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Full-Text Articles in Behavioral Economics

The Weekend Effect In Television Viewership And Prime-Time Scheduling, Jung Won Yeo Nov 2017

The Weekend Effect In Television Viewership And Prime-Time Scheduling, Jung Won Yeo

Research Collection School Of Economics

The observed drops in the ratings of television programs on Fridays and Saturdays are likely a result of two factors: intrinsic contraction in demand for television watching and endogenous scheduling. I decompose the observed weekend effect into the effects from these two factors. To this end, I estimate a viewer choice model that uses aggregate Nielsen ratings data for prime-time network television shows over 11 years. The long span of the data enables me to control for television series qualities. The estimation results reveal that the estimated weekend effect is dampened as the empirical model accounts for variation in the …


Random Mechanism Design On Multidimensional Domains, Shurojit Chatterji, Huaxia Zeng Oct 2017

Random Mechanism Design On Multidimensional Domains, Shurojit Chatterji, Huaxia Zeng

Research Collection School Of Economics

We study random mechanism design in an environment where the set of alternatives has a Cartesian product structure. We first show that all generalized random dictatorships are strategy-proof on a minimally rich domain if and only if the domain is a top-separable domain. We next generalize the notion of connectedness (Monjardet, 2009) to establish a particular class of top-separable domains: connected domains, and show that in the class of minimally rich and connected domains, the multidimensional single-peakedness restriction is necessary and sufficient for the design of a flexible random social choice function that is unanimous and strategy-proof. Such a flexible …


On The Relationship Between Household Wealth And Entrepreneurship, Jungho Lee Aug 2017

On The Relationship Between Household Wealth And Entrepreneurship, Jungho Lee

Research Collection School Of Economics

Motivated by a substantial number of startup owners with negative household net worth, I present a model that incorporates credit borrowing into Evans and Jovanovic [1989]. The estimated model generates no relationship between household wealth and the propensity for business entry. Ignoring credit borrowing for potential business owners substantially overstates the efficiency loss from financial constraints in business entry. However, the efficiency loss in investments by the entrants is large even if credit borrowing is allowed. Individuals who start a business once credit borrowing is available are those whose business ideas are of a high-enough quality to compensate high financing …


Fertility And Rural Electrification In Bangladesh, Tomoki Fujii, Abu S. Shonchoy Jul 2017

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

Research Collection School Of Economics

We use a household-level panel dataset from Bangladesh to examine the household-level relationship between fertility and the access to electricity. We find that the household's access to electricity reduces the change in the number of children by about 0.1 to 0.25 children in a period of five years in most estimates. This finding also applies to retrospective panel data and is robust to the choice of covariates and estimation methods. Our finding passes falsification test and corroborates with the predictions of our theoretical model on the households' time use and consumption pattern.


A Martingale Difference-Divergence-Based Test For Specification, Liangjun Su, Xin Zheng May 2017

A Martingale Difference-Divergence-Based Test For Specification, Liangjun Su, Xin Zheng

Research Collection School Of Economics

In this paper we propose a novel consistent model specification test based on the martingale difference divergence (MDD) of the error term given the covariates. The MDD equals zero if and only if error term is conditionally mean independent of the covariates. Our MDD test does not require any nonparametric estimation under the alternative and it is applicable even if we have many covariates in the regression model. We establish the asymptotic distributions of our test statistic under the null and a sequence of Pitman local alternatives converging to the null at the usual parametric rate. Simulations suggest that our …


Singapore’S Life Program: Actuarial Framework, Longevity Risk And Impact Of Annuity Fund Return, Koon Shing Kwong, Yiu Kuen Tse, Wai-Sum Chan May 2017

Singapore’S Life Program: Actuarial Framework, Longevity Risk And Impact Of Annuity Fund Return, Koon Shing Kwong, Yiu Kuen Tse, Wai-Sum Chan

Research Collection School Of Economics

The Central Provident Fund (CPF) is a defined-contribution savings plan forming the key pillar of the pension system in Singapore. The CPF Lifelong Income For the Elderly (LIFE) program, which provides lifetime income for retirees, is a mandatory pension scheme for all Singapore residents. In this paper we construct an actuarial framework to analyze the LIFE program. We use this framework to study the plan payout outcomes with respect to changes in mortality and annuity fund return assumptions. We also examine the effects of some possible changes in the program on the payouts and bequests.


