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THE NEXUS OF FINANCIAL DEEPENING AND POVERTY: THE CASE OF BLACK SEA REGION ECONOMIES The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2022-06-30 LU CHENGHUI, AZER DILANCHIEV
This paper analyzes the effect of financial deepening on poverty in the emerging Black Sea market economies with new generation causality analysis techniques utilizing panel data from 1996 to 2020. The econometric method of panel data is applied to the six emerging economies. It can be seen that the causal relationship between domestic loans to the private sector (DPS) and per capita household consumption
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INTERNATIONAL TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER, ENVIRONMENTAL POLLUTION AND DOMESTIC WELFARE The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2022-06-30 RAY-YUN CHANG, PING-SING KUO, YAN-SHU LIN, JIN-LI HU
Licensing of foreign green technologies is not free to the home country, hence causing tradeoffs in the domestic welfare. This paper constructs a two-stage game model to explore the impact of international green technology licensing on the environment and social welfare. Results show that the total amount of pollution under licensing may be larger than that under no licensing whereas the social welfare
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RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FIRM SIZE AND FIRM GROWTH: EVIDENCE FROM KOREAN MANUFACTURING FIRMS The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2022-06-30 TAEWON KANG, WONSUB EUM
This study uses a representative sample of Korean manufacturing firms for the period 2010–2018 to examine the relationship between firm size and growth in various aspects. The main findings are as follows. First, smaller firms have a higher average growth rate and wider growth dispersion (growth variance) across the firms. Second, the growth rates of micro and small firms show negative growth persistence
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GOOD LUCK OR GOOD POLICY? A RECENT MACROECONOMIC HISTORY OF NEW ZEALAND The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2022-06-29 ÖMER FARUK AKBAL
The Great Moderation was a global phenomenon marked by stable economic growth and inflation. However, how much monetary policy contributed to its success remained a popular debate in the literature. Answering this question became imperative after the global financial crisis since global conditions became relatively more important than past. I examined the recent macroeconomic history of New Zealand
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CLIMATE CHANGE, SOCIO-ECONOMIC FACTORS AND BIODIVERSITY LOSS IN MALAYSIA The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2022-06-27 YAN-LING TAN, THIAN-HEE YIEW, MUZAFAR SHAH HABIBULLAH
Malaysia is recognized as one of the mega biodiversity countries of the world. However, Malaysia’s biodiversity hotspot experiencing a more pronounce biodiversity loss. Accordingly, the objective of this study is to explore the link between climate change, socio-economic factors and biodiversity loss in Malaysia from 1990 to 2016, with a special focus on different climate change indicators namely rainfall
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ANALYSIS OF GLOBAL VALUE CHAIN PARTICIPATION AND WORKERS’ WAGES IN THAILAND: A MICRO-LEVEL ANALYSIS The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2022-06-23 UPALAT KORWATANASAKUL, YOUNGMIN BAEK, ADAM MAJOE
This study examines the relationship between global value chain (GVC) participation and workers’ wages and the disparities in wage benefits from GVC participation. It employs a pseudo-panel approach to treat endogeneity biases, utilizing pseudo-panel data constructed from the Thai Labour Force Survey, 1995–2011. The results show that GVC participation, on average, induces higher hourly wages through
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SINGAPORE’S HIGH WAGE POLICY REVISITED The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2022-06-21 LIM CHONG YAH
The author, now aged 90, reflects on the then highly iconoclastic National Wages Council (NWC) recommendation of a 20% yearly gross wage increase guideline for three years, 1979–1981. He emphasizes the important differences between the negotiable and the non-negotiable recommended wage increases. He also emphasizes the important difference between a pure percentage wage increase and a quantum plus
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DOES FINANCIAL GOVERNANCE STEER FINANCIAL DEVELOPMENT TOWARD SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT? The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2022-06-15 KUMAR DEBASIS DUTTA, MALLIKA SAHA
