Economics | Open Access Articles | Digital Commons Network™

The Global Economy In 2021, Simon Baptist

Perspectives@SMU

The Economist Intelligence Unit is keeping an eye on inflation despite expecting interest rates to stay near zero. But don’t expect COVID-19 to be gone anytime soon

Go to article

Informal Institutions And Comparative Advantage Of South-Based Mnes: Theory And Evidence, Pao-Li Chang, Yuting Chen

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper builds a theory based on “informal institutions” to characterize the comparative advantage of South-based MNEs. MNEs headquartered in countries with poorer state institutions are shown to endogenously invest more in firm-specific institutional capital to compensate for the lack of state institutions, and as an optimal response, undertake FDI in countries with weaker institutions. We conduct an extensive test of the theory using worldwide firm-level greenfield FDI flows during 2009–2016, employing (among others) variations in the interaction of prevalence of informal institutions at home and state institutional qualities of host countries, as well as heterogeneity across sectors and firms …

Go to article

A Theory Of Revealed Indirect Preference, Gaoji Hu, Jiangtao Li, John K.-H. Quah, Rui Tang

Research Collection School Of Economics

A preference over menus is said to be an indirect preference if it is induced by a preference over the objects that make up those menus, i.e., a menu A is ranked over B whenever A contains an object that is preferred to every object in B. The basic question we address in this paper is the following: suppose an observer has partial information of an agent’s ranking over certain menus; what necessary and sufficient conditions on those rankings guarantee the existence of a preference over objects that induces the observed menu rankings? Our basic result has a wide variety …

Go to article

House Prices And Affordability, R. Greenaway-Mcgrevy, Peter C. B. Phillips

Research Collection School Of Economics

The decade following the global financial crisis (GFC) has witnessed rampant house price appreciation in many cities of the developed world. The metropolitan centres of New Zealand showcase this phenomenon with house price appreciation persistently outpacing income growth. In Auckland, the ratio of prevailing median house prices to median household income rose from 6.4 in 2010 to 10.0 in 2016 (Demographia, Citation2011, Citation2017), before declining to 8.6 by 2019 as house prices flat-lined while household incomes increased (Demographia, Citation2020). However, a strong resurgence in house prices during 2020 means that this ratio has resumed its upward trajectory, with an increase …

Go to article

Retirement Preparedness In Singapore, Junxing Chay, Seonghoon Kim

Research Collection School Of Economics

This chapter presents empirical evidence on a variety of measures to assess the social and economic well-being of near-retirees and retirees in Singapore based on rich data from the Singapore Life Panel, a nationally representative monthly panel survey of 50- to 70-year-old adults in Singapore. Large differences in retirement behaviour and household financial conditions related to retirement preparedness across education and wealth groups are documented. This suggests the importance of a retirement-related policy that focuses on the low-skilled and low-wealth groups. In addition, we discuss and evaluate current public policy designed to increase the employment of older workers and propose …

Go to article

Generalized Jump Regressions For Local Moments, Tim Bollerslev, Jia Li, Leonardo Salim Saker Chaves

Research Collection School Of Economics

We develop new high-frequency-based inference procedures for analyzing the relationship between jumps in instantaneous moments of stochastic processes. The estimation consists of two steps: the nonparametric determination of the jumps as differences in local averages, followed by a minimum-distance type estimation of the parameters of interest under general loss functions that include both least-square and more robust quantile regressions as special cases. The resulting asymptotic distribution of the estimator, derived under an infill asymptotic setting, is highly nonstandard and generally not mixed normal. In addition, we establish the validity of a novel bootstrap algorithm for making feasible inference including bias-correction. …

Go to article

Public Health Insurance And Pharmaceutical Innovation: Evidence From China, Xuan Zhang, Huihua Nie

Research Collection School Of Economics

Developing countries are characterized by low levels of pharmaceutical innovation. A likely reason is their small market size, which is not because of the population size but because of low levels of income and lack of health insurance coverage. This study exploits a natural experiment from the implementation of a public health insurance program for rural residents in China (New Cooperative Medical Scheme [NCMS]) to examine whether the pharmaceutical industry increases innovation regarding diseases covered by the NCMS that are prevalent in rural areas. We examine the 1993–2009 patent data to gauge pharmaceutical innovation in China. Diseases with a 10% …

Go to article

Joint Tests For Dynamic And Spatial Effects In Short Dynamic Panel Data Models With Fixed Effects And Heteroskedasticity, Zhenlin Yang