Love, Money, And Parental Goods: Does Parental Matchmaking Matter?, Fali Huang, Ginger Zhe Xu, Lixin Colin Xu May 2017

Love, Money, And Parental Goods: Does Parental Matchmaking Matter?, Fali Huang, Ginger Zhe Xu, Lixin Colin Xu

Research Collection School Of Economics

While parental matchmaking has been widespread throughout history and across countries, we know little about the relationship between parental matchmaking and marriage outcomes. Does parental involvement in matchmaking help ensure their needs are better taken care of by married children? This paper finds supportive evidence using a survey of Chinese couples. In particular, parental involvement in matchmaking is associated with having a more submissive wife, a greater number of children, a higher likelihood of having any male children, and a stronger belief of the husband in providing old age support to his parents. These benefits, however, are achieved at the …


Local And Global Sd-Strategy-Proofness Of Ordinal Mechanisms On Block-Connected Domains, Peng Liu Mar 2017

Local And Global Sd-Strategy-Proofness Of Ordinal Mechanisms On Block-Connected Domains, Peng Liu

Research Collection School Of Economics

The adjacency by Monjardet (2009) is weakened to a flip between two adjacently ranked blocks and called block-adjacency. The connectedness defined accordingly, blockconnectedness, covers some interesting unconnected domains. An ordinal mechanism on a block-connected domain is block-adjacent sd-strategy-proof if reporting the true preference always leads to a lottery that stochastically dominates the lottery delivered by reporting any preference block-adjacent to the sincere one.A condition on a block-connected domain called path-nestedness is proposed and shown sufficient for the equivalence between sd-strategy-proofness and block-adjacent sd-strategy-proofness. The sequentially dichotomous domain by Liu (2017) is an application. In addition, we systematically search for the …


Retirement Adequacy Of Mature Workers In Singapore, Rhema Vaithianathan, Stephen Hoskins Jan 2017

Retirement Adequacy Of Mature Workers In Singapore, Rhema Vaithianathan, Stephen Hoskins

Research Collection School Of Economics

In the last decade, the Singapore resident population has grown older with more elderly and fewer younger people. As Singapore Department of Statistics noted, the proportion of residents aged 65 years and over has increased from 9% to 13% over the past ten years. There are now fewer working-age adults to support each resident aged 65 years and over as indicated by the falling resident old-age support ratio from 7.7 in 2007 to 5.1 in 2017. The support ratio is expected to halve to 2.5 by 2030. As Singaporeans are both living and working longer, it is vital for the …


Need Based Aid From Selective Universities And The Achievement Gap Between Rich And Poor, Sunha Myong Oct 2016

Need Based Aid From Selective Universities And The Achievement Gap Between Rich And Poor, Sunha Myong

Research Collection School Of Economics

I study the role of need-based aid from selective universities in closing the achievement gap between rich and poor high school students. I focus on the incentive aspect of need-based aid that can change high school students’ effort choices. The impact of increasing need-based aid depends on the extent of borrowing constraints and how competition affects the relative performance of low- and high-income students. I develop a structural model of students’ learning, application, and admission processes, and estimate it with the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002, a nationally representative sample. I use a geographic variation in costs of attending selective …


Sequential Auctions With Descending Reserve Prices, Massimiliano Landi Aug 2016

Sequential Auctions With Descending Reserve Prices, Massimiliano Landi

Research Collection School Of Economics

No abstract provided.


Harmful Transparency In Teams, Parimal Bag, Nona Pepito May 2016

Harmful Transparency In Teams, Parimal Bag, Nona Pepito

Research Collection School Of Economics

In a two-player team project with efforts over two rounds, we demonstrate that observability of peer efforts can be strictly harmful if preferences are utilitarian. This contrasts with Mohnen et al. (2000) who show in a similar setting that observability of interim efforts induces more efforts, if team members are inequity-averse.


