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Articles 31 - 60 of 170
Full-Text Articles in Behavioral Economics
Does Precise Case Disclosure Limit Precautionary Behavior? Evidence From Covid-19 In Singapore, Aljoscha Janssen, Matthew H. Shapiro
Does Precise Case Disclosure Limit Precautionary Behavior? Evidence From Covid-19 In Singapore, Aljoscha Janssen, Matthew H. Shapiro
Research Collection School Of Economics
Limiting the spread of contagious diseases can involve both government-managed and voluntary efforts. Governments have a number of policy options beyond direct intervention that can shape individuals’ responses to a pandemic and its associated costs. During its first wave of COVID-19 cases, Singapore was among a few countries that attempted to adjust behavior through the announcement of detailed case information. Singapore's Ministry of Health maintained and shared precise, daily information detailing local travel behavior and residences of COVID-19 cases. We use this policy along with device-level cellphone data to quantify how local and national COVID-19 case announcements trigger differential behavioral …
Economic Impact Of Targeted Government Responses To Covid-19: Evidence From The Large-Scale Cluster In Seoul, Kim, Kanghyock Koh, Jinwook Shin
Economic Impact Of Targeted Government Responses To Covid-19: Evidence From The Large-Scale Cluster In Seoul, Kim, Kanghyock Koh, Jinwook Shin
Research Collection School Of Economics
We estimate the economic impact of South Korea's targeted responses to the first large-scale COVID-19 cluster in Seoul. We find that foot traffic and retail sales decreased only within a 300 meter radius of the cluster and recovered to its pre-outbreak level after four weeks. The reductions appear to be driven by temporary business closures rather than the risk avoidance behavior of the citizens. Our results imply that less intense, but more targeted COVID-19 interventions, such as pin-pointed, temporary closures of businesses, can be a low-cost alternative after lifting strict social distancing measures.
The Price Elasticity Of African Elephant Poaching, Quy-Toan Do, Andrei A. Levchenko, Lin Ma, Julian Blanc, Holly Dublin, Tom Milliken
The Price Elasticity Of African Elephant Poaching, Quy-Toan Do, Andrei A. Levchenko, Lin Ma, Julian Blanc, Holly Dublin, Tom Milliken
Research Collection School Of Economics
The objective of this paper is to provide an estimate of the elasticity of elephant poaching with respect to prices. Ivory being a storable commodity subjects its price to Hotelling’s no-arbitrage condition, hence allowing identification of the supply curve. The price of gold, one of many commodities used as stores of value, is thus used as an instrument for ivory prices. The supply of illegal ivory is found to be price inelastic with an elasticity of 0.4, with changes in consumer prices passing-through to prices faced by producers at a rate close to unity. Estimations based on a number of …
Social Norms And Fertility, Sunha Myong, Junghae Park, Junjian Yi
Social Norms And Fertility, Sunha Myong, Junghae Park, Junjian Yi
Research Collection School Of Economics
We document three stylized facts on marriage and fertility patterns in East Asian societies: (i) their marriage rates are among the highest in the world, but their total fertility is the lowest; (ii) although they have the lowest total fertility, almost all married women have at least one child; and (iii) almost no single women have any children. As these societies have been influenced by Confucianism over millennia, marriage and fertility decisions are potentially shaped by two social norms: the unequal gender division of childcare and the stigma attached to out-of-wedlock births. We present a model incorporating the two social …
Providing Childcare, Christine Ho, Sunha Myong
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. …
Hedonic Price Of Housing Space, Sumit Agarwal, Yanying Chen, Li Jing, Yi Jin Tan
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 …
Happy Lottery Winners And Lottery-Ticket Bias, Seonghoon Kim, Andrew J. Oswald
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
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 …
Asset Classes, Nicolas L. Jacquet
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".