Research Collection School Of Economics

Simple and reliable tests are proposed for testing the existence of dynamic and/or spatial effects in fixed-effects panel data models with small T and possibly heteroskedastic errors. The tests are constructed based on the adjusted quasi scores (AQS), which correct the conditional quasi scores given the initial differences to account for the effect of initial values. To improve the finite sample performance, standardized AQS tests are also derived, which are shown to have much improved finite sample properties. All the proposed tests are robust against nonnormality, but some are not robust against cross-sectional heteroskedasticity (CH). A different type of adjustments …

Go to article

The Developmental State And Public Participation: The Case Of Energy Policymaking In Post-Fukushima Japan, Hiro Saito

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

After the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, the Japanese government tried to democratize energy policy-making by introducing public participation. Over the course of its implementation, however, public participation came to be subordinated to expert committees as the primary mechanism of policy rationalization. The expert committees not only neutralized the results of public participation but also discounted the necessity of public participation itself. This trajectory of public participation, from its historic introduction to eventual collapse, can be fully explained only in reference to complex interactions between the macroinstitutions and microsituations of Japanese policy-making at the time of the nuclear disaster: the macroinstitutional …

Go to article

Local Dominance, Emiliano Catonini, Jingyi Xue

SMU Economics and Statistics Working Paper Series

We define a local notion of weak dominance that speaks to the true choice problems among actions in a game tree and does not necessarily require to plan optimally for the future. A strategy is (globally) weakly dominant if and only if it prescribes a locally weakly dominant action at every decision node it reaches, and in this case local weak dominance is characterized by a (wishful-thinking) condition that requires no forward planning. From this local perspective, we identify form of contingent reasoning that are particularly natural, despite the absence of an obviously dominant strategy (Li, 2017). Following this approach, …

Go to article

Staying Connected: The Importance Of Social Integration On The Well-Being Of Older Adults, Paulin T. Straughan, Vincent Chua, Stephen Hoskins, Frosch Quek

ROSA Research Briefs

It has been about a year since COVID-19 first emerged and reshaped the daily lives of people around the globe, including Singaporeans. Since moving past the circuit breaker in June, Singapore has gradually re-opened and relaxed its restrictions in different phases. As Singapore prepares for Phase 3- the final and least restrictive phase, it is important to examine how Singaporeans have coped and responded with the circuit breaker (7 April 2020) and its gradual easing of restriction in Phase 1 (2nd June 2020) and Phase 2 (19 June 2020), and identify the groups which have fallen through the gaps in …

Go to article

Urbanization Policy And Economic Development: A Quantitative Analysis Of China's Differential Hukou Reforms, Wen-Tai Hsu, Lin Ma

Research Collection School Of Economics

The household registration system (hukou system) in China has hampered rural-urban migration by posing large migration friction. The system has been gradually relaxed in the past few decades, but the reforms have been differential in city size and by the coastal-inland divide. We find a striking contrast in the migration patterns between years 2005 and 2015; rural people tended to move more to the coastal urban region in 2005, but more to the inland urban region in 2015. We calibrate a spatial quantitative model to the world economy in both years with China being divided into the rural, coastal urban, …

Go to article

Point Optimal Testing With Roots That Are Functionally Local To Unity, Anna Bykhovskaya, Peter C. B. Phillips

Research Collection School Of Economics

Limit theory for regressions involving local to unit roots (LURs) is now used extensively in time series econometric work, establishing power properties for unit root and cointegration tests, assisting the construction of uniform confidence intervals for autoregressive coefficients, and enabling the development of methods robust to departures from unit roots. The present paper shows how to generalize LUR asymptotics to cases where the localized departure from unity is a time varying function rather than a constant. Such a functional local unit root (FLUR) model has much greater generality and encompasses many cases of additional interest that appear in practical work, …

Go to article

Trading Regularity And Fund Performance: Evidence In Uncertain Markets, Lin Tong, Zhe Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

High trading regularity funds outperform low trading regularity funds more during periods of low market returns and greater market and economic uncertainty. Their trading also has strong return predictability on stock returns during periods of greater uncertainty. They trade more around news events, and their news related trading predicts stock return stronger during periods of greater uncertainty. They also profit from liquidity provision in highly uncertain market environment. Overall our evidence suggests that high trading regularity funds trade more frequently during periods of high uncertainty when information production and processing skill is more valuable and when the demand for liquidity …

Go to article

Asymptotic Properties Of Least Squares Estimator In Local To Unity Processes With Fractional Gaussian Noises, Xiaohu Wang, Weilin Xiao, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper derives asymptotic properties of the least squares estimator of the autoregressive parameter in local to unity processes with errors being fractional Gaussian noises with the Hurst parameter H. It is shown that the estimator is consistent when H ∈ (0, 1). Moreover, the rate of convergence is n when H ∈ [0.5, 1). The rate of convergence is n^2H when H ∈ (0, 0.5). Furthermore, the limit distribution of the centered least squares estimator depends on H. When H = 0.5, the limit distribution is the same as that obtained in Phillips (1987a) for the local to …

