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...

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...

Apart from aggregate accounting of Singapore’s investment abroad, case studies on the performance of these investments in individual countries hardly exist. This paper is an attempt to compile such a study by focusing on Singapore’s investment in Sri Lanka. Singapore is one of the largest...

Aided by strong economic growth the Singapore government has been able to keep both the tax rate and the government expenditure rate low and yet generate healthy budget surpluses year after year. Although the gap between the tax rate and the government expenditure rate is the obvious source of...

The existing measures of housing affordability are essentially short-run indicators that compare current income with property prices. Taking into consideration that a housing purchase is a long-horizon decision and the property price reflects the discounted present value of future mortgage...

Recurrent large fiscal deficits and accumulating public debt frequently ring alarm bells around the world on the sustainability of U.S. federal fiscal policy. The present-value borrowing constraint, which states that, for the fiscal policy to be sustainable the current debt stock should match...

This paper sheds further light on the debate spearheaded by Riedel (1988) on the specification of a small country export function. The theoretical and empirical analyses in the paper show that while the price-taker assumption cannot be rejected, the export function for Singapore should not be...

Many studies have examined the determinants of ethnic conflicts in multi-ethnic developing countries and report a myriad of contributory factors. It is natural to observe many correlates because ethnic wars tend to gain their own momentum and proceed for variety of reasons that are not directly...

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....