Entrepreneurship, Education And Credit: The Golden Triangle, Roberto M. Samaniego, Juliana Yu Sun Apr 2016

Entrepreneurship, Education And Credit: The Golden Triangle, Roberto M. Samaniego, Juliana Yu Sun

Research Collection School Of Economics

We develop a model to evaluate the impact of college education finance on welfare, inequality and aggregate outcomes. Our model captures the stylized fact that entrepreneurs with college are more common and more profitable. Our calibration to US data suggests this is mainly because higher labor earnings allow college educated agents to ameliorate credit constraints when they become entrepreneurs. The welfare benefits of subsidizing education are greater than those of eliminating financing constraints on education because subsidies ameliorate the impact of financing constraints on would-be entrepreneurs.


Inference In Near-Singular Regression, Peter C. B. Phillips Jan 2016

Inference In Near-Singular Regression, Peter C. B. Phillips

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper considers stationary regression models with near-collinear regressors. Limit theory is developed for regression estimates and test statistics in cases where the signal matrix is nearly singular in finite samples and is asymptotically degenerate. Examples include models that involve evaporating trends in the regressors that arise in conditions such as growth convergence. Structural equation models are also considered and limit theory is derived for the corresponding instrumental variable (IV) estimator, Wald test statistic, and overidentification test when the regressors are endogenous. It is shown that near-singular designs of the type considered here are not completely fatal to least squares …


Impact Of International Remittances On Schooling In The Philippines: Does The Relationship To The Household Head Matter?, Tomoki Fujii Sep 2015

Impact Of International Remittances On Schooling In The Philippines: Does The Relationship To The Household Head Matter?, Tomoki Fujii

Research Collection School Of Economics

We study the impact of international remittances on schooling in the Philippines, taking into account the school-age individual's relationship to the household head. This consideration is important because employment opportunities abroad may be taken at the expense of the quality of child rearing. Our estimation results indicate that there are, indeed, significant negative guardian effects on school attendance and education expenditures when children with overseas parents are looked after by a relative other than a parent or grandparent. However, these negative effects tend to be outweighed by the positive impact of remittance flows from overseas.


Expropriation Risk And Competition With The Military, Madhav S. Aney, Giovanni Ko May 2015

Expropriation Risk And Competition With The Military, Madhav S. Aney, Giovanni Ko

Research Collection School Of Economics

How can agents in the military, who control the means of coercion, commit not to expropriate from producers? In this paper we propose competition within the military as one of the mechanisms that can deter predation and consequently create commitment. In our model, even if agents within the military could expropriate all output costlessly, it is attractive to protect producers from predating military units. This is because there is a marginal defensive advantage and consequently defense is an effective way to potentially eliminate other military units, reducing competition and leading to higher future payoffs. Our model predicts that greater internal …


Social Transformation, Group Reputation, And Reputation Matching, Huan Wang, Yi Zhang Mar 2015

Social Transformation, Group Reputation, And Reputation Matching, Huan Wang, Yi Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

Unlike in small communities where one can strategically interact with another according to the latter’s individual reputation, players in complex societies often have to interact with strangers whose individual reputations cannot be easily acquired. They often have to infer their counterparts’ characteristics from the latters’ group reputation to simplify decision making. We provide a game theoretical model of reputation matching concerning corruption during social transformation. We show that the regime change from acquaintance matching to anonymous matching tends to cause rampant corruption and the effectiveness of anti-corruption policies is non-monotonic with respect to the supervision efforts.


Fertility And Rural Electrification In Bangladesh, Tomoki Fujii, Abu S. Shonchoy Mar 2015

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

Research Collection School Of Economics

We use a panel dataset from Bangladesh to examine the relationship between fertility and the adoption of electricity with the latter instrumented by infrastructure development and the quality of service delivery. We find that the adoption of electricity reduces fertility, and this impact is more pronounced when the household already has two or more children. This observation can be explained by a simple household model of time use, in which adoption of electricity affects only the optimal number of children but not necessarily current fertility behavior if the optimal number has not yet been reached.