Go to article

On Strategy-Proofness And The Salience Of Single-Peakedness In A Private Goods Economy, Shurojit Chatterji, Masso Jordi, Serizawa Shigehiro

Research Collection School Of Economics

We consider strategy-proof rules operating on a rich domain of preference profiles in a set up where multiple private goods have to be assigned to a set of agents with entitlements where preferences display satiation. We show that if the rule is in addition "desirable", in that it is tops-only, continuous, same-sided and individually rational with respect to the entitlements, then the preferences in the domain have to satisfy a variant of single-peakedness (referred to as smilattice single-peakedness). We also provide a converse of this main finding. It turns our that this domain coincides with the one already identified in …

Go to article

Quasi-Bayesian Inference For Production Frontiers, Xiaobin Liu, Thomas Tao Yang, Yichong Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

We propose a quasi-Bayesian method to conduct inference for the production frontier. This approach combines multiple first-stage extreme quantile estimates by the quasi-Bayesian method to produce the point estimate and confidence interval for the production frontier. We show the asymptotic properties of the proposed estimator and the validity of the inference procedure. The finite sample performance of our method is illustrated through simulations and an empirical application.

Go to article

Decomposing Duration Dependence: Skill Depreciation Vs. Statistical Discrimination, Ismail Baydur, Jianhuan Xu

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper develops a random matching model with unobserved worker heterogeneity and learning about worker types from unemployment duration. The model features negative duration dependence that stems from unobserved heterogeneity as well as statistical discrimination and skill depreciation. We estimate our model using micro-level data from Current Population Survey (CPS) and we decompose the contribution of each channel to job finding rates by duration. We find that shutting down statistical discrimination substantially increases the job finding rates of the long-term unemployed while skill depreciation mainly affects the medium-term unemployed.

Go to article

Firm Productivity And The Variety Of Inputs And Outputs: Evidence From Chinese Trade Data, Ken Onishi, Jianhuan Xu, Guang Yang

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper studies how the trade liberalization in China changes the firm productivity. We develop a framework to estimate revenue productivity (TFPR) and real productivity (TFPQ) with multi-product firms. We find that the aggregate TFPR increases 30\% from 2002-2007 and TFPQ increases 22\%, suggesting that the observed TFPR increase is mainly driven by real productivity change rather than the markup change. We further decompose the change of productivity into three channels: (1) access to foreign inputs; (2) technology upgrade; (3) resource re-allocation within the firm. We find the most significant channel is the last one, which explains half of the …

Go to article

Density Of Demand And The Consumer Benefit From Uber, Matthew H. Shapiro

Research Collection School Of Economics

Uber has attracted the attention of economists and policy makers for its innovations in the taxicab market and its potential for significant consumer welfare gains. The size of this gain depends in part on whether these innovations permit transactions previously costly or infeasible. Using New York City — the largest taxi market in the country — as its context, this paper estimates the level of any technological advantage Uber has over hail taxis in matching to consumers. I combine publicly available transportation data with data scraped from Uber and traffic cameras to estimate a model of the demand for transportation …

Go to article

Causal Change Detection In Possibly Integrated Systems: Revisiting The Money-Income Relationship, Shuping Shi, Stan Hurn, Peter C. B. Phillips

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper re-examines changes in the causal link between money and income in the United States over the past half century (1959-2014). Three methods for the data-driven discovery of change points in causal relationships are proposed, all of which can be implemented without prior detrending of the data. These methods are a forward recursive algorithm, a rolling window algorithm, and a recursive evolving algorithm all of which utilize subsample tests of Granger causality within a lagaugmented vector autoregressive framework. The limit distributions for these subsample Wald tests are provided. Bootstrap methods are developed to control family-wise size in the implementation …

Go to article

The Convergence Of Water, Electricity And Gas Industries: Implications For Ppp Design And Regulation, Sock Yong Phang

Research Collection School Of Economics

In several countries that have privatised their utilities, power and water are separate industries regulated by sector-specific regulators. In a parallel development, desalination has become an important source of water supply in countries where there is a shortage of cheap and clean freshwater. Where the energy source is gas, the use of gas-fired power plants to supply electricity for desalination links the water, electricity and gas industries. We use the case of the financial collapse of an integrated water and power project to illustrate the problems that can arise from such convergence, and to draw lessons for firms, Public-Private Partnerships …