Unbridled financial development (FD) leads to financial crisis and undermines sustainable development (SD), which underscores the need for financial governance (FG). Following this backdrop, we seek to explore the role of FG in shaping the FD–SD nexus for a panel of 122 countries covering the period 2000–2017 using advanced econometric methods. Results reveal that the FD–SD relationship is nonlinear
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LIFE SATISFACTION CHANGES AND ADAPTATION IN THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC: EVIDENCE FROM SINGAPORE The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2022-06-15 TERENCE C. CHENG, SEONGHOON KIM, KANGHYOCK KOH
We provide novel evidence on how COVID-19 affected overall life satisfaction using a monthly longitudinal survey of middle-aged and older Singaporeans. We study how the subjective well-being of individuals evolves over the course of 18 months including the outbreak of the pandemic, the implementation of the lockdown and the spike of cases due to the delta variant in a country where COVID-19 is controlled
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PROMOTING COOPERATION IN A PUBLIC GOOD EXPERIMENT THROUGH OSTRACISM AS A PUNISHMENT MECHANISM The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2022-05-11 RAWADEE JARUNGRATTANAPONG
Ostracism is one form of real-life punishment mechanism to penalize uncooperative individuals in many societies. This paper aims to test whether ostracism enhances cooperation in the public good experiment by allowing group members to expel others based on the majority voting rule. The study also employed the modified public good experiment to categorize the contributors. The results showed that introducing
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SPILLOVERS OF GLOBAL LIQUIDITY AND MONETARY POLICY DIVERGENCE FROM ADVANCED ECONOMIES TO VIETNAM The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2022-05-11 CHAU LE, XUAN VINH VO, ANDY MULLINEUX, HUYEN NGUYEN
This paper studies the spillovers of global liquidity and monetary policy divergence from advanced economies to Vietnam. Applying the structural Bayesian Vector Auto-Regressive model with Sims–Zha prior distribution, we find that unconventional monetary policy shocks of major central banks led to a reduction in inflation and short-term interest rate as well as an appreciation of local currency in Vietnam
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WHO HAS PRICE LEADERSHIP IN PAPRIKA TRADE BETWEEN KOREA AND JAPAN? EVIDENCE FROM THRESHOLD VECTOR AUTOREGRESSIVE MODEL APPROACH The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2022-05-05 HANPIL MOON, JUN HO SEOK, SUHWAN LEE, MICHAEL R. REED
Korea is not only a top paprika exporter to Japan, but also Japan is the largest Korean paprika importer. In this situation, investigating who has price leadership contributes to fill a gap in previous literature. This study examines paprika price relationships between wholesale prices in Korea, import prices in Japan and wholesale prices in Japan using monthly data from 2007 to 2017. A threshold vector
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ARE FAIR, REASONABLE AND NONDISCRIMINATORY (FRAND) COMMITMENTS APPLICABLE OUTSIDE THE STANDARD ESSENTIAL PATENTS (SEPS) DOMAIN? — AN ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVE The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2022-04-30 JIA LE NG, MARCEL TAN, WENG LOONG KONG
To date, the Competition and Consumer Commission of Singapore (CCCS) has dealt with two cases that involved fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory (FRAND) commitments in order to resolve the competition concerns identified. While the application of FRAND commitments outside the standard essential patents (SEPs) domain remains limited globally, we show that the circumstances that give rise to the economic
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A FREQUENCY-DOMAIN ANALYSIS OF MEDIUM-SCALE DSGE MODELS The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2022-04-29 JINSHUN WU, TAPS MAITI
This paper employs the local Bayesian likelihood methodology to estimate a medium-scale dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model on different frequencies and uses frequency-domain tools to evaluate the time-varying parameter model and the fixed-parameter model. These techniques yield fresh insights into theoretical and empirical implications conveyed by alternative models beyond what conventional
