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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™

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

2012

Asian Studies

Research Collection School Of Economics

Articles 1 - 9 of 9

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Singapore Inflation Expectations: Expecting The Unexpected, Aurobindo Ghosh, Jun Yu Dec 2012

Singapore Inflation Expectations: Expecting The Unexpected, Aurobindo Ghosh, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

The study of inflation expectations of Singapore house-holds is a multi-disciplinary industry-relevant research that comes out of a partnership between Singapore Management University (SMU) and MasterCard. The research team for this MasterCard-SKBI Singapore Index of Inflation Expectations (SInDEx) project applied rigorous methods using current internet-based marketing survey tools for data-collection and advanced econometric techniques to analyse the data. The updates from the quarterly waves are keenly followed by policymakers, market watchers and the media because of the enormous importance of cost of living to individuals and businesses alike.

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Dynamic Poverty Decomposition Analysis: An Application To The Philippines, Tomoki Fujii Nov 2012

Dynamic Poverty Decomposition Analysis: An Application To The Philippines, Tomoki Fujii

Research Collection School Of Economics

In this paper, we propose a new method of poverty decomposition. Our method remedies the shortcomings of existing methods and has some desirable properties such as time-reversion consistency and subperiod additivity. It integrates the existing methods of growth-redistribution decomposition and sector-based decomposition, because it allows us to decompose poverty change into growth and redistribution components for each group (e.g. regions or sectors) in the economy. We extend our method to have six components and provide an empirical application to the Philippines for the period 1985-2009.

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Detecting Bubbles In Hong Kong Residential Property Market, Matthew S. Yiu, Jun Yu, Lu Jin Aug 2012

Detecting Bubbles In Hong Kong Residential Property Market, Matthew S. Yiu, Jun Yu, Lu Jin

Research Collection School Of Economics

This study uses a newly developed bubble detection method (Phillips, Shi and Yu, 2011) to identify real estate bubbles in the Hong Kong residential property market. Our empirical results reveal several positive bubbles in the Hong Kong residential property market, including one in 1995, a stronger one in 1997, another one in 2004, and a more recent one in 2008. In addition, the method identifies two negative bubbles in the data, one in 2000 and the other one in 2001. These empirical results continue to be valid for the mass segment and the luxury segment. However, the method finds a …

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Why Smes Should Aim At Becoming Exporters, Hian Teck Hoon Jul 2012

Why Smes Should Aim At Becoming Exporters, Hian Teck Hoon

Research Collection School Of Economics

In the fortnightly series entitled 'Engage SMU profs', Professor Hoon Hian Teck, Associate Dean of the School of Economics, answers the questions: Should SMEs aim to become exporters rather than serve only the domestic market? What are the benefits to SMEs in doing so? Does the smallness in size limit their productivity growth? Are there any channels for SMEs to get assistance from the authorities, and what are these? He commented that if more of our local SMEs look towards the international marketplace and sell to foreign markets, not only will Singapore's GDP be boosted, local businessmen will also get …

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Growth And Inequality In Singapore, Kong Weng Ho Jul 2012

Growth And Inequality In Singapore, Kong Weng Ho

Research Collection School Of Economics

While the strategy of openness had earned Singapore rapid economic growth, upward social mobility, and possibly decreasing inequality in the early years of development, the more recent years saw increasing inequality and with it an underlying possibly diminished upward intergenerational mobility due to skill-biased growth processes, skill-biased parental influence, liberalization in the education industry, and structural changes in the society which hurt the human capital accumulation of children in families under economic and intra-household stresses. In particular, the paternal influence on educational aspiration and attainment is more pronounced than the mother’s. Non-Chinese and youths from disrupted families are worse off …

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Changing Unchanged Inequality: Higher Education, Youth Population, And The Japanese Seniority Wage System, Ken Yamada, Daiji Kawaguchi May 2012

Changing Unchanged Inequality: Higher Education, Youth Population, And The Japanese Seniority Wage System, Ken Yamada, Daiji Kawaguchi

Research Collection School Of Economics

Wage inequality declined in the 1990s and rose after 2000 among full-time male workers in Japan. Narrowing wage inequality in the 1990s can be accounted for by a decline in between-group inequality resulting from a stable return to education and decreased returns to experience and tenure. Widening wage inequality after 2000 can be accounted for by a rise in within-group inequality resulting from a relative increase in educated and experienced workers, as well as changes in heterogeneous returns to human capital.

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Love And Money By Parental Match-Making: Evidence From Urban Couples In China, Fali Huang, Ginger Jin, Lixin Collin Xu May 2012

Love And Money By Parental Match-Making: Evidence From Urban Couples In China, Fali Huang, Ginger Jin, Lixin Collin Xu

Research Collection School Of Economics

Parental involvement in marriage matchmaking may distort the optimal spouse choice because parents are willing to substitute love for money. The rationale is that the joint income of married children can be shared among extended family members more easily than mutual attraction felt by the couple themselves, and as a result, the best spouse candidate in the parents' eyes can differ from what is optimal to the individual, even though parents are altruistic and care dearly about their children's welfare. We find supporting evidence for this prediction using a unique sample of urban couples in China in the early 1990s.

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Designing And Implementing An Evaluation Of A National Work Support Program, Kong Weng Ho, Irene Y. H. Ng, Thartmalingam Nesamani, Alex Lee, Tee Liang Ngiam Feb 2012

Designing And Implementing An Evaluation Of A National Work Support Program, Kong Weng Ho, Irene Y. H. Ng, Thartmalingam Nesamani, Alex Lee, Tee Liang Ngiam

Research Collection School Of Economics

Welfare reforms in the 1990s have shifted governments around the world towards financial assistance conditional on work. While large-scale rigorous research on welfare-to-work programs has demonstrated effectiveness towards employment in other countries, no such micro-level evaluation of a policy has ever been conducted in Singapore. This article describes the process of developing a large experimental evaluation of the Work Support Program, which the Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports started in 2006. The lessons learned from planning and implementing the research can be helpful to future researchers in negotiating long-term rigorous evaluations in an environment where collaborators lack sufficient …

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Public Housing: Appreciating Assets?, Sock Yong Phang Jan 2012

Public Housing: Appreciating Assets?, Sock Yong Phang

Research Collection School Of Economics

The topic of HDB housing is one that is close to the hearts and minds of the majority of Singaporeans. The first part of the presentation will provide a brief overview of price trends in Singapore’s housing sector. The second part delves into the market and policy factors behind the rapid increase in HDB housing prices since 2006. The monograph “Reflections on Housing a Nation” published by the Ministry of National Development in February 2011, contains numerous statements on the goals of housing policy. Briefly, the government is committed to affordable home ownership as a major pillar of Singapore’s public …

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