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Research Collection School Of Economics

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Full-Text Articles in Economics

The Relative Price Of Capital And Economic Structure, Roberto Samaniego, Juliana Yu Sun Feb 2020

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 Feb 2020

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 Jan 2020

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 …


Rationalizable Incentives: Interim Implementation Of Sets In Rationalizable Strategies, Takashi Kunimoto, Roberto Serrano Jan 2020

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 Jan 2020

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 Jan 2020

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 Jan 2020

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 Jan 2020

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 Jan 2020

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 Jan 2020

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 Jan 2020

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 Jan 2020

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. …


Sieve Estimation Of Time-Varying Panel Data Models With Latent Structures, Liangjun Su, Xia Wang, Sainan Jin Dec 2019

Sieve Estimation Of Time-Varying Panel Data Models With Latent Structures, Liangjun Su, Xia Wang, Sainan Jin

Research Collection School Of Economics

We propose a heterogeneous time-varying panel data model with a latent group structure that allows the coefficients to vary over both individuals and time. We assume that the coefficients change smoothly over time and form different unobserved groups. When treated as smooth functions of time, the individual functional coefficients are heterogeneous across groups but homogeneous within a group. We propose a penalized-sieve-estimation-based classifier-Lasso (C-Lasso) procedure to identify the individuals’ membership and to estimate the group-specific functional coefficients in a single step. The classification exhibits the desirable property of uniform consistency. The C-Lasso estimators and their post-Lasso versions achieve the oracle …


The Role Of Career And Wage Incentives In Labor Productivity: Evidence From A Two-Stage Field Experiment In Malawi, Hyuncheol Kim, Seonghoon Kim, Thomas Kim Dec 2019

The Role Of Career And Wage Incentives In Labor Productivity: Evidence From A Two-Stage Field Experiment In Malawi, Hyuncheol Kim, Seonghoon Kim, Thomas Kim

Research Collection School Of Economics

We study how career and wage incentives affect labor productivity through self-selection and incentive effect channels using a two-stage field experiment in Malawi. First, recent secondary school graduates were hired with either career or wage incentives. After employment, a half of workers with career incentives randomly received wage incentives, and a half of workers with wage incentives randomly received career incentives. Career incentives attract higher-performing workers than wage incentives, but do not increase productivity conditional on selection. Wage incentives increase productivity for those recruited through career incentives. Observable characteristics are limited in explaining selection effects of entry-level workers.


Growth Effects Of Additive And Multiplicative Robots Alongside Conventional Machines, Hian Teck Hoon Dec 2019

Growth Effects Of Additive And Multiplicative Robots Alongside Conventional Machines, Hian Teck Hoon

Research Collection School Of Economics

We study the effects of introducing two different types of robots (additive and multiplicative) in an infinitely lived one-sector aggregative model with malleable capital on wages. The wage effects of these two polar cases are dramatically different. Given malleable capital that can be retrofitted for use either as conventional machines or as robots, we show that when it is profitable for firms to adopt additive robots in the production process, the real wage drops on impact and remains permanently at the lower level even as total malleable capital accumulates. However, when multiplicative robots are adopted, we show that while the …


Detecting Financial Collapse And Ballooning Sovereign Risk, Peter C. B. Phillips, Sp Shi Dec 2019

Detecting Financial Collapse And Ballooning Sovereign Risk, Peter C. B. Phillips, Sp Shi

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper proposes a new model for capturing discontinuities in the underlying financial environment that can lead to abrupt falls, but not necessarily sustained monotonic falls, in asset prices. This notion of price dynamics is consistent with existing understanding of market crashes, which allows for a mix of market responses that are not universally negative. The model may be interpreted as a martingale composed with a randomized drift process that is designed to capture various asymmetric drivers of market sentiment. In particular, the model is capable of generating realistic patterns of price meltdowns and bond yield inflations that constitute major …


Uniform Inference In Panel Autoregression, John C. Chao, Peter C. B. Phillips Dec 2019

Uniform Inference In Panel Autoregression, John C. Chao, Peter C. B. Phillips

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper considers estimation and inference concerning the autoregressive coefficient (rho) in a panel autoregression for which the degree of persistence in the time dimension is unknown. Our main objective is to construct confidence intervals for rho that are asymptotically valid, having asymptotic coverage probability at least that of the nominal level uniformly over the parameter space. The starting point for our confidence procedure is the estimating equation of the Anderson-Hsiao (AH) IV procedure. It is well known that the AH IV estimation suffers from weak instrumentation when rho is near unity. But it is not so well known that …