Go to article

Testing For Structural Changes In Factor Models Via A Nonparametric Regression, Liangjun Su, Xia Wang

Research Collection School Of Economics

We propose a model-free test for structural changes in factor models. The basic idea is to regress the data on commonly estimated factors by local smoothing and compare the fitted values of time-varying factor loadings with those of time-invariant factor loadings estimated via principal component analysis. By construction, the test is designed to be powerful against both smooth structural changes and sudden structural breaks with a possibly unknown number of breaks and unknown break dates in the factor loadings. No restrictions on the form of alternatives or trimming of boundary regions near the beginning or end of the sample period …

Go to article

Diagnostic Tests For Homoskedasticity In Spatial Cross-Sectional Or Panel Models, Badi K. Baltagi, Alain Pirotte, Zhenlin Yang

Research Collection School Of Economics

We propose an Adjusted Quasi-Score (AQS) method for constructing tests for homoskedasticity in spatial econometric models. We first obtain an AQS function by adjusting the score-type function from the given model to achieve unbiasedness, and then develop an Outer-Product-of-Martingale-Difference (OPMD) estimate of its variance. In standard problems where a genuine (quasi) score vector is available, the AQS-OPMD method leads to finite sample improved tests over the usual methods. More importantly in non-standard problems where a genuine (quasi) score is not available and the usual methods fail, the proposed AQS-OPMD method provides feasible solutions. The AQS tests are formally derived and …

Go to article

Data Driven Value-At-Risk Forecasting Using A Svr-Garch-Kde Hybrid, Marius Lux, Wolfgang Karl Hardle, Stefan Lessmann

Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics

Appropriate risk management is crucial to ensure the competitiveness of financial institutions and the stability of the economy. One widely used financial risk measure is value-at-risk (VaR). VaR estimates based on linear and parametric models can lead to biased results or even underestimation of risk due to time varying volatility, skewness and leptokurtosis of financial return series. The paper proposes a nonlinear and nonparametric framework to forecast VaR that is motivated by overcoming the disadvantages of parametric models with a purely data driven approach. Mean and volatility are modeled via support vector regression (SVR) where the volatility model is motivated …

Go to article

The Dorian Gray Phenomenon In Financial Markets, Ajay Makhija

Asian Management Insights

Looking at the current state of the global economy and the extent of financial market hedonism through the lens of Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray”.

Go to article

Mandarins Make Markets: Leadership Rotations And Inter-Provincial Trade In China, Junyan Jiang, Yuan Mei

Research Collection School Of Economics

The careers of many public officials span multiple localities, yet the economic effects of their inter-regional movements are not well understood. This paper focuses on the rotation of provincial leaders in China and studies its impact on regional economic integration. Estimation results using the gravity framework indicate that when a provincial leader is appointed as the party secretary of a new province, the trade volume from the new province to the old province increases, but not vice versa. Additional analyses using two novel datasets that capture the intensity of inter-provincial socioeconomic activities in China corroborate this finding. We then construct …

Go to article

Can Retail Investors Learn From Insiders?, Ekkehart Boehmer, Bo Sang, Zhe Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper examines the trading patterns of retail investors following insider trading and the corresponding price impact. Retail investors follow the opportunistic purchases by insiders, but not their routine purchases. Neither investor attention nor common information such as earnings announcements or analysts forecast re- visions explains the results. They keep following insider purchases in subsequent four quarters. Moreover, for stocks with opportunistic insider purchases, those that retail investors bought yield higher cumulative abnormal returns than those that retail investors sold. The effect is mostly driven by the information compo- nent of the retail trades, rather than liquidity provision or temporary …

Go to article

The Revealed Preference Theory Of Stable Matchings With One-Sided Preferences, Gaoji Hu, Jiangtao Li, Rui Tang

Research Collection School Of Economics

We investigate the testable implications of the theory of stable matchings in two-sided matching markets with one-sided preferences. Our main result connects the revealed preference analysis to the well-known lattice structure of the set of stable matchings, and tests the rationalizability of a data set by analyzing the joins and meets of matchings.

