Economics Commons^™

Common Power Laws For Cities And Spatial Fractal Structures, Tomoya Mori, Tony E. Smith, Wen-Tai Hsu

Research Collection School Of Economics

City-size distributions are known to be well approximated by power laws across a wide range of countries. But such distributions are also meaningful at other spatial scales, such as within certain regions of a country. Using data from China, France, Germany, India, Japan, and the United States, we first document that large cities are significantly more spaced out than would be expected by chance alone. We next construct spatial hierarchies for countries by first partitioning geographic space using a given number of their largest cities as cell centers and then continuing this partitioning procedure within each cell recursively. We find …

Hybrid Stochastic Local Unit Roots, Offer Lieberman, Peter C. B. Phillips

Research Collection School Of Economics

Two approaches have dominated formulations designed to capture small departures from unit root autoregressions. The first involves deterministic departures that include local-to-unity (LUR) and mildly (or moderately) integrated (MI) specifications where departures shrink to zero as the sample size n -> infinity. The second approach allows for stochastic departures from unity, leading to stochastic unit root (STUR) specifications. This paper introduces a hybrid local stochastic unit root (LSTUR) specification that has both LUR and STUR components and allows for endogeneity in the time varying coefficient that introduces structural elements to the autoregression. This hybrid model generates trajectories that, upon normalization, …

Random Assignment Of Bundles, Shurojit Chatterji, Peng Liu

Research Collection School Of Economics

We propose a model studying the random assignments of bundles with no free disposal. The key difference between our model and the one where objects are allocated (see Bogomolnaia and Moulin (2001)) is one of feasibility. The implications of this difference are significant. Firstly, the characterization of sd-efficient random assignments is more complex. Secondly, we are able to identify a preference restriction, called essential monotonicity, under which the random serial dictatorship rule (extended to the setting with bundles) is equivalent to the probabilistic serial rule (extended to the setting with bundles). This equivalence implies the existence of a rule on …

Welfare Consequences Of Access To Health Insurance For Rural Households: Evidence From The New Cooperative Medical Scheme In China, Jessica Ya Sun

Research Collection School Of Economics

This study evaluates the welfare benefits of the New Cooperative Medical Scheme (NCMS), the main public health insurance plan for the rural population in China. The findings show that the value of the NCMS to recipients is slightly lower than the government's costs of implementation, ranging from 0.79 to 0.97 per RMB of the resource cost of the NCMS. The estimated moral hazard costs are low compared with the total benefits. It is also estimated that the benefits originating from the NCMS's insurance function only constitute 20% of the total benefits, suggesting a need for higher generosity levels among rural …

Time-Series Momentum: Is It There?, Dashan Huang, Jiangyuan Li, Liyao Wang, Guofu Zhou

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Time-series momentum (TSM) refers to the predictability of the past 12-month return on the next one-month return, and is the focus of several recent influential studies. This paper shows, however, that asset-by-asset time-series regressions reveal little evidence of TSM, both in- and out-of-sample. While the t-statistic in a pooled regression appears large, it is not statistically reliable as it is less than the critical values of parametric and non-parametric bootstraps. From an investment perspective, the TSM strategy is profitable, but its performance is virtually the same as that of a similar strategy that is based on historical sample mean and …

Estimation Of Fixed Effects Spatial Dynamic Panel Data Models With Small T And Unknown Heteroskedasticity, Liyao Li, Zhenlin Yang

Research Collection School Of Economics

We consider the estimation and inference of fixed effects (FE) spatial dynamic panel data (SDPD) models under small T and unknown heteroskedasticity by extending the M-estimation strategy for homoskedastic FE-SDPD model of Yang (2018, Journal of Econometrics). Unbiased estimating equations are obtained by adjusting the conditional quasi-score functions given the initial observations, leading to M-estimators that are free from the initial conditions and robust against unknown cross-sectional heteroskedasticity. Consistency and asymptotic normality of the proposed M-estimator are established. The standard errors are obtained by representing the estimating equations as sums of martingale differences. Monte Carlo results show that the proposed …

Sustainable Cooperation In International Trade: A Quantitative Analysis, Yuan Mei