Love, Money And Old Age Support: Does Parental Matchmaking Matter?, Fali Huang, Ginger Zhe Jin, Lixin Colin Xu Feb 2015

Love, Money And Old Age Support: Does Parental Matchmaking Matter?, Fali Huang, Ginger Zhe Jin, Lixin Colin Xu

Research Collection School Of Economics

Parental involvement in matchmaking may distort the choice of spouse because parents are willing to substitute love for market and household production, which are more sharable between parents and their children. This paper finds supportive evidence in a survey of Chinese couples. In both rural and urban areas, parent matchmaking is associated with less marital harmony between the couple, more submissive wives, and a stronger belief in old age support for the son. In contrast, its association with couple income differs by rural and urban regions, perhaps because of differences in earning opportunities and in the enforcement of the one-child …


A Prospect Theory Of Power Transition: Why Power Transition Does Not Imply War?, Huan Wang, Yi Zhang Jan 2015

A Prospect Theory Of Power Transition: Why Power Transition Does Not Imply War?, Huan Wang, Yi Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

We present a prospect theory model to explain why power transitions do not necessarily lead to war. We find that three major mechanisms prevent the occurrence of potential power transition wars. First, the dual boiling frog effects occurring in the middle range of capability catching-up rate prevent a dominant state from preempting and a rising state from challenging the other side. Second, divergent expectations for favorable comparative growth advantage motivate both parties to keep the status quo. Third, the concerns of relative advantage deterioration over a third party in the post-war power structure help deter both parties from starting a …


Reputation Building Through Failure, Huan Wang, Yi Zhang Jan 2015

Reputation Building Through Failure, Huan Wang, Yi Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

In China, many entrepreneurs receive strong supports each time their business fails. This contradicts existing literature and differs from rare revival elsewhere. The major explanation lies in China’s unfriendly and unstable policy environments, due to which business failure per se cannot discern competence. Therefore, entrepreneurs failing because of policy shocks have the incentive for extra efforts to build reputation of competence and trustworthiness. This mechanism prepares a pool of seasoned entrepreneurs who can help alleviate damages of not only policy shocks, but also such system shocks as business cycle and sector upgrading, and therefore makes the economy more adaptable.


Wellbeing Of Singapore’S Youths, Kong Weng Ho Jan 2015

Wellbeing Of Singapore’S Youths, Kong Weng Ho

Research Collection School Of Economics

Given Singapore’s focus on human capital investment in its residents, the nation’s youths have experienced increases in their financial, educational, and physical wellbeing. However, how have our youths fared in their emotional and mental wellbeing? Figures from the World Values Survey show reported a gradual decline in life satisfaction for both general population and youths. Data from four waves of the National Youth Survey confirms this trend. This chapter explores and examines the non-economic channels that may have countered the positive influence of economic success on the wellbeing of youths, namely, changing family structure, heightened stressors, shifting life goals, time …


Aggregate Consumption And Debt Accumulation: An Empirical Examination Of Us Household Behavior, Yun K. Kim, Mark Setterfield, Yuan Mei Jan 2015

Aggregate Consumption And Debt Accumulation: An Empirical Examination Of Us Household Behavior, Yun K. Kim, Mark Setterfield, Yuan Mei

Research Collection School Of Economics

The outbreak of the financial crisis in 2008 witnessed a significant contraction in US consumption spending, as households began deleveraging following a period marked by historically high levels of household borrowing. These events call into question the canonical life-cycle theory of consumption, with its benign view of debt as a neutral instrument of optimal intertemporal expenditure smoothing. This paper draws attention to an alternative, post-Keynesian account of consumption spending in which current income, household borrowing and household indebtedness all affect current consumption. Central to the analysis is an empirical investigation of US consumption spending since the 1950s. The results of …


Optimal City Hierarchy: A Dynamic Programming Approach To Central Place Theory, Wen-Tai Hsu, Thomas J. Holmes, Frank Morgan Nov 2014

Optimal City Hierarchy: A Dynamic Programming Approach To Central Place Theory, Wen-Tai Hsu, Thomas J. Holmes, Frank Morgan

Research Collection School Of Economics

Central place theory is a key building block of economic geography and an empirically plausible description of city systems. This paper provides a rationale for central place theory via a dynamic programming formulation of the social planner's problem of city hierarchy. We show that there must be one and only one immediate smaller city between two neighboring larger-sized cities in any optimal solution. If the fixed cost of setting up a city is a power function, then the immediate smaller city will be located in the middle, confirming the locational pattern suggested by Christaller. We also show that the solution …


