Economics Commons^™

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

Research Collection School Of Economics

This chapter analyses 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. The analysis is carried out both at the country aggregate level 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 characterise a country/industry’s downstreamness in the GVC and the importance of each trade partner in its backward/forward linkages. Singapore started off with a very high …

Providing Childcare, Christine Ho, Sunha Myong

Research Collection School Of Economics

Women’s economic empowerment has been hailed as one of the most remarkable revolutions in the past 50 years. Yet, women still face the lion’s share of the burden of childcare despite major progress in their education and earnings capacity. This is particularly salient in many Asian countries. This chapter proposes a synthesis of the state of knowledge on childcare and discusses policy-relevant issues applicable to the Singapore context. Selected policies are documented and lessons from the international landscape are discussed. Raising children incurs both direct costs in the form of childcare and opportunity costs in the form of career costs. …

Financing Singapore’S Smes And The Crowdfunding Industry In Singapore, Swee Liang Tan, Yoke Wang Tok, Chansriniyom Thitipat

Research Collection School Of Economics

As new digital technologies emerge that make the provision of financial services more efficient, they hold the potential to address barriers that SMEs face in accessing credit. This paper finds empirical evidence that crowdfunding for SMEs improved SMEs’ timeliness to pay debt in Singapore. Anecdotal evidence from growing SMEs suggests that getting crowdfunding loans also induced financing from banks, leading to more efficient allocation of credit. In just four years, Singapore’s crowdfunding volume has grown rapidly making it one of the top crowdfunding hubs in Southeast Asia in 2018. The rapid development of Singapore’s crowdfunding industry can be attributed to …

Volatility Coupling, Jean Jacod, Jia Li, Zhipeng Liao

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper provides a strong approximation, or coupling, theory for spot volatility estimators formed using high-frequency data. We show that the t-statistic process associated with the nonparametric spot volatility estimator can be strongly approximated by a growing-dimensional vector of independent variables defined as functions of Brownian increments. We use this coupling theory to study the uniform inference for the volatility process in an infill asymptotic setting. Specifically, we propose uniform confidence bands for spot volatility, beta, idiosyncratic variance processes, and their nonlinear transforms. The theory is also applied to address an open question concerning the inference of monotone nonsmooth integrated …

Wild Bootstrap For Instrumental Variable Regressions With Weak And Few Clusters, Wenjie Wang, Yichong Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

We study the wild bootstrap inference for instrumental variable (quantile) regressions in the framework of a small number of large clusters, in which the number of clusters is viewed as fixed and the number of observations for each cluster diverges to infinity. For subvector inference, we show that the wild bootstrap Wald test with or without using the cluster-robust covariance matrix controls size asymptotically up to a small error as long as the parameters of endogenous variables are strongly identified in at least one of the clusters. We further develop a wild bootstrap Anderson-Rubin (AR) test for full-vector inference and …

Jobs For Justice(S): Corruption In The Supreme Court Of India, Madhav S. Aney, Shubhankar Dam, Giovanni Ko

Research Collection School Of Economics

We investigate whether judicial decisions are affected by career concerns of judges by analyzing two questions: Do judges respond to incentives to pander by ruling in favor of the government in the hope of receiving jobs after retiring from the Supreme Court? Does the government reward judges who rule in its favor with prestigious jobs? We construct a data set of Supreme Court of India cases involving the government for 1999–2014. We find that incentives to pander have a causal effect on judicial decision-making, and they are jointly determined by the importance of the case and whether the judge retires …

Glivenko-Cantelli Theorems For Integrated Functionals Of Stochastic Processes, Jia Li, Congshan Zhang, Yunxiao Liu

Research Collection School Of Economics

We prove a Glivenko-Cantelli theorem for integrated functionals of latent continuous-time stochastic processes. Based on a bracketing condition via random brackets, the theorem establishes the uniform convergence of a sequence of empirical occupation measures towards the occupation measure induced by underlying processes over large classes of test functions, including indicator functions, bounded monotone functions, Lipschitz-in-parameter functions, and Hölder classes as special cases. The general Glivenko-Cantelli theorem is then applied in more concrete high-frequency statistical settings to establish uniform convergence results for general integrated functionals of the volatility of efficient price and local moments of microstructure noise.

Efficient Estimation Of Integrated Volatility Functionals Under General Volatility Dynamics, Jia Li, Yunxiao Liu

Research Collection School Of Economics

We provide an asymptotic theory for the estimation of a general class of smooth nonlinear integrated volatility functionals. Such functionals are broadly useful for measuring financial risk and estimating economic models using high-frequency transaction data. The theory is valid under general volatility dynamics, which accommodates both Itô semimartingales (e.g., jump-diffusions) and long-memory processes (e.g., fractional Brownian motions). We establish the semiparametric efficiency bound under a nonstandard nonergodic setting with infill asymptotics, and show that the proposed estimator attains this efficiency bound. These results on efficient estimation are further extended to a setting with irregularly sampled data.

