence from two studies that authoritarianism (right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation) moderates the relationship between need for cognition and punitiveness. Among low authoritarians, need for cognition was negatively associated with punitiveness and dispositional attribution of crimes and positively associated with support for rehabilitation of criminals. However, among high authoritarians, the pattern reversed. These results are discussed in the context of some recent advances in …

Go to article

Unit Root Model Selection, Peter C. B. Phillips

Research Collection School Of Economics

Some limit properties for information based model selection criteria are given in the context of unit root evaluation and various assumptions about initial conditions. Allowing for a nonparametric short memory component, standard information criteria are shown to be weakly consistent for a unit root provided the penalty coefficient Cn?? and Cn/n?0 as n??. Strong consistency holds when Cn/(log logn)3?? under conventional assumptions on initial conditions and under a slightly stronger condition when initial conditions are infinitely distant in the unit root model. The limit distribution of the AIC criterion is obtained.

Go to article

Rational And Boundedly Rational Behavior In Sender-Receiver Games, Massimiliano Landi, Domenico Colucci

Research Collection School Of Economics

The authors investigate the strategic rationale behind the message sent by Osama bin Laden on the eve of the 2004 U.S. Presidential elections. They model this situation as a signaling game in which a population of receivers takes a binary choice, the outcome is decided by majority rule, sender and receivers have conflicting interests, and there is uncertainty about both players’ degree of rationality. They characterize the structure of the sequential equilibria of the game as a function of the parameters governing the uncertainty and find that in all pure strategy equilibria, the outcome most preferred by the rational sender …

Go to article

Balancing Competing Interests In Bankruptcy: Discharge By Certificate Of The Official Assignee In Singapore, S. Chandra Mohan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

After more than a hundred years, Singapore made major reforms to its bankruptcy laws in 1995. These changes attracted considerable public interest, with the Government taking pains to emphasise that the new law was designed to strike a balance between the interest of the debtor, the creditor and society. The greatest scrutiny of the provisions, to determine whether in law and in practice the competing interests of debtors and creditors could effectively be balanced, was in respect of the discharge provisions. In this article, the writer, who was then the Official Assignee, discusses how the novel remedy of discharge by …

Go to article

Civil Liabilities For False Or Misleading Statements Made By Listed Companies To The Securities Markets In Singapore, Wai Yee Wan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This article examines the scope and efficacy of the civil remedies available to investors against listed companies which have made false or misleading statements in the secondary securities market in Singapore, both at common law and the statutory compensation scheme under the Securities and Futures Act. It argues that there are a number of limitations faced by such investors in bringing claims founded in tort law against the listed companies. While the statutory compensation scheme attempts to improve the position of investors, there are a number of deficiencies in the scheme the most significant of which is the ceiling on …

Go to article

Resisting The Socialist Fetish, Shubhankar Dam

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

No abstract provided.

Go to article

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Why Being A For-Profit In The Non-Profit Sector Makes Sense, Carolyn Seah

Social Space

Sleepless In Singapore, Jack Sim

Social Space

Exchange Rate Changes And Trade Balance: An Empirical Study Of The Case Of Japan, Ziwei Shao

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Are De Jure Labor Laws Absolute? Formal Manufacturing In India, Gurmeet Singh Ghumman

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Offshore Financial Havens: Their Role In International Capital Flows, Zhixiang Sun

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Rolling Adf Tests: Detecting Rational Bubbles In Greater China Stock Markets, Peng Huang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Stock Markets And Income Inequality: A Cross-Country Study, Elizabeth Mathew

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Flow-Performance Relationship And Tournament Behavior In The Mutual Fund Industry, Baoling Ma

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Growing Civil Society In Singapore, Braema Mathi

Social Space

Optimal Bandwidth Selection In Heteroskedasticity-Autocorrelation Robust Testing, Yixiao Sun, Peter C. B. Phillips, Sainan Jin

Research Collection School Of Economics

A Union Of Gender Equality And Pragmatic Patriarchy: International Marriages And Citizenship Laws In Singapore, Eugene K. B. Tan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Refined Inference On Long Memory In Realized Volatility, Peter C. B. Phillips, Offer Lieberman

Research Collection School Of Economics

Hong Kong's Money: The History, Logic And Operation Of The Currency Peg, Hwee Kwan Chow

Research Collection School Of Economics

Birth Spacing Effect On Children's Attainments: Indentification Using Instrument Variables, Jing Xie

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Test For Infinite Variance In Stock Returns, Xian Ning Yan

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Target Saving In An Overlapping Generations Model, Ashok S. Guha, Brishti Guha

Research Collection School Of Economics

Two-Sample Estimation Of Poverty Rates For Disabled People: An Application To Tanzania, Tomoki Fujii

Research Collection School Of Economics

Education And Trade, Pao Li Chang, Fali Huang

Research Collection School Of Economics

Estimating The Dynamics Of Mutual Fund Alphas And Betas, Harry Mamaysky, Matthew Spiegel, Hong Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Sanctions Against Belarus: Normative Unintended, Clara Portela

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Ethnic Differentials In Parental Health Seeking For Childhood Illness In Vietnam, Bussarawan Teerawichitchainan, James F. Phillips

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The Stress-Affiliation Paradigm Revisited: Do People Prefer The Kindness Of Strangers Or Their Attractiveness?, Norman P. Li, Rose A. Halterman, Margaret J. Cason, George P. Knight, Jon K. Maner

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The Asean Charter As "Legs To Go Places": Ideational Norms And Pragmatic Legalism In Community Building In Southeast Asia, Eugene K. B. Tan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Adaptive Estimation Of Autoregressive Models With Time-Varying Variances, Ke-Li Xu, Peter C. B. Phillips

Research Collection School Of Economics

On Being A Mindful Authoritarian: Is Need For Cognition Always Associated With Greater Tolerance Of Deviant And Stigmatized Groups?, Kim-Pong Tam, Angela K. Y. Leung, Chi-Yue Chiu

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Unit Root Model Selection, Peter C. B. Phillips

Research Collection School Of Economics

Rational And Boundedly Rational Behavior In Sender-Receiver Games, Massimiliano Landi, Domenico Colucci

Research Collection School Of Economics

Balancing Competing Interests In Bankruptcy: Discharge By Certificate Of The Official Assignee In Singapore, S. Chandra Mohan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Civil Liabilities For False Or Misleading Statements Made By Listed Companies To The Securities Markets In Singapore, Wai Yee Wan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Resisting The Socialist Fetish, Shubhankar Dam

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law