Har Testing For Spurious Regression In Trend, Peter C. B. Phillips, Xiaohu Wang, Yonghui Zhang Dec 2019

Har Testing For Spurious Regression In Trend, Peter C. B. Phillips, Xiaohu Wang, Yonghui Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

The usual t test, the t test based on heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation consistent (HAC) covariance matrix estimators, and the heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation robust (HAR) test are three statistics that are widely used in applied econometric work. The use of these significance tests in trend regression is of particular interest given the potential for spurious relationships in trend formulations. Following a longstanding tradition in the spurious regression literature, this paper investigates the asymptotic and finite sample properties of these test statistics in several spurious regression contexts, including regression of stochastic trends on time polynomials and regressions among independent random walks. Concordant …


Innovation, Growth, And Dynamic Gains From Trade, Wen-Tai Hsu, Raymond G. Riezman, Ping Wang Nov 2019

Innovation, Growth, And Dynamic Gains From Trade, Wen-Tai Hsu, Raymond G. Riezman, Ping Wang

Research Collection School Of Economics

How large are the welfare gains from trade? Would such gains be significantly amplified in the long run when productivity is endogenously enhanced? To address these questions, we focus on the dynamic effect of trade, in particular, how trade affects the incentives for technological advancement. We construct an innovation-based endogenous growth model of North-South trade. There are two types of innovation: one by the North to upgrade the general purpose technology (GPT) and another by all countries to advance entrepreneurial knowledge for developing differentiated products. We find sizable welfare gains from trade, about 5.3% when compared to autarky. The gains …


Strategically Simple Mechanisms, Tilman Börgers, Jiangtao Li Nov 2019

Strategically Simple Mechanisms, Tilman Börgers, Jiangtao Li

Research Collection School Of Economics

We define and investigate a property of mechanisms that we call "strategic simplicity," and that is meant to capture the idea that, in strategically simple mechanisms, strategic choices require limited strategic sophistication. We define a mechanism to be strategically simple if choices can be based on first-order beliefs about the other agents' preferences and first-order certainty about the other agents' rationality alone, and there is no need for agents to form higher-order beliefs, because such beliefs are irrelevant to the optimal strategies. All dominant strategy mechanisms are strategically simple. But many more mechanisms are strategically simple. In particular, strategically simple …


Uncertainty, Depreciation And Industry Growth, Roberto Samaiego, Juliana Yu Sun Nov 2019

Uncertainty, Depreciation And Industry Growth, Roberto Samaiego, Juliana Yu Sun

Research Collection School Of Economics

When investment is irreversible, firms invest only when the mismatch between their productivity and their capital stock is large. This suggests that two factors should be related to the frequency of mismatch: volatility and capital depreciation. A canonical model of industry dynamics with investment irreversibility displays slow growth in times of high uncertainty, and decline is particularly pronounced in industries where capital depreciation is rapid. A differences-in-differences regression using industry growth data from a large sample of countries supports this result.


Rationalizable Implementation Of Correspondences, Takashi Kunimoto, Roberto Serrano Nov 2019

Rationalizable Implementation Of Correspondences, Takashi Kunimoto, Roberto Serrano

Research Collection School Of Economics

A new condition, which we call uniform monotonicity, is shown to be necessary and almost sufficient for rationalizable implementation of corre-spondences. Uniform monotonicity is much weaker than Maskin monotonic-ity and reduces to it in the case of functions. Maskin monotonicity, the key condition for Nash implementation, had also been shown to be necessary for rationalizable implementation of social choice functions. Our conclusion is that the conditions for rationalizable implementation are not only starkly different from, but also much weaker than those for Nash implementation, when we consider social choice correspondences. Thus, dropping rational ex-pectations significantly expands the class of rules …


A Demand And Supply Game Exploring Global Supply Chains, Bei Hong Nov 2019

A Demand And Supply Game Exploring Global Supply Chains, Bei Hong

Research Collection School Of Economics

In this article, the author describes a classroom experiment in which participants make decisions to achieve the lowest-cost production. Student volunteers acting as smartphone companies are provided with confidential information representing their own cost of production and are asked to make trade decisions to form a supply chain at the lowest possible cost. This interactive classroom experiment facilitates an understanding and appreciation of the basic demand and supply model. Students also explore the motivations, facilitators, and impediments of global supply chains. Suggestions are made to expand the game by incorporating more sophisticated models of the global supply chain, and also …


Quantifying Quality Specialization Across Space: Skills, Sorting, And Agglomeration, Pao-Li Chang, Angdi Lu, Xin Yi Nov 2019