Research Collection School Of Economics

How does the presence of multilateral institutions affect the sustainability of trade-policy cooperation? Do free-trade agreements make multilateral cooperation less sustainable? Will countries be more likely to deviate from negotiated tariffs when more trade liberalization realizes in the future? These questions have been studied in theory literature using models that feature repeated games, but have yet to be quantitatively analyzed. In this paper, I propose a methodology to quantitatively characterize the equilibrium strategies on tariffs of various nations in a widely used repeated-game framework. I then apply this methodology to address these questions from a quantitative perspective. The numerical results …

Fertility And Rural Electrification In Bangladesh, Tomoki Fujii, Abu S. Shonchoy

Research Collection School Of Economics

We use contemporaneous and retrospective panel datasets to examine the household-level relationship between fertility and access to electricity in Bangladesh. We find that access to electricity reduces fertility by about 0.2 children over a period of five years or total fertility rate by about 1.2 in most estimates. This finding is robust with respect to the choice of the estimation method, the choice of sample, and potential presence of endogeneity. The finding also corroborates the theoretical predictions on time use and consumption pattern derived from our model of electrification and fertility. The results also suggest that television is an important …

Why Do Businesses Grow Faster In Urban Areas Than In Rural Areas?, Lee, Jungho, Jianhuan Xu

Research Collection School Of Economics

We document that growth of business earnings is mostly observed among young firmsin metro areas. Three explanations are considered: metro areas attract more-productiveentrepreneurs, and reaching the optimal size takes time due to borrowing constraints;metro areas provide better learning opportunities; and high operating costs in metroareas allow only the productive firms to survive. We use a firm-dynamics model with alocation choice to quantify the extent to which the three theories explain the data. Wefind the first two theories largely explain the high growth among metro, young firms. Ourmodel also suggests the distortion in entrepreneurs’ location choice can induce substantialwelfare loss.

The Rising Importance Of Chinese Monetary Policy, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Expert expects the influence of Chinese monetary policy to rise as the country’s share of the global economy increases

Skbi Big 5 Survey 2020 February, Singapore Management University

Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics

On balance, our overall read of the latest multiyear Big5 survey results implies the following economy-at-risk scale (least to most): India, US, Euro Area, Japan and China (i.e., India’s economy might be least at-risk, while China is deemed to be most at-risk). Broadly, survey participants expect the risk assessment to GDP growth to be skewed to the downside in 2020 followed by a more balanced backdrop in 2021. But participants seem to be more divided, with most responses favoring “downside” or/and “balanced” risks, on the 2022 growth environment. The risks to headline inflation in 2020, however, appear to be more …

Local Powers Of Least-Squares-Based Test For Panel Fractional Ornstein-Uhlenbeck Process, Katsuto Tanaka, Weilin Xiao, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

Based on the least squares estimator, this paper proposes a novel method to test the sign of the persistence parameter in a panel fractional Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process with a known Hurst parameter H. Depending on H ∈ (1/2, 1), H = 1/2, or H ∈ (0, 1/2), three test statistics are considered. In the null hypothesis the persistence parameter is zero. Based on a panel of continuous record of observations, the null asymptotic distributions are obtained when T is fixed and N is assumed to go to infinity, where T is the time span of the sample and N is the …

Infrastructure Investment And Travel Time, Yumi Koh, Gea M. Lee

Research Collection School Of Economics

We examine additional travel time that arises as reconstruction of non-functioning bridges gets delayed. Our simulations show that the extent to which a budget increase reduces such additional travel time is rather modest. We show that a substantial portion of the unsolved travel time results from budgetary allocations.

Corrigendum To "On Time-Varying Factor Models: Estimation And Testing" [J. Econometrics 198 (2017) 84-101], Liangjun Su, Xia Wang

Research Collection School Of Economics

We note that Su and Wang (2017, On Time-varying Factor Models: Estimation and Testing, Journal of Econometrics 198, 84-101) ignore the bias terms when estimating the time-varying factor models. In this note, we correct the theoretical results on the estimation of time-varying factor models. The asymptotic results for testing the correct specification of time invariant factor loadings are not affected.