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WHICH FACTORS MATTER TO DEPOSIT INSURANCE COVERAGE LIMIT? EVIDENCE FROM EMERGING MARKETS The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2022-04-29 YIMING CHANG, XIANGYUAN YU, SHANGMEI ZHAO, HAIJUN YANG
This paper analyzes the effects of the household savings rate, interest rate spread and bank capital to total assets on the relationship between banks’ risk-taking and explicit deposit insurance coverage while controlling for certain macroeconomic factors, bank-level factors and political factors with data from 50 emerging markets. It is found that the U-shaped relationship between banks’ risk-taking
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Air Pollution and Outward Foreign Direct Investment — A Cross-Country Empirical Study The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2022-04-26 Jr-Tsung Huang,He-Shun Hsu
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REVISITING THE ROLE OF THE OIL CURSE AND ITS TRANSMISSION CHANNELS IN SHAPING PETROSTATES’ GROWTH: AN EVIDENCE FROM A QUANTILE REGRESSION The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2022-04-14 BASEM ERTIMI, TAMAT SARMIDI, NORLIN KHALID, MOHD HELMI ALI
This paper aims to uncover the oil curse by presenting the distinctive characteristics of petrostates. Furthermore, it also clusters the countries to determine the mechanisms of oil resources by the importance of each transmission channel. Fixed and random effect models are performed, coupled with quantile regression. The results are threefold. First, oil abundance is favorable for economic growth
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FINANCIAL LIBERALIZATION, DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS, AND INCOME INEQUALITY: NEW INSIGHTS FROM PAKISTAN The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2022-03-30 ABDUL RAHMAN, MUHAMMAD ARSHAD KHAN
This study investigates the relationship between financial liberalization, democratic institutions, and income inequality in Pakistan by using a two-state Markov switching (MS) methodology for the period 1972–2017. The dynamic factor modelling approach is used to construct the financial liberalization index. The impact of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2007–2008 on financial liberalization–i
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A DIGITAL SERVICES APPROACH TO PPP: THE NETFLIX INDEX The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2022-03-30 MAXIMILIAN AMBROS
The famous Big Mac Index (BMI) is a popular example of global price differences for a non-tradable good. We analyze the prices of digital goods worldwide to check whether the Law of One Price (LOP) holds. We construct a Netflix Index, i.e., a price comparison of entertainment subscriptions. This Netflix Index compares the affordability of digital goods around the world. While the deviations between
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COMPARATIVE STUDY OF DETERMINANTS OF THE MALAYSIAN HOUSEHOLD NONPERFORMING LOANS: EVIDENCE FROM NARDL The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2022-03-23 MAY-JIN THEONG, WEE-YEAP LAU, AHMAD FARID OSMAN
This study compares the sensitivity of each household nonperforming loans (NPLs) category in Malaysia, allowing asymmetry across different household credit types, credit cards, personal uses, purchase of residential properties and purchase of transport vehicles. Differences in the impact of household debt on the Malaysian household NPLs are found evident. In the sample period from 2006 to 2018, the
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EXPORT–GROWTH NEXUS IN THE KINGDOM OF SAUDI ARABIA: A NONLINEAR ARDL APPROACH The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2022-03-23 MD. SAIFUL ISLAM, SALEH SAUD ALSAIF, ABDULHAMID FARHAN ALSHAMMARI
The study examines the asymmetric influence of exports on economic growth in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia using an augmented neoclassical production function incorporating export earnings and oil rent. It uses time-series yearly data from 1985 to 2019 published by the World Bank, employs the nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) approach and Toda–Yamamoto (T–Y) Granger causality test. The
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IMPACT OF IP PROTECTION ON EXPORT TRADE: EVIDENCE FROM THE ASIA-PACIFIC FTAs The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2022-03-17 LIYING WANG, YUAN LOU, XIANXIN GAO
As intellectual property (IP) rules increasingly occur in the international trade policies, the change of IP rules in the free trade agreement (FTA) shows the trend of TRIPS-plus, leading the trade friction between countries into fierce IP competition. To clarify how the IP rules influence the export trade structure and to provide theoretical and practical advice for reconstructing free trade rules
