We draw attention to an apparent puzzle in the aggregate consumption behaviour of Singaporeans. In stark contrast to the rest of the world, the average propensity to consume has plummeted to a record low of two-fifths of income in 2000 leaving the economy without a good built-in stabilizer. This...

Temporally aggregated data is a bane for Granger causality tests. The same set of variables may lead to contradictory causality inferences at different levels of temporal aggregation. Obtaining temporally disaggregated data series is impractical in many situations. Since cointegration is...

The growing affluence of the East and Southeast Asian economies has come about through a substantial increase in their economic links with the rest of the world, the OECD economies in particular. Econometric studies that try to quantify these links face a severe shortage of high frequency time...

Policy prescriptions have generally assumed that exchange rate depreciation would stimulate exports and curtail imports, while exchange rate appreciation would be detrimental to exports and encourage imports. This prediction has, however, often neglected to consider the existence of the import...

How the old saying “when the United States sneezes, the world catches a cold†holds true has been the subject of many research papers on global and country group business cycle synchronization and divergence. Instead of business cycle linkages, however, this paper examines the...

The academic literature has focused largely on testing for long-run fiscal sustainability. In this exercise we formulate a flexible regression model that can be used to assess the sustainability of a more recent build-up of fiscal deficits and debt that would be of major concern to policy...

In applied econometric literature, the causal inferences are often made based on highly temporally aggregated or systematically sampled data. A number of theoretical studies have pointed out that temporal aggregation has distorting effects on causal inference and systematic sampling preserves...