Government Support For Smes In Response To Covid-19: Theoretical Model Using Wang Transform, Shaun Shuxun Wang, Jing Rong Goh, Didier Sornette, He Wang, Esther Yang

Research Collection School Of Economics

Purpose: Many governments are taking measures in support of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to mitigate the economic impact of the COVID-19 outbreak. This paper presents a theoretical model for evaluating various government measures, including insurance for bank loans, interest rate subsidy, bridge loans and relief of tax burdens. Design/methodology/approach: This paper distinguishes a firm's intrinsic value and book value, where a firm can lose its intrinsic value when it encounters cash-flow crunch. Wang transform is applied to (1) calculating the appropriate level of interest rate subsidy payable to incentivize banks to issue more loans to SMEs and to extend …

Generalized Local-To-Unity Models, Liyu Dou, Ulrich K. Müller

Research Collection School Of Economics

We introduce a generalization of the popular local‐to‐unity model of time series persistence by allowing for p autoregressive (AR) roots and p − 1 moving average (MA) roots close to unity. This generalized local‐to‐unity model, GLTU(p), induces convergence of the suitably scaled time series to a continuous time Gaussian ARMA(p,p − 1) process on the unit interval. Our main theoretical result establishes the richness of this model class, in the sense that it can well approximate a large class of processes with stationary Gaussian limits that are not entirely distinct from the unit root benchmark. We show that Campbell and …

Hedonic Price Of Housing Space, Sumit Agarwal, Yanying Chen, Li Jing, Yi Jin Tan

Research Collection School Of Economics

This article estimates hedonic prices for different levels of housing space, by exploiting a unique space‐adding project in Singapore that added a uniform amount of space to each existing housing unit regardless of the original size. This space adding program was carried out if sufficient residents vote in favor of space adding. Using a difference‐in‐differences (DiD) strategy after restricting our sample to narrow margins around the voting cutoff, we find that the additional space increased the resale price of a housing unit by 7% on average, and the extent of price appreciation varied significantly across the original size of the …

Connectedness Of Asia Pacific Forex Markets: China's Growing Influence, Hwee Kwan Chow

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper investigates the degree of connectedness of Asia Pacific forex markets post global financial crisis and relates it to developments in the renminbi markets. The connectedness measure developed by Diebold and Yilmaz (2014) reveal the strength of linkages across the US dollar currency pairs of twelve currencies, namely offshore renminbi, onshore renminbi, euro, yen, Australian dollar, Indian rupee, Korean won, Malaysian ringgit, New Zealand dollar, Singapore dollar, Thai baht and Taiwan dollar. With the gradual liberalization of China’s exchange rate system, shocks from the renminbi markets contribute more to fluctuations in almost all individual Asia Pacific currency markets vis-a-vis …

Are Simple Mechanisms Optimal When Agents Are Unsophisticated?, Jiangtao Li, Piotr Dworczak

Research Collection School Of Economics

We study the design of mechanisms involving agents that have limited strategic sophistication. The literature has identified several notions of simple mechanisms in which agents can determine their optimal strategy even if they lack cognitive skills such as predicting other agents' strategies (strategy-proof mechanisms), contingent reasoning (obviously strategy-proof mechanisms), or foresight (strongly obviously strategy-proof mechanisms). We examine whether it is optimal for the mechanism designer who faces strategically unsophisticated agents to offer a mechanism from the corresponding class of simple mechanisms. We show that when the designer uses a mechanism that is not simple, while she loses the ability to …

Competitive Information Disclosure In Random Search Markets, Wei He, Jiangtao Li

Research Collection School Of Economics

We analyze the role of competition in information provision in random search markets. Multiple symmetric senders compete for the receiver’s investment by disclosing information about their respective project qualities, and the receiver conducts random search to learn about the qualities of the projects. We show that in any symmetric Nash equilibrium, each sender chooses a strategy with the lowest possible reservation value. The receiver does not benefit from the competition of the senders, as the receiver’s expected payoff does not change when the number of senders increases.