Quantifying Quality Specialization Across Space: Skills, Sorting, And Agglomeration, Pao-Li Chang, Angdi Lu, Xin Yi

Research Collection School Of Economics

We quantify the supply-side determinants of quality specialization across space. Specifically, we complement the quality specialization literature in international trade and study how larger cities specialize in higher-quality goods within a country. In our general equilibrium model, firms in larger cities produce goods with higher quality, because agglomeration benefits accrue more to skilled workers who are also more efficient in upgrading quality. Two channels are at work in our model. The first channel is through the treatment effect of agglomeration, such that firms become more productive if they locate in a larger city. The second channel works through sorting, in …


Parametric Rationing With Uncertain Needs, Yan Long, Jingyi Xue Oct 2019

Parametric Rationing With Uncertain Needs, Yan Long, Jingyi Xue

Research Collection School Of Economics

We study resource allocation in the face of uncertain needs. We extend Young (1987)’s parametric rules to the uncertain context. We re-establish the axiomatic char-acterization of parametric rules and show the optimality of the rules.


Continuous Implementation With Small Transfers, Yi-Chun Chen, Takashi Kunimoto, Yifei Sun Oct 2019

Continuous Implementation With Small Transfers, Yi-Chun Chen, Takashi Kunimoto, Yifei Sun

Research Collection School Of Economics

The robust mechanism design literature investigates the global robustness of op-timal mechanisms to large changes in the environment. Acknowledging the global robustness as an overly demanding requirement, we propose continuous implementa-tion as a local robustness of optimal mechanisms to small changes in the environment. We say that a social choice function is continuously implementable “with small trans-fers” if there exists a mechanism which yields the outcome close to the desired one for all types close to the designer’s initial model. We show that when a generic cor-relation condition is imposed on the class of interdependent values environments, any incentive compatible …


Non-Separable Models With High-Dimensional Data, Liangjun Su, T Ura, Yc Zhang Oct 2019

Non-Separable Models With High-Dimensional Data, Liangjun Su, T Ura, Yc Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper studies non-separable models with a continuous treatment when the dimension of the control variables is high and potentially larger than the effective sample size. We propose a three-step estimation procedure to estimate the average, quantile, and marginal treatment effects. In the first stage we estimate the conditional mean, distribution, and density objects by penalized local least squares, penalized local maximum likelihood estimation, and numerical differentiation, respectively, where control variables are selected via a localized method of L-1-penalization at each value of the continuous treatment. In the second stage we estimate the average and marginal distribution of the potential …


Financing Singapore’S Smes And The Crowdfunding Industry In Singapore, Swee Liang Tan, Yoke Wang Tok, Thitipat Chansriniyom Oct 2019

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

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 found empirical evidence that crowdfunding improved SMEs’ timeliness to pay debt. Anecdotal evidence from SMEs suggests that getting crowdfunding loans also induced financing from banks. In just four years, Singapore’s crowdfunding volumes have grown rapidly to make it the top crowdfunding hub in Southeast Asia. The rapid development of Singapore’s crowdfunding industry can be attributed to its higher GDP per capita, higher level of financial sector development and greater availability of …


Singapore As A Sustainable City: Past, Present And The Future, Tomoki Fujii, Rohan Ray Sep 2019

Singapore As A Sustainable City: Past, Present And The Future, Tomoki Fujii, Rohan Ray

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper outlines Singapore’s major sustainability challenges and its policy response in the areas of land use, transportation, waste management, water, and energy. We review the current and past Concept Plans from the perspective of sustainable land use and provide an overview of transportation policy in Singapore. We also examine Singapore’s policies to manage increasing wastes and review the four tap water management plan. Finally, we look at various initiatives by the government for sustainable use of energy. While Singapore has been successful in many ways in transforming itself into one of the most prosperous and sustainable cities in the …


Forecasting Realized Volatility Using A Nonnegative Semiparametric Model, Anders Eriksson, Daniel P. A. Preve, Jun Yu Sep 2019

Forecasting Realized Volatility Using A Nonnegative Semiparametric Model, Anders Eriksson, Daniel P. A. Preve, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper introduces a parsimonious and yet flexible semiparametric model to forecast financial volatility. The new model extends a related linear nonnegative autoregressive model previously used in the volatility literature by way of a power transformation. It is semiparametric in the sense that the distributional and functional form of its error component is partially unspecified. The statistical properties of the model are discussed and a novel estimation method is proposed. Simulation studies validate the new method and suggest that it works reasonably well in finite samples. The out-of-sample forecasting performance of the proposed model is evaluated against a number of …