The Relative Price Of Capital And Economic Structure, Roberto Samaniego, Juliana Yu Sun

Research Collection School Of Economics

Are trends in the price of capital technological in nature? First, we find that trends in the relative price of capital vary significantly across countries. We then show that a multi-industry growth model, calibrated to match differences in economic structure around the world and productivity growth rates across industries, accounts for this variation – mainly due to variation in the composition of capital. The finding indicates that the rate of change in the relative price of capital can be interpreted as investment-specific technical change – the extent to which productivity growth is relatively more rapid in the capital-producing sector. The …

Preferences With Changing Ambiguity Aversion, Jingyi Xue

Research Collection School Of Economics

We provide two extensions of Gilboa and Schmeidler (J Math Econ 18:141–153, 1989)’s maxmin expected utility decision rule to accommodate a decision maker’s changing ambiguity attitudes. The two rules are, respectively, a weighted maxmin rule and a variant constraint rule. The former evaluates an act by a weighted average of its worst and best possible expected utilities over a set of priors, with the weights depending on the act. The latter evaluates an act by its worst expected utility over a neighborhood of a set of approximating priors, with the size of the neighborhood depending on the act. Canonical representations …

Restricted Probabilistic Fixed Ballot Rules And Hybrid Domains, Shurojit Chatterji, Souvik Roy, Soumyarup Sadhukhan, Arunava Sen, Huaxia Zeng

Research Collection School Of Economics

We study Random Social Choice Functions (or RSCFs) in a standard ordinal mech-anism design model. We introduce a new preference domain called a hybrid domain which includes as special cases as the complete domain and the single-peaked domain. We characterize the class of unanimous and strategy-proof RSCFs on these domains and refer to them as Restricted Probabilistic Fixed Ballot Rules (or RPFBRs). These RSCFs are not necessarily decomposable, i.e., cannot be written as a convex combina-tion of their deterministic counterparts. We identify a necessary and sufficient condition under which decomposability holds for anonymous RPFBRs. Finally, we provide an axiomatic justification …

The Economist’S Vision For 2020, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

The global economy will have stable but sluggish growth due to the macro environment

The World In 2020, Simon Baptist

Library Events

Simon Baptist, the Chief Economist from The Economist Intelligence Unit, shared the global economic outlook in 2020:

• The outlook for the global economy and prospects for ASEAN in 2020
• The key risks, how they might play out, and what these scenarios mean
• The impact on the business environment

Regulation Of Derivatives In Asia: When Technology Meets Financial Engineering, Christopher C. H. Chen

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This chapter introduces the current state of derivatives market regulation in Asia following the global financial crisis. It focuses on Singapore and Hong Kong, the two largest international financial centres in the region. Singapore and Hong Kong have adopted international regulatory reforms, including mandatory trade reporting, centralized clearing, exchange trading requirements and the initial margin rule. The implementation has varied greatly because reporting requirements and initial margin rules have been implemented whereas clearing and trading requirements are waiting for full implementation. The arrival of financial technology may help Asian regulators oversee derivatives markets, by improving cross-border information sharing, reporting or …

Rationalizable Incentives: Interim Implementation Of Sets In Rationalizable Strategies, Takashi Kunimoto, Roberto Serrano

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper investigates rationalizable implementation of social choice sets (SCSs) in incomplete information environments. We identify rationalizable incentive compatibility (RIC) as its key condition, argue by means of example that RIC is strictly weaker than the standard Bayesian incentive compatibility (BIC), and show that RIC reduces to BIC when we only consider single-valued SCSs (i.e., social choice functions or SCFs). We next identify additional necessary conditions and, essentially closing the gap be-tween necessity and sufficiency, obtain a sufficiency result for rationalizable implementation in general environments. We also characterize a well-studied class of economic environments in which RIC is essentially the …

Geography, Trade And Power-Law Phenomena, Pao-Li Chang, Wen-Tai Hsu

Research Collection School Of Economics

This article reviews interrelated power-law phenomena in geography and trade. Given the empirical evidence on the gravity equation in trade flows across countries and regions, its theoretical underpinnings are reviewed. The gravity equation amounts to saying that trade flows follow a power law in distance (or geographic barriers). It is concluded that in the environment with firm heterogeneity, the power law in firm size is the key condition for the gravity equation to arise. A distribution is said to follow a power law if its tail probability follows a power function in the distribution’s right tail. The second part of …

Model Selection For Explosive Models, Yubo Tao, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

This chapter examines the limit properties of information criteria (such as AIC, BIC, and HQIC) for distinguishing between the unit-root (UR) model and the various kinds of explosive models. The explosive models include the local-to-unit-root model from the explosive side the mildly explosive (ME) model, and the regular explosive model. Initial conditions with different orders of magnitude are considered. Both the OLS estimator and the indirect inference estimator are studied. It is found that BIC and HQIC, but not AIC, consistently select the UR model when data come from the UR model. When data come from the local-to-unit-root model from …

