Policy makers often impose some cooling measures on the housing market when housing prices rise fast. Such policies yield limited success if housing prices are driven up by fundamentals. A fundamental price trend may not necessarily be an affordable one. Unaffordable housing price trends...

The study examines whether the Central Provident Fund (CPF) can provide adequate retirement savings for a young Singaporean joining the workforce today, using the Income Replacement Rate (IRR). The paper fills gaps in previous studies on Singapore’s IRR by incorporating unique institutional...

This paper is devoted to empirical investigations of the effects of international outsourcing on labour productivity using the five-digit SIC Singapore’s manufacturing industry data. There are two types of international outsourcing this paper takes into consideration. The first is...

The International Maritime Organization has proposed the implementation of a carbon dioxide emission trading scheme for the industry. Two problems associated with this is that of high noncompliance rate and the need to reconcile the both IMO and UNFCCC principles. This study reports a laboratory...

The European Union has proposed a Directive to include aviation activities in the Emission Trading Scheme (ETS) in 2012. The allowance allocation method which will be put in place is relatively easy to implement with low administration cost. However, careful scrutiny suggests that the allocation...

The link between mental stress and cancer is still a belief, not a well established scientific fact. Scientists have relied largely on opinions of cancer stricken patients to establish a link between stress and cancer. Such opinion surveys tend to produce contradictory statistical inferences....

This paper examines the conditional time-varying currency betas from five developed markets and four emerging markets. A trivariate BEKK-GARCH-in-mean model is used to estimate the timevarying conditional variance and covariance of returns of stock index, the world market portfolio and changes...

We use a mixed-frequency regression technique to develop a test for cointegration under the null of stationarity of the deviations from a long-run relationship. What is noteworthy about this MA unit root test, based on a variance-difference, is that, instead of having to deal with non-standard...

The instrumental variable (IV) estimator in a cross-sectional or panel regression model is often taken to provide valid causal inference from contemporaneous correlations. In this exercise we point out that the IV estimator, like the OLS estimator, cannot be used effectively for causal inference...

We search for evidence of conditional volatility in the quarterly real GDP growth rates of three East Asian tigers: Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan. The widely accepted exponential GARCH-type model is used to capture the existence of asymmetric volatility and the potential structural break...