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INTRODUCTION — FRONTIERS OF INNOVATION STUDIES AND ISSUES IN EMERGING ECONOMIES: A SCHUMPETERIAN PERSPECTIVE The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2022-02-11 Keun Lee,Xiaobo Wu,Chan-Yuan Wong
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BEHAVIORAL HETEROGENEITY IN THE JAPANESE AND US STOCK MARKETS The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2022-02-11 SOOK-REI TAN, CHANGTAI LI, WAI-MUN CHIA
Using monthly stock prices and exchange rate of Japan and the US from June 1980 to December 2019, we identify episodes of boom/bubble and bust/crash in these stock markets by comparing their market prices with their respective fundamental values. We then examine the price dynamic of the two stock markets and foreign exchange market using a three-market heterogeneous agent model with fundamentalists
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UNLICENSED MONEYLENDING MARKETS: RELATIONAL CONTRACTING BETWEEN BORROWERS AND GUARANTORS The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2022-02-08 KAIWEN LEONG, DAN LI, HUAILU LI, HAIBO XU
Unlicensed moneylending is when an unlicensed individual, often called loan shark, lends money to another individual. We model the unlicensed moneylending market to analyze relational contracting between borrowers and guarantors. A guarantor repeatedly decides whether to act as the guarantor for a borrower, whereas the borrower repeatedly chooses a loan shark to borrow from and determines his effort
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IS THERE ANY DAY-OF-THE-WEEK EFFECT AMID THE COVID-19 PANIC IN THE MALAYSIAN STOCK MARKET? The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2022-02-08 VENUS KHIM-SEN LIEW, RICKY CHEE-JIUN CHIA, SAMINA RIAZ, EVAN LAU
Using daily data from January 2, 2020 to May 31, 2021, this study empirically examines the day-of-the-week effect in the Malaysian stock market during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak. We also test the impact of the lockdown policy and market sentiment index on the stock market. We resort to ordinary least square regression with generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity
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HOW INFORMATIVE ARE QUANTIFIED SURVEY DATA? EVIDENCE FROM RBI HOUSEHOLD INFLATION EXPECTATIONS SURVEY The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2022-02-04 GAURAV KUMAR SINGH, TATHAGATA BANDYOPADHYAY
Quantification1 of the ordinal survey responses on inflation expectations is an important preliminary step for undertaking further macroeconomic analysis of the data. In this paper, we briefly describe the standard quantification methods along with the underlying assumptions. We also propose two new methods for quantification. We then apply these methods to quantify the IESH2 data collected by the
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THE EFFECTS OF NEWLY INTRODUCED COUNTRY-BY-COUNTRY REPORTING ON AGGRESSIVE TAX AVOIDANCE: EVIDENCE FROM EUROPEAN BANKS The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2022-02-03 SVETLANA SABLJIĆ, BARBARA MÖREC, VLADIMIR VASIĆ
This study investigates the effects of enhanced tax transparency on aggressive tax avoidance using Country-by-Country Reporting (CbCR) as the main instrument of tax transparency for deterring and preventing tax avoidance by multinational companies. We find strong empirical evidence on decreased aggressive tax avoidance by European Union multinational banks in the post-implementation period (2014–2018)
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TOURISM DEMAND AND ECONOMIC GROWTH IN VIETNAM: FRESH INSIGHTS BASED ON THE PARTIAL AND MULTIVARIATE WAVELET APPROACHES The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2022-02-03 NGO THAI HUNG, HA MINH HIEU
This study aims to examine the interaction among tourism revenue (TOV), the real exchange rate (REX), and economic development in Vietnam throughout 1995–2019. Using the bivariate and multivariate wavelet frameworks, we examine the lead–lag connectedness, co-movement and dynamic associations between these indicators across various time and frequency domains. By doing so, we employ wavelet transform
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LEVERAGING ON ENERGY SECURITY TO ALLEVIATE POVERTY IN ASIAN ECONOMIES The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2022-01-29 FARHAD TAGHIZADEH-HESARY, ABDULRASHEED ZAKARI, NAOYUKI YOSHINO, IRFAN KHAN