Happy Lottery Winners And Lottery-Ticket Bias, Seonghoon Kim, Andrew J. Oswald

Research Collection School Of Economics

The world spends a remarkable $250 billion a year on lottery tickets. Yet, perplexingly, it has proved difficult for social scientists to show that lottery windfalls actually make people happier. This is the famous and still unresolved paradox due initially to Brickman and colleagues. Here we describe an underlying weakness that has affected the research area, and explain the concept of lottery‐ticket bias (LT bias), which stems from unobservable lottery spending. We then collect new data—in the world’s most intense lottery‐playing nation, Singapore—on the amount that people spend on lottery tickets (n = 5626). We demonstrate that, once we correct …

High-Frequency Internet Survey Of A Probability Sample Of Older Singaporeans: The Singapore Life Panel, Rhema Vaithianathan, Bryce Hool, Michael D. Hurd, Susann Rohwedder

Research Collection School Of Economics

Facing a rapidly ageing population, Singapore is presented with urgent policy challenges. Yet there is very little data on the economic, health and family circumstances of older Singaporeans. In response, the Centre for Research on the Economics of Ageing (CREA) at Singapore Management University has been collecting monthly data on a panel of Singaporeans aged between 50 and 70 years. We detail the methodology by which the Singapore Life Panel® (SLP) was constructed using a population-representative sampling frame from the Singapore Department of Statistics. Contact was made with 25,000 households through postal, phone and in-person canvassing. More than 15,200 respondents …

The Response Of The Chinese Economy To The U.S.-China Trade War: 2018-2019, Pao-Li Chang, Kefang Yao, Fan Zheng

Research Collection School Of Economics

In this paper, we follow the micro-to-macro approach of Fajgelbaum et al. (2020) and analyze the impacts of the 2018–2019 U.S.-China trade war on the Chinese economy. We use highly disaggregated trade and tariff data with monthly frequency to identify the demand/supply elasticities of Chinese imports/exports, combined with a general equilibrium model for the Chinese economy (that takes into account input-output linkages, and regional heterogeneity in employment and sector specialization) to quantify the partial and general equilibrium effects of the tariff war at the product/sector/region/aggregate levels. This complements the studies that focus on the ex post response of the U.S. …

Business Cycles, Trend Elimination, And The Hp Filter, Peter C. B. Phillips, Sainan Jin

Research Collection School Of Economics

Trend elimination and business cycle estimation are analyzed by finite sample and asymptotic methods. An overview history is provided, operator theory is developed, limit theory as the sample size n → ∞ is derived, and filtered series properties are studied relative to smoothing parameter (λ) behavior. Simulations reveal that limit theory with λ =O(n4) delivers excellent approximations to the HP filter for common sample sizes but fails to remove stochastic trends, contrary to standard thinking in macroeconomics and thereby explaining ‘spurious cycle’ effects of the HP filter. The findings are related to the long run effects of the GFC.

Boosting: Why You Can Use The Hp Filter, Peter C. B. Phillips, Zhentao Shi

Research Collection School Of Economics

We propose a procedure of iterating the HP filter to produce a smarter smoothing device, called the boosted HP (bHP) filter, based on L2-boosting in machine learning. Limit theory shows that the bHP filter asymptotically recovers trend mechanisms that involve integrated processes, deterministic drifts, and structural breaks, covering the most common trends that appear in current modeling methodology. A stopping criterion automates the algorithm, giving a data-determined method for data-rich environments. The methodology is illustrated in simulations and with three real data examples that highlight the differences between simple HP filtering, the bHP filter, and an alternative autoregressive approach.

In-Fill Asymptotic Theory For Structural Break Point In Autoregression, 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, trimodal, 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 …

On Factor Models With Random Missing: Em Estimation, Inference, And Cross Validation, Sainan Jin, Ke Miao, Liangjun Su

Research Collection School Of Economics

We consider the estimation and inference in approximate factor models with random missing values. We show that with the low rank structure of the common component, we can estimate the factors and factor loadings consistently with the missing values replaced by zeros. We establish the asymptotic distributions of the resulting estimators and those based on the EM algorithm. We also propose a cross validation-based method to determine the number of factors in factor models with or without missing values and justify its consistency. Simulations demonstrate that our cross validation method is robust to fat tails in the error distribution and …

A Hybrid Equity Release Plan For Retirement Financing, Koon Shing Kwong, Yiu Kuen Tse, Junxing Chay

Research Collection School Of Economics

There are two main equity release plans for retirement financing: reverse mortgage plan and home reversion plan. Both plans entitle the homeowners not only to release cash from their properties but also to allow them living there for life. In the lease buyback scheme (LBS) recently introduced in Singapore, the home owner sells the tail-end of the property lease to the government in exchange for a cash payment upfront. Unlike the two main equity release plans, the LBS only allows the owner to stay in the property for the front part of the lease but not for life.