Go to article

Uniform Nonparametric Inference For Time Series, Jia Li, Zhipeng Liao

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper provides the first result for the uniform inference based on nonparametric series estimators in a general time-series setting. We develop a strong approximation theory for sample averages of mixingales with dimensions growing with the sample size. We use this result to justify the asymptotic validity of a uniform confidence band for series estimators and show that it can also be used to conduct nonparametric specification test for conditional moment restrictions. New results on the validity of heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation consistent (HAC) estimators with increasing dimension are established for making feasible inference. An empirical application on the unemployment volatility …

Go to article

Full-Text Articles in Economics

The Global Economy In 2021, Simon Baptist

Perspectives@SMU

Informal Institutions And Comparative Advantage Of South-Based Mnes: Theory And Evidence, Pao-Li Chang, Yuting Chen

Research Collection School Of Economics

A Theory Of Revealed Indirect Preference, Gaoji Hu, Jiangtao Li, John K.-H. Quah, Rui Tang

Research Collection School Of Economics

House Prices And Affordability, R. Greenaway-Mcgrevy, Peter C. B. Phillips

Research Collection School Of Economics

Retirement Preparedness In Singapore, Junxing Chay, Seonghoon Kim

Research Collection School Of Economics

Generalized Jump Regressions For Local Moments, Tim Bollerslev, Jia Li, Leonardo Salim Saker Chaves

Research Collection School Of Economics

Public Health Insurance And Pharmaceutical Innovation: Evidence From China, Xuan Zhang, Huihua Nie

Research Collection School Of Economics

Joint Tests For Dynamic And Spatial Effects In Short Dynamic Panel Data Models With Fixed Effects And Heteroskedasticity, Zhenlin Yang

Research Collection School Of Economics

The Developmental State And Public Participation: The Case Of Energy Policymaking In Post-Fukushima Japan, Hiro Saito

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Local Dominance, Emiliano Catonini, Jingyi Xue

SMU Economics and Statistics Working Paper Series

Staying Connected: The Importance Of Social Integration On The Well-Being Of Older Adults, Paulin T. Straughan, Vincent Chua, Stephen Hoskins, Frosch Quek

ROSA Research Briefs

Urbanization Policy And Economic Development: A Quantitative Analysis Of China's Differential Hukou Reforms, Wen-Tai Hsu, Lin Ma

Research Collection School Of Economics

Point Optimal Testing With Roots That Are Functionally Local To Unity, Anna Bykhovskaya, Peter C. B. Phillips

Research Collection School Of Economics

Trading Regularity And Fund Performance: Evidence In Uncertain Markets, Lin Tong, Zhe Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Asymptotic Properties Of Least Squares Estimator In Local To Unity Processes With Fractional Gaussian Noises, Xiaohu Wang, Weilin Xiao, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

On Strategy-Proofness And The Salience Of Single-Peakedness In A Private Goods Economy, Shurojit Chatterji, Masso Jordi, Serizawa Shigehiro

Research Collection School Of Economics

Quasi-Bayesian Inference For Production Frontiers, Xiaobin Liu, Thomas Tao Yang, Yichong Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

Decomposing Duration Dependence: Skill Depreciation Vs. Statistical Discrimination, Ismail Baydur, Jianhuan Xu

Research Collection School Of Economics

Firm Productivity And The Variety Of Inputs And Outputs: Evidence From Chinese Trade Data, Ken Onishi, Jianhuan Xu, Guang Yang

Research Collection School Of Economics

Density Of Demand And The Consumer Benefit From Uber, Matthew H. Shapiro

Research Collection School Of Economics

Causal Change Detection In Possibly Integrated Systems: Revisiting The Money-Income Relationship, Shuping Shi, Stan Hurn, Peter C. B. Phillips

Research Collection School Of Economics

The Convergence Of Water, Electricity And Gas Industries: Implications For Ppp Design And Regulation, Sock Yong Phang

Research Collection School Of Economics

Testing For Structural Changes In Factor Models Via A Nonparametric Regression, Liangjun Su, Xia Wang

Research Collection School Of Economics

Diagnostic Tests For Homoskedasticity In Spatial Cross-Sectional Or Panel Models, Badi K. Baltagi, Alain Pirotte, Zhenlin Yang

Research Collection School Of Economics

Data Driven Value-At-Risk Forecasting Using A Svr-Garch-Kde Hybrid, Marius Lux, Wolfgang Karl Hardle, Stefan Lessmann

Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics

The Dorian Gray Phenomenon In Financial Markets, Ajay Makhija

Asian Management Insights

Mandarins Make Markets: Leadership Rotations And Inter-Provincial Trade In China, Junyan Jiang, Yuan Mei

Research Collection School Of Economics

Can Retail Investors Learn From Insiders?, Ekkehart Boehmer, Bo Sang, Zhe Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The Revealed Preference Theory Of Stable Matchings With One-Sided Preferences, Gaoji Hu, Jiangtao Li, Rui Tang

Research Collection School Of Economics

Uniform Nonparametric Inference For Time Series, Jia Li, Zhipeng Liao

Research Collection School Of Economics