The Evolution Of Income Risk And Consumption Insurance In South Korea Over The Last Two Decades, Taehyun Ahn, Chung Gu Chee, Seonghoon Kim
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 …
The Effects Of Income On Health: Evidence From Lottery Wins In Singapore, Seonghoon Kim, Kanghyock Koh
The Effects Of Income On Health: Evidence From Lottery Wins In Singapore, Seonghoon Kim, Kanghyock Koh
Research Collection School Of Economics
We estimate the causal effects of household income on self-reported health status by exploiting random variations in the amount of lottery prizes won. We find that a S$10,000 (US$7,245) increase in income via lottery wins improves individuals’ health by a standard deviation of 0.18. As possible mechanisms, we find that lottery wins increase household consumption spending and improve overall life satisfaction, but do not change healthcare spending, labor supply, and risky health behavior. Previous studies, which focused on the health effects of lottery prizes in Western European countries with strong social safety nets, do not find positive effects other than …
Pregnancy Persistently Reduces Alcohol Purchases: Causal Evidence From Scanner Data, Aljoscha Janssen, Elle Parslow
Pregnancy Persistently Reduces Alcohol Purchases: Causal Evidence From Scanner Data, Aljoscha Janssen, Elle Parslow
Research Collection School Of Economics
We analyze household-level changes in alcohol consumption in response to pregnancy. Using scanner data, we identify households with a pregnant household member. Within an event study and a dynamic difference-in-differences estimation, we find that during a first pregnancy, households reduce their alcohol purchases by 36%. After pregnancy, purchases of alcohol are 34% lower than before pregnancy. We do not find any effect during the second pregnancy. One possible explanation for our result is that lower consumption during pregnancy changes habits and reduces consumption in the long term. We discuss other explanations and comment on policy implications.
Decomposing Duration Dependence: Skill Depreciation Vs. Statistical Discrimination, Ismail Baydur, Jianhuan Xu
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.
Housing Equity And Household Consumption In Retirement: Evidence From The Singapore Life Panel©, Lipeng Chen, Liang Jiang, Sock Yong Phang, Jun Yu
Housing Equity And Household Consumption In Retirement: Evidence From The Singapore Life Panel©, Lipeng Chen, Liang Jiang, Sock Yong Phang, Jun Yu
Research Collection School Of Economics
Housing affordability for elderly homeowners involves an entirely different set of issues as compared to housing affordability for first-time homeowners. To afford to ‘age-in-place’ may require homeowners to access channels that enable them to withdraw their housing equity to finance consumption in retirement. We utilize data from the Singapore Life Panel© survey to empirically investigate the impact of housing equity on the consumption of elderly households. Based on panel analysis, we find housing equity value has no significant impact on non-durable consumption for elderly people. The conclusion holds for a battery of robustness checks. Moreover, heterogeneity analyses based on subsamples …
Does Early Access To Pension Wealth Improve Health?, Seonghoon Kim, Kanghyock Koh
Does Early Access To Pension Wealth Improve Health?, Seonghoon Kim, Kanghyock Koh
Research Collection School Of Economics
We examine the health impacts of early access to public pension wealth by exploiting a unique policy in Singapore allowing individuals to withdraw a proportion of their pension savings after their 55th birthday. For the identification, we employ a regression discontinuity design by comparing individuals before and after their 55th birthday. To address anticipated and lagged health impacts, we adopt the donut regression discontinuity approach. Using nationally representative monthly panel data, we find that early access to pension wealth improves self‐reported overall health.
Covid-19, Lockdown, And The Dynamics Of Subjective Well-Being, Terence C. Cheng, Kim, Kanghyock Koh
Covid-19, Lockdown, And The Dynamics Of Subjective Well-Being, Terence C. Cheng, Kim, Kanghyock Koh
Research Collection School Of Economics
We provide novel evidence on how the COVID-19 global health and economic crisis is affecting overall life satisfaction and domain-specific satisfaction using data from a monthly longitudinal survey of middle-aged and older Singaporeans. Using a difference-in-differences framework, we document large declines in overall life satisfaction and domain-specific satisfaction during the COVID-19 outbreak, except satisfaction with health. These declines coincide with the introduction of a nationwide lockdown, with life satisfaction remaining below its pre-pandemic levels even after the lockdown is lifted. We also find that individuals who report a drop in household income during the COVID-19 outbreak experience a decline in …
Spending Impact Of Covid-19 Stimulus Payments: Evidence From Card Transaction Data In South Korea, Kim, Kanghyock Koh, Wonjun Lyou
Spending Impact Of Covid-19 Stimulus Payments: Evidence From Card Transaction Data In South Korea, Kim, Kanghyock Koh, Wonjun Lyou
Research Collection School Of Economics
Various countries have implemented transfer programs to individuals since the Covid-19 outbreaks. However, the extent to which such transfers alleviate economic recessions is unclear. This paper analyzes a South Korean program, which provided vouchers redeemable only at small local businesses. We find that, due to the program, over 30% of households across all income groups increased their food and overall household spending, but the usage restriction may have affected consumer choice, distorting business competition. While the employment and sales of small businesses improved, the program’s fiscal sustainability is in question because of the large tax exemption.