Testing Alphas In Conditional Time-Varying Factor Models With High Dimensional Assets, Shujie Ma, Wei Lan, Liangjun Su, Chih-Ling Tsai

Research Collection School Of Economics

For conditional time-varying factor models with high dimensional assets, this article proposes a high dimensional alpha (HDA) test to assess whether there exist abnormal returns on securities (or portfolios) over the theoretical expected returns. To employ this test effectively, a constant coefficient test is also introduced. It examines the validity of constant alphas and factor loadings. Simulation studies and an empirical example are presented to illustrate the finite sample performance and the usefulness of the proposed tests. Using the HDA test, the empirical example demonstrates that the FF three-factor model (Fama and French, 1993) is better than CAPM (Sharpe, 1964) …

Geography, Trade, And Internal Migration In China, Lin Ma, Yang Tang

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper quantitatively studies the local welfare impacts of inter-city migration in China. We structurally estimate a trade model with endogenous migration decisions using data from 279 prefecture-level cities. The results suggest that inflows of migrant workers increase welfare in the destination cities between 2000 and 2005 despite their negative impacts on congestion and nominal wage. The positive local impacts of migration depend crucially on the endogenous firm entry. The positive impacts in the destination cities also spill over to the neighboring cities through inter-city trade, often leading to higher welfare gains in the nearby cities than the destination cities …

Strong Consistency Of Spectral Clustering For Stochastic Block Models, Liangjun Su, Wuyi Wang, Yichong Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

In this paper we prove the strong consistency of several methods based on the spectral clustering techniques that are widely used to study the community detection problem in stochastic block models (SBMs). We show that under some weak conditions on the minimal degree, the number of communities, and the eigenvalues of the probability block matrix, the K-means algorithm applied to the eigenvectors of the graph Laplacian associated with its first few largest eigenvalues can classify all individuals into the true community uniformly correctly almost surely. Extensions to both regularized spectral clustering and degree-corrected SBMs are also considered. We illustrate the …

Competition, Markups, And Gains From Trade: A Quantitative Analysis Of China Between 1995 And 2004, Wen-Tai Hsu, Yi Lu, Guiying Laura Wu

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper provides a quantitative analysis of gains from trade in a model with head-to-head competition using Chinese firm-level data from Economic Censuses in 1995 and 2004. We find a significant reduction in trade cost during this period, and total gains from such improved openness during this period is 7.1%. The gains are decomposed into a Ricardian component and two pro-competitive ones. The pro-competitive effects account for 20% of the total gains. Moreover, the total gains from trade are 13 − 31% larger than what would result from the formula provided by ACR (Arkolakis et al., 2012), which nests a …

Singapore In The Global Value Chains, Pao-Li Chang, Tran Bao Phuong Nguyen

Research Collection School Of Economics

In this chapter, we analyze the participation of Singapore in the global value chains (GVC): how much of its gross exports are GVC-related trade, how downstream it is, and which countries are its key upstream and downstream trade partners. This is done at both the country aggregate and at the sector level. New formulas are proposed in the gross export decomposition framework of Koopman, Wang and Wei (2014) and Borin and Mancini (2017), to characterize a country/industry’s downstreamness in the GVC and the importance of each trade partner in its backward/forward linkages. Singapore is found to start off with a …

Efficient Child Care Subsidies, Christine Ho, Nicola Pavoni

Research Collection School Of Economics

We study the design of child care subsidies in an optimal welfare problem with heterogeneous private market productivities. The optimal subsidy schedule is qualitatively similar to the existing US scheme. Efficiency mandates a subsidy on formal child care costs, with higher subsidies paid to lower income earners and a kink as a function of child care expenditure. Marginal labor income tax rates are set lower than the labor wedges, with the potential to generate negative marginal tax rates. We calibrate our simple model to features of the US labor market and focus on single mothers with children aged below 6. …

The Future Development Of Reits In China, Jia Sun

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) is a type of trust fund or corporation that pools the funds of a large number of investors by issuing a certificate of income and invest the raised funds in real estate projects that are managed by a specialized investment institution. The real estate investment risk is moderate, and the rent is stable, but the capital threshold is high, and it is difficult for small and medium investors to enter the market. The invention of REITs aims to solve this problem, through the collection of funds, so that small and medium investors can enter the …