Is Urban Food Demand In The Philippines Different From China?, Tomoki Fujii Oct 2014

Is Urban Food Demand In The Philippines Different From China?, Tomoki Fujii

Research Collection School Of Economics

It is essential to understand the consumption pattern of food and how it changes over time to formulate sound economic policies as well as marketing and pricing strategies. In this study, we estimate the Quadratic Almost Ideal Demand System with six rounds of the Family Income Expenditure Survey exploiting the conditional linearity of the demand system. We find that the Filipino diet has become westernized and that the changes in urban food demand elasticities are qualitatively similar to those in urban China, especially for meat, fruits, and vegetables.We also offer some policy and business implications.


Does Market Competition Lead To Customization?, Wen-Tai Hsu, Yi Lu, Travis Ng Oct 2014

Does Market Competition Lead To Customization?, Wen-Tai Hsu, Yi Lu, Travis Ng

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper proposes a theory of competition and customization. When firms allocate their production to both custom-made and standardized products, the fraction of sales from the former will increase in the face of increased competition. Recent surveys conducted by the World Bank on Chinese firms provide a rare direct measure of customization that allows us to test the above-mentioned prediction. We find empirical results consistent with the prediction.


How Effective Can Ex Post Destruction Alleviate The Hold-Up Problem?, Huan Wang, Juyuan Zhang, Yi Zhang Jul 2014

How Effective Can Ex Post Destruction Alleviate The Hold-Up Problem?, Huan Wang, Juyuan Zhang, Yi Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

We first investigate whether or not ex post destruction can possibly alleviate the hold-up problem in a one-shot game between a supplier and a buyer. The answer is yes but only when the buyer believes that the supplier might be a Homo reciprocans agent with sufficiently strong propensity for reciprocity. Under incomplete information with informed supplier, investment is made feasible by the “mismatch” between the buyer’s belief of stronger supplier reciprocal propensity and a de facto weaker one. Under incomplete information with uninformed supplier, the “mismatch” between the buyer’s belief of weaker supplier reciprocal propensity and a stronger ex post …


Reinterpreting King Solomon's Problem: Malice And Mechanism Design, Brishti Guha Feb 2014

Reinterpreting King Solomon's Problem: Malice And Mechanism Design, Brishti Guha

Research Collection School Of Economics

I argue for an alternative interpretation of King Solomon's problem in terms of one of the two claimants being “malicious”. A “malicious” claimant places no intrinsic value on the object but derives utility from depriving the rival claimant. This new interpretation permits a simpler solution than those considered in the literature; I derive a mechanism that induces truthful revelation where the equilibrium involves a single round of elimination of weakly dominated strategies, and no monetary transfers. I consider extensions which allow for the malicious claimant to also place some low but positive intrinsic valuation on the object; I also discuss …


Grandchild Care, Intergenerational Transfers, And Grandparents’ Labor Supply, Christine Ho Sep 2013

Grandchild Care, Intergenerational Transfers, And Grandparents’ Labor Supply, Christine Ho

Research Collection School Of Economics

One-fifth of children aged below five with employed mothers benefit from grandparent provided child care as their main source of daycare in the U.S. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, we investigate how grandchild care needs relate to intergenerational transfers of time and money and grandparents’ labor supply behavior. We find that grandparents with a new born grandchild are more likely to provide grandchild care while married grandparents are also more likely to be employed and provide financial help. Grandparents with grandchildren living close by provided higher time transfers while married grandmothers with resident grandchildren also worked longer …


A Spatial Analysis Of The Italian Second Republic, Massimiliano Landi, Ricardo Pelizzo Sep 2013

A Spatial Analysis Of The Italian Second Republic, Massimiliano Landi, Ricardo Pelizzo

Research Collection School Of Economics

The Optimal Classification method is applied to a newly created data set to provide a spatial map of the Italian Second Republic (1996–2008). A bi-dimensional political space was found in the XIII Legislature and virtually a one-dimensional political space in the XIV and XV Legislatures. In addition, the main dimension is explained along the government–opposition dimension rather than on the traditional left–right dimension. During the Second Republic, Italy experienced changes in the electoral system and in the format of parties. The data are used to discuss the implications of either change on the dimensionality space. It was found that the …