Fertility And Rural Electrification In Bangladesh, Tomoki Fujii, Abu S. Shonchoy
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 …
Geography, Trade, And Internal Migration In China, Lin Ma, Yang Tang
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 …
Tax Uncertainty And Business Activity, Jungho Lee, Jianhuan Xu
Tax Uncertainty And Business Activity, Jungho Lee, Jianhuan Xu
Research Collection School Of Economics
We investigate the extent to which uncertainties about tax policies affect business activities. We develop a statewide tax-uncertainty measure (TU measure) and show that it captures state corporate tax uncertainty. By comparing adjacent counties across state borders, we show that increasing tax uncertainty by one standard deviation (a 30% increase in the TU measure) leads to a 0.17% point per-year decrease in the growth rate of establishments over two years. The result holds after conducting a variety of robustness checks and is not likely to be driven by general state-policy uncertainties.
Illusion Of Gender Parity In Education: Intrahousehold Resource Allocation In Bangladesh, Sijia Xu, Abu S. Shonchoy, Tomoki Fujii
Illusion Of Gender Parity In Education: Intrahousehold Resource Allocation In Bangladesh, Sijia Xu, Abu S. Shonchoy, Tomoki Fujii
Research Collection School Of Economics
A target in the Millennium Development Goals—gender parity in all levels of education—is widely considered to have been attained. However, measuring gender parity only through school enrollment is misleading, as girls may lag behind boys in other educational measures. We investigate this with four rounds of surveys from Bangladesh by decomposing households’ education decisions into enrollment, education expenditure, and share of the education expenditure allocated for the quality of education like private tutoring. We find a strong profemale bias in school enrollment but promale bias in the other two decisions. This contradirectional gender bias is unique to Bangladesh and partly …
Central Place Theory And The Power Law For Cities, Wen-Tai Hsu, Zou Xin
Central Place Theory And The Power Law For Cities, Wen-Tai Hsu, Zou Xin
Research Collection School Of Economics
This chapter provides a review of the link between central place theory and the power laws for cities. A theory of city size distribution is proposed via a central place hierarchy a la Christaller (1933) either as an equilibrium results or an optimal allocation. Under a central place hierarchy, it is shown that a power law for cities emerges if the underlying heterogeneity in economies of scale across good is regularly varying. Furthermore, we show that an optimal allocation of cities conforms with a central place hierarchy if the underlying heterogeneity in economies of scale across good is a power …
Monthly Spending Dynamics Of The Elderly Following A Health Shock: Evidence From Singapore, Terence C. Cheng, Jing Li, Rhema Vaithianathan
Monthly Spending Dynamics Of The Elderly Following A Health Shock: Evidence From Singapore, Terence C. Cheng, Jing Li, Rhema Vaithianathan
Research Collection School Of Economics
We use novel longitudinal data from 19 monthly waves of the Singapore Life Panel to examine the short-term dynamics of the effects health shocks have on household health and non-health spending and income by the elderly. The health shocks we study are the occurrence of new major conditions such as cancer, heart problems, and minor conditions (e.g. diabetes, and hypertension). Our empirical strategy exploits unanticipated changes in health status through the diagnosis of new health conditions, combined with an individual fixed effect framework. We find that major shocks have large and persistent effects while minor shocks have small and mainly …
Potential Crime Risk And Housing Market Responses, Seonghoon Kim, Kwan Ok Lee
Potential Crime Risk And Housing Market Responses, Seonghoon Kim, Kwan Ok Lee
Research Collection School Of Economics
We study how information on local (dis)amenities is transmitted and manifested in housing markets. Using nationwide data on multifamily homes in South Korea, we analyze heterogeneity in the effect of a sex offender's presence on sale prices and rents of nearby homes. Our results demonstrate that the price effect of the offender's move-in varies significantly by spatial context. People react more strongly and persistently to the move-in of the offender in places wherein indicators of social connectedness are stronger, such as places with relatively low population density. We also find that, unlike housing prices, rents do not change in response …
Has The Development Gap Between The Ethnic Minority And Majority Groups Narrowed In Vietnam?: Evidence From Household Surveys, Tomoki Fujii
Has The Development Gap Between The Ethnic Minority And Majority Groups Narrowed In Vietnam?: Evidence From Household Surveys, Tomoki Fujii
Research Collection School Of Economics
Using household data for rural northern Vietnam between 1993 and 2014, we find that the ethnic minority group continued to lag behind the majority group in various development indicators despite the overall improvement in living standards. Our regression and decomposition analyses show that the structural differences between the two groups are an important cause of persistent development gap. However, the nature of structural differences changed over time and no single source of structural difference explains the persistent gap. We argue that more minority‐appropriate policies are needed to lift poor minority households out of poverty further and reduce the development gap.
Income And Subjective Well-Being: Evidence From Singapore's First National Non-Contributory Pension, Yanying Chen, Yi Jin Tan
Income And Subjective Well-Being: Evidence From Singapore's First National Non-Contributory Pension, Yanying Chen, Yi Jin Tan
Research Collection School Of Economics
We use a new monthly panel and a difference-in-differences strategy to study the effects of an exogenous permanent income shock on subjective well-being along previously unexplored dimensions. This permanent income shock is the introduction of Singapore’s first national non-contributory pension, the Silver Support Scheme. The pension improved the life satisfaction of recipients, and appeared to be driven by social, household income, and economic satisfaction. Consistent with the predictions of standard consumption-savings models, well-being improved when the shock was unanticipated (at announcement), but did not improve significantly further when the shock was anticipated (at disbursement). In addition, we find evidence that …
Deadlier Road Accidents? Traffic Safety Regulations And Heterogeneous Motorists’ Behavior, Christine Ho, Madhav S. Aney
Deadlier Road Accidents? Traffic Safety Regulations And Heterogeneous Motorists’ Behavior, Christine Ho, Madhav S. Aney
Research Collection School Of Economics
In 2003, China enacted the Road Traffic Safety Law in an attempt to promote traffic safety.We employ a difference-in-differences strategy on province level data, where fire accidentsare used as a control group for road accidents, to estimate the effects of the law on road accidents and casualties. Our findings suggest that while the law was successful in decreasing thenumber of accidents and casualties, the ratio of deaths to accidents and injuries to accidentsincreased. Exploring the potential channels, we find no evidence that “hit-and-kill” incentives,that is, incentives for motorists to kill the pedestrians that they hit due to China’s peculiar personal …
Barriers To Labor Migration For The Rural Poor: Experimental Evidence From A Vocational Training Program In Bangladesh, Abu S. Shonchoy, Tomoki Fujii, Selim Raihan
Barriers To Labor Migration For The Rural Poor: Experimental Evidence From A Vocational Training Program In Bangladesh, Abu S. Shonchoy, Tomoki Fujii, Selim Raihan
Research Collection School Of Economics
Vocational training programs aimed at rapidly growing sectors have the potential to reduce skill gaps as well as improve income and employment possibilities. Such programs have often been unsuccessful because they are not driven by industry demand and market linkages. Also, they do not tackle other barriers faced by trainees, such as savings and credit constraints and the uncertainty of migration. We introduced a training "plus'' program for the apparel sector jobs offered to the poor, rural households in northern Bangladesh, where we relaxed some of these constraints in a rigorous Randomized Control Trial (RCT) setting. Analyzing the program uptake …
Contributors Of Singaporean Youths' Wellbeing: Life Goals, Family-Community-Nation Capitals, Opportunity And Social Mobility, Kong Weng Ho
Contributors Of Singaporean Youths' Wellbeing: Life Goals, Family-Community-Nation Capitals, Opportunity And Social Mobility, Kong Weng Ho
Research Collection School Of Economics
Life goals induce one’s current investment and set one’s expectations of future outcomes, affecting one’s current state of subjective wellbeing. Using National Youth Survey (NYS) 2016, which has a representative sample of Singaporean youths, we find that non-zero-sum life goals such as family-oriented life goals and altruism-oriented life goals enhance happiness and life satisfaction of Singaporean youths while career-oriented life goals, zero-sum in nature, reduce subjective wellbeing. Apart from personal motivations or life aspirations, perceived social mobility (in terms of career opportunity and meritocracy) matters positively in the subjective wellbeing of both youths in school and in the workforce. Family …
Does "America First" Help America? The Impact Of Country Image On Exports And Welfare, Pao-Li Chang, Tomoki Fujii, Wei Jin
Does "America First" Help America? The Impact Of Country Image On Exports And Welfare, Pao-Li Chang, Tomoki Fujii, Wei Jin
Research Collection School Of Economics
This paper estimates the effects of bilateral and time-varying preference bias on trade flows and welfare. We use a unique dataset from the BBC World Opinion Poll that surveys (annually during 2005-2017 with some gaps) the populations from a wide array of countries on their views of whether an evaluated country is having a mainly positive or negative influence in the world. We identify the effects on bilateral preference parameters due to shifts in these country image perceptions, and quantify their general equilibrium effects on bilateral exports and welfare (each time for an evaluated exporting country, assuming that the exporting …