In this …

The Evolution Of Income Risk And Consumption Insurance In South Korea Over The Last Two Decades, Taehyun Ahn, Chung Gu Chee, Seonghoon Kim

Research Collection School Of Economics

Using data from the Korea Labor Income Panel Study, we study the evolution of income risk and consumption insurance against transitory and permanent income shocks in South Korea over the last two decades. We find a decreasing trend in both income and consumption risks. Furthermore, we estimate that 47.6% of permanent income shocks and 9.8% of transitory income shocks pass through to consumption. We also provide evidence of substantial improvements in consumption insurance among the less educated and the older cohort nearing retirement. Our results suggest that recent developments of social safety net and welfare system may have played an …

Government Management Capacities And The Containment Of Covid-19: A Repeated Cross-Sectional Study Across Chinese Cities, Wenchao Li, Jing Li, Junjian Yi

Research Collection School Of Economics

Objectives: Better understanding of the dynamics of the COVID-19 (2019 novel coronavirus disease) pandemic to curb its spread is now a global imperative. While travel restrictions and control measures have been shown to limit the spread of the disease, the effectiveness of the enforcement of those measures should depend on the strength of the government. Whether, and how, the government plays a role in fighting the disease, however, has not been investigated. Here, we show that government management capacities are critical to the containment of the disease. Setting: We conducted a statistical analysis based on cross-city comparisons within China. China …

Teaching In The Right Context: Textbook Supply Program, Language, And Vocabulary Ability In Vietnam, Tomoki Fujii, Maki Nakajima, Sijia Xu

Research Collection School Of Economics

While past two decades have witnessed a remarkable educational progress in Vietnam, ethnic minority children consistently lagged behind ethnic majority children in academic performance. The government of Vietnam has stepped up efforts to assist ethnic minority students in their learning by lowering the linguistic and cultural barriers they face. Among such efforts is the textbook supply program, and we examine its impact on the learning of children proxied by vocabulary test. We apply difference-in-differences estimation to four rounds of the Young Lives data between 2006 and 2015 in order to investigate how the textbook supply program narrowed the gap between …

Spatial Dynamic Panel Data Models With Correlated Random Effects, Liyao Li, Zhenlin Yang

Research Collection School Of Economics

In this paper, M-estimation and inference methods are developed for spatial dynamic panel data models with correlated random effects, based on short panels. The unobserved individual-specific effects are assumed to be correlated with the observed time-varying regressors linearly or in a linearizable way, giving the so-called correlated random effects model, which allows the estimation of effects of time-invariant regressors. The unbiased estimating functions are obtained by adjusting the conditional quasi-scores given the initial observations, leading to M-estimators that are consistent, asymptotically normal, and free from the initial conditions except the process starting time. By decomposing the estimating functions …

Determining The Number Of Communities In Degree-Corrected Stochastic Block Models, Shujie Ma, Liangjun Su, Yichong Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

We propose to estimate the number of communities in degree-corrected stochastic block models based on a pseudo likelihood ratio. For estimation, we consider a spectral clustering together with binary segmentation method. This approach guarantees an upper bound for the pseudo likelihood ratio statistic when the model is over-fitted. We also derive its limiting distribution when the model is under-fitted. Based on these properties, we establish the consistency of our estimator for the true number of communities. Developing these theoretical properties require a mild condition on the average degree: growing at a rate faster than log(n), where n is the number …

On The Decomposability Of Fractional Allocations, Shurojit Chatterji, Peng Liu

Research Collection School Of Economics

A common practice in dealing with the allocation of indivisible objects is to treat them as infinitely divisible and specify a fractional allocation, which is then implemented as a lottery on integer allocations that are feasible. The question we study is whether an arbitrary fractional allocation can be decomposed as a lottery on an arbitrary set of feasible integer allocations. The main result is a characterization of decomposable fractional allocations, that is obtained by transforming the decomposability problem into a maximum flow problem. We also provide a separate necessary condition for decomposability.

Asset Classes, Nicolas L. Jacquet

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper proposes a theory of endogenous differences in liquidity of assets based on the interaction between differences in the risk of assets and differences in liquidity needs of investors. An equilibrium of the model, which always exists and is unique, displays a class structure, where investors’ types sort themselves across different types of assets. I also provide a detailed analysis of the possible types of sorting and of the consequences for the cross-sectional properties of asset prices and their velocity. The framework can also be useful to think about what constitute a ""light-to-liquidity" and a "safe asset".

Mildly Explosive Autoregression With Anti-Persistent Errors, Yiu Lim Lui, Weilin Xiao, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

An asymptotic distribution is derived for the least squares (LS) estimate of a first‐order autoregression with a mildly explosive root and anti‐persistent errors. While the sample moments depend on the Hurst parameter asymptotically, the Cauchy limiting distribution theory remains valid for the LS estimates in the model without intercept and a model with an asymptotically negligible intercept. Monte Carlo studies are designed to check the precision of the Cauchy distribution in finite samples. An empirical study based on the monthly NASDAQ index highlights the usefulness of the model and the new limiting distribution.