Asian Economic Journal最新文献

We adopt intraday data in this study to facilitate an exploration of the influences of relatively rational and irrational investor sentiment on volatility within the Taiwan stock markets. Following the decomposition of daily trading volume within the Taiwan Stock Exchange Capitalization Weighted Stock Index (TWSE) into two subsets, comprising the trading volume of institutional investors and individual investors, we go on to investigate the influence of each subset on realized volatility. We reveal that the relatively rational sentiment of institutional investors plays a stabilizing role in future volatility, whereas the relatively irrational sentiment of individual investors tends to exacerbate such volatility. Therefore, we suggest that our modified model, which takes into account the relatively rational and irrational sentiment of investors, is capable of more accurately predicting volatility than the benchmark model.

Most economics research have concentrated on testing the quality–quantity (QQ) model through the relationship between family size and children's schooling. Much less effort has been given to comparing the child quality and child quantity income elasticities. Using the Thai household socioeconomic panel surveys, this paper examines the trade-off between the quality and quantity of children by comparing the child quality and child quantity income elasticities. According to the theoretical prediction, the results showed that quality income elasticity was evidently higher than quantity income elasticity. Moreover, quality income elasticity was higher than quantity income elasticity even if permanent income was also controlled.

Long-term time-series data show a strong negative correlation between obesity and smoking prevalence, which may not reflect the causality. Many heavy smokers claim that smoking helps them maintain a slim body and keep smoking despite the health risks. Using the Japan Household Panel Survey, this study investigates the causal effect of smoking on body shapes by exogenous variations of Japan's smoking ban in the workplace. Contrary to previous studies, our instrumental variable estimates show that smoking has no effect on body mass index, obesity and underweightness. We also construct an overidentified model to test the robustness of our results.

Despite the growing importance of migrants and their role in the South Korean economy, how much and in which ways COVID-19, as an adverse labor market shock, has affected them has received too little attention, with no single study published to date yet. Motivated by such a paucity, this paper investigates the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis on employment for migrants in South Korea, with special emphasis on quantifying the magnitude of its causal effect. In doing so, this study exploits the unique fact that only one specific region in South Korea had a substantial number of COVID-19 infections in the early stage of the pandemic so that estimations can be made using a difference-in-differences (DD) model. The DD estimates suggest that COVID-19 lowered migrants’ overall employment probability by 2.5 to 3.2 percent points. However, strong heterogeneity between the genders is apparent: the pandemic severely hurts female migrants’ employment, with male migrants weathering it relatively unscathed. Furthermore, female migrants seem considerably harder hit than female host populations. Heterogeneity analyses reveal that (i) a duration