This study examines the role of energy security in poverty reduction in the 12 poorest Asian economies from 2000 to 2019. We postulated an energy security index using principal component analysis. We adopted the system generalized method of a moment technique to manage endogeneity and dynamism in the model. For robustness, we applied a panel-corrected standard error (PCSE). We found a negative relationship
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HOUSEHOLD ECONOMIC PRUDENCE IN THAILAND The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2022-01-29 SASIWIMON WARUNSIRI PAWEENAWAT
The countercyclical pattern of saving in Thailand in the 1990s and 2000s raised questions about household saving behaviors in the country. Using constructed pseudo-panel data sets from the Thai Household Socioeconomic Surveys (SESs) from 1992 to 2011, this paper estimates the intensity of the precautionary saving motive, measured by the coefficient of relative prudence of households in Thailand. By
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HOW DO NATURAL DISASTERS AFFECT ENERGY POVERTY? EVIDENCE FROM A GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2022-01-28 YUE DOU, KANGYIN DONG, QINGZHE JIANG, MUHAMMAD SHAHBAZ
To investigate the impact of natural disasters on energy poverty, this study employs a panel dataset of 113 countries covering the period 2000–2014. We also conduct an asymmetric analysis on the natural disaster–energy poverty nexus. In addition, we analyze the impact mechanism between natural disasters and energy poverty. The main findings indicate that natural disasters deteriorate the energy poverty
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DOES PERSISTENT COST INEFFICIENCY EXIST? A MUNICIPAL-LEVEL ANALYSIS OF EXPENDITURE IN VICTORIAN LOCAL GOVERNMENT The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2022-01-28 CAROLYN-THI THANH DUNG TRAN, BRIAN DOLLERY
While a voluminous empirical literature has investigated cost efficiency in local government, until recently no effort has been invested in decomposing municipal performance into its persistent efficiency and transient efficiency components. In this paper, we estimate persistent and transient cost efficiency that might be attributed to managerial and environmental factors in the Victorian state local
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Model Uncertainty and Financial Frictions: Implications for Optimal Monetary Policy The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2021-12-31 ZEYNEP KANTUR, GÜLSERİM ÖZCAN
The last decades proved that policymaking without considering uncertainty is impracticable. In an environment of uncertainty, policymakers have doubts about the policy models they routinely use. This paper focuses specifically on the situation where uncertainty on the financial side of the economy leads to misspecification in the policy model. We describe a coherent strategy for policymakers who are
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FOREIGN FINANCING, EXCHANGE RATE EXPOSURES AND CORPORATE INVESTMENT IN SINGAPORE The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2021-12-28 BEN CHAROENWONG, ANISAH BTE ABDUL RAHMAH ZAMAWI
We study the effect of exchange rate fluctuations on foreign corporate investment flows to Singaporean firms using a linear reduced-form empirical specification on data from the past decade. Overall, we find that the cost of debt capital falls on average when the Singapore dollar depreciates. Isolating the effect of exchange rates on US-denominated debt vis-a-vis interest rates and yield curve variables
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THE CONNECTEDNESS BETWEEN THE SENTIMENT INDEX AND STOCK RETURN VOLATILITY UNDER COVID-19: A TIME-VARYING PARAMETER VECTOR AUTOREGRESSION APPROACH The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2021-12-17 WENTING ZHANG, SHIGEYUKI HAMORI
We analyze the connectedness between the sentiment index and the return and volatility of the crude oil, stock and gold markets by employing the time-varying parameter vector autoregression model vis-à-vis the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) epidemic. Our sentiment index is constructed via text mining technology. We also employ a network to visualize and better understand the structure of the connectedness
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MOBILE WALLETS AND CONSUMER SPENDING IN SINGAPORE: AGARWAL et al. REVISITED The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2021-12-17 LEO VAN HOVE
Agarwal et al. (2019). Mobile wallet and entrepreneurial growth. AEA Papers and Proceedings, 109, 48–53 analyze the impact of the introduction of quick response (QR) codes for mobile payments in Singapore. They find that this not only resulted in a significant increase in the use of mobile wallets, but that there was also a positive spillover effect on debit and credit card payments — in particular
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INTRODUCTION TO SPECIAL ISSUE ON ISLAMIC ECONOMICS AND FINANCE The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2021-12-15 M. Kabir Hassan
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MODELING TOURISM–ENVIRONMENT RELATIONSHIP IN AUSTRALIA: DOES ASYMMETRY MATTER? The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2021-12-15 ALEX O. ACHEAMPONG
Prior empirical studies have employed various econometric estimation techniques to study the environmental effect of tourism demand. Prominently, these econometric modeling techniques implicitly assume that the environmental effect of tourism is symmetrical, which could sometimes be problematic. This study, therefore, utilized two econometric estimation techniques, namely, the Pesaran et al. (2001)
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AN ANALYSIS OF ABNORMAL RETURNS ASSOCIATED WITH STOCK SPLIT The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2021-12-13 JYOTI PANDEY, VINAY KANDPAL, NEERAJ NAUTIYAL
A stock split is when a company’s outstanding shares are divided into multiple shares by issuing more shares to current shareholders without eroding their stake’s value. The company typically takes these actions to increase liquidity and marketability, lower stock prices, attract new investors and so on. The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of stock splits on the stock returns during
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CONSUMER PREFERENCES AND REGULATIONS IN CREDIT CARD MARKETS: EVIDENCE FROM TURKEY The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2021-11-30 G. GULSUN AKIN, AHMET FARUK AYSAN, EZGI ÖZER, LEVENT YILDIRAN
In this paper, we analyze the demand side of the credit card market. Using unique survey data and a discrete choice model, we uncover consumer preferences for all price and nonprice features of credit cards. Our results provide evidence for an alternative explanation for the credit card pricing puzzles. We show that consumers view credit cards as highly differentiated products with both bank-level
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EVALUATING THE ROLE OF EDUCATION AND HUMAN CAPITAL IN POVERTY REDUCTION AND INCLUSIVE GROWTH IN SOUTH ASIA The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2021-11-30 SICHENG LI, CEMEI LI, MOHAMMAD MARUF HASAN, SYED MOUDUD-UL-HUQ, ROBINA IRAM
Economic growth necessitates the development of human capital and education. It plays a critical and necessary role in the formulation of income distribution policies and alleviating poverty. This study investigates the relationship through ordinary least square (OLS), fully-modified OLS and dynamic OLS models using panel data from the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) countries
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THE EFFICIENCY OF SIN STOCKS: A MULTIFRACTAL ANALYSIS OF DRUG INDICES The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2021-11-16 Faheem Aslam, Paulo Ferreira, Fahd Amjad, Haider Ali
This study provides the first evidence of market efficiency of drug indices, especially cannabis and tobacco, which are known in finance as sin markets. The multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis (MFDFA) is employed on the daily data of six cannabis and one tobacco indices in order to measure efficiency by quantifying the intensity of self-similarity. The findings confirm multifractality in all
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DETERMINANTS OF INFLATION IN INDIA IN A DYNAMIC SETUP The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2021-11-10 MASUDUL HASAN ADIL, MOHAMMAD AZEEM KHAN, HAROON RASOOL
The present study empirically examines the factors accounting for inflation in India in an open economy framework by utilizing the bounds testing approach to cointegration for the 2006: Q3-2019: Q4 period. The findings reveal the existence of a long-run relationship with the household survey-based inflation expectation, real output, narrow money aggregate and interest rate as important determinants
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IS THE REPORTS-BASED MEASURE OF UNCERTAINTY STATIONARY? EVIDENCE FROM A NEW PANEL RESIDUAL AUGMENTED LEAST SQUARES UNIT ROOT TEST The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2021-10-30 SAKIRU ADEBOLA SOLARIN, CHRIS STEWART
To avoid spurious inferences, researchers analyzing the dimensions of uncertainty need to determine whether it is nonstationary. The degree of persistence of uncertainty also indicates the duration of the negative impact of an uncertainty shock on the economy. We use a new panel residual augmented least squares unit root test that allows for heterogeneous structural breaks in both intercepts and slopes
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POLICY UNCERTAINTY AND THE DEMAND FOR MONEY IN SINGAPORE: AN ASYMMETRIC ANALYSIS The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2021-10-29 MOHSEN BAHMANI-OSKOOEE, MUHAMMAD AFTAB, SAHAR BAHMANI
In search of a stable demand for money, almost all previous studies include two uncertainty measures captured by the volatility of the money supply and output. While in some countries, this yielded a stable demand for money, in some others, it did not. The latter was the case for Singapore. In this paper, we use a relatively more new and comprehensive measure of uncertainty known as policy uncertainty
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AID FOR TRADE FLOWS AND POVERTY REDUCTION The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2021-10-29 SÈNA KIMM GNANGNON
The effectiveness of Aid for Trade (AfT) interventions, including with respect to recipient countries’ trade performance, has now been well explored in the literature. However, in spite of the voluminous literature on the poverty effect of the total official development aid, the effect of AfT flows on poverty has received little attention on the empirical front. This paper aims to contribute to the
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AN EXPLORATION OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE QUALITY OF PUBLIC GOVERNANCE AND INCOME INEQUALITY: A CASE STUDY OF VIETNAM The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2021-10-21 PHUC VAN PHAN
Public governance and income inequality relationship is complex and debatable. This paper examines the extent to which the quality of local governance affects inequality in Vietnam spanning the 2006–2016 period. I apply a generalized method of moments (GMM) estimators to a dynamic panel data extracted from the Vietnam’s provincial competitiveness index and the Vietnam household living standard surveys
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INTRODUCTION TO SPECIAL ISSUE ON ECONOMIC ISSUES OF POPULATION AGING IN ASIA The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2021-10-15 JR-TSUNG HUANG
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THE COST EFFICIENCY OF CAMBODIAN COMMERCIAL BANKS: A STOCHASTIC FRONTIER ANALYSIS The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2021-10-15 DAIJU AIBA, OKUDA HIDENOBU
The Cambodian banking sector has rapidly expanded in recent decades, although there are concerns about the performance of Cambodian banks and the country’s banking sector. A paucity of empirical evidence to clarify the real issues in the banking sector also makes it difficult to formulate effective policy measures to address any potential problems. This study provides empirical evidence by estimating
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Wage Discrimination and Tax Progressivity The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2021-10-09 INSOOK LEE
How does wage discrimination affect tax progressivity? To address this, optimal tax progressivity is characterized in an economy where individuals have different levels of ability and some of the individuals face wage discrimination. A decrease in wage discrimination reduces optimal tax progressivity, while an increase in ability inequality raises it. When pre-tax income inequality increases, tax progressivity
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MODELING THE NONLINEAR FISCAL REACTION FUNCTION IN MALAYSIA The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2021-10-07 CHEE LOONG LEE, RIAYATI AHMAD, NORLIN Khalid, ZULKEFLY ABDUL KARIM
The fiscal reaction function (FRF) provides valuable insights into a country’s fiscal sustainability and output stability. However, there is no consensus yet on how to model it. Thus, this study investigates the best functional form for the FRF by adopting a nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag approach that accounts for a potential structural break in the data across periods. We examine the case
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CO-MOVEMENT OF STEADY-STATE GOVERNMENT DEBT AND HOUSEHOLD DEBT The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2021-10-07 INSOOK LEE
To understand whether and how movements of government debt and household debt are related, stationary equilibrium government debt and household debt are characterized in a politico-economic model where office-seeking policymakers decide government debt and individual voters can borrow facing uninsurable idiosyncratic income shocks. An increase in uninsurable income risk unconditionally raises stationary
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DYNAMIC CONNECTEDNESS OF FINANCIAL STRESS ACROSS ADVANCED AND EMERGING ECONOMIES: EVIDENCE FROM TIME AND FREQUENCY DOMAINS The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2021-09-30 TRINH QUANG LONG, LAN HOANG NGUYEN, PETER J. MORGAN
This study analyzes the dynamic connectedness (i.e., spillovers and spillbacks) of financial stress across advanced and emerging economies. As proxy for financial stress, we reconstruct the financial stress index (FSI) for 16 advanced economies and 15 emerging economies from January 1997 to August 2020. The constructed FSIs reflect combined stress level in banking sectors, equity markets, capital markets
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EVALUATION OF MONETARY POLICY IN EMU THROUGH CREDIT CHANNELS INTERCONNECTEDNESS: EVIDENCE USING BLS DATA The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2021-09-24 MICHAIL E. PETSALAKIS, AHMED M. KHALID, GAMINI PREMARATNE
Credit channel(s) of the monetary policy transmission has not been debated much in the literature especially in the context of the European monetary union (EMU) and the apparent rising fragmentation of the previously much integrated European banking system. This discussion is even more important in the aftermath of the global financial crisis (GFC) and the decade-long European debt crisis (EDC), a
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INVITED POLICY ECONOMICS PAPER — ECONOMICS IN ASIA 1995–2020 The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2021-09-24 JOERGEN OERSTROEM MOELLER
Over the last 25 years, Asia’s economic rise has been extraordinary. Its share of global gross domestic product (GDP) has risen from 5.8% to 22.9%.1 The first phase of high economic growth — up to 1995 — saw Asia enter the global supply chain primarily with labor-intensive/low-cost manufacturing. Domestic consumption was a fairly low share of GDP; Asia was manufacturing mainly for consumption in the
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R&D SPILLOVER, FIRM SIZE AND IN-HOUSE R&D: PANEL DATA EVIDENCE FROM ELECTRONICS GOODS SECTOR IN INDIA The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2021-09-09 RICHA SHUKLA
This study examines the impact of R&D spillover and firm size on the R&D intensity of electronic firms operating in India for the time period 2000–2015. The study finds that firms benefitting from R&D spillover in their line of business are spending more on in-house R&D, indicating complementarity between R&D spillover and R&D efforts. When we consider possible R&D spillover with firm size, the positive
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DISPERSION IN INPUT AND OUTPUT PRICES: A FIRM-LEVEL ANALYSIS The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2021-09-09 SONAM CHOUDHRY
Analyzing representative and rich data on the Indian formal manufacturing sector, this paper tries to establish an empirical relationship between prices of input, output and firm size of the plant. The firm-level data reflect tremendous dispersion in prices that firms pay to purchase material input even within an industry. Price heterogeneity is also observed for prices that firms charge for their
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INTER-INDUSTRY COMPETITION PRESSURES: THE MODEL, MEASUREMENT AND STATISTICAL CHARACTERISTICS The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2021-09-09 CHUANFENG HUANG, RONG WANG, YAQIN SONG, PEIYU FENG
This paper proposes a two-dimensional conceptual model of inter-industry competitive pressure, which is constituted of resource competition and market competition. This paper also provides the related measurement method and some basic properties based on the perspective of input–output analysis. Empirical research in the U.S. clearly shows that these pressures obey a lognormal distribution with a power-law
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NINE HISTORICAL VIEWS OF THE PHILLIPS CURVE: EIGHT AUTHENTIC AND ONE INAUTHENTIC The Singapore Economic Review (IF 1.736) Pub Date : 2021-08-27 JAMES FORDER
There is a widely believed but entirely mythical story to the effect that the discovery of ‘the Phillips curve’ was, in the 1960s and 1970s, an inspiration of inflationist policy. One aspect of the explanation of how that myth came to be widely believed is considered in this paper. It is noted that the expression ‘Phillips curve’ was applied in a number of quite distinct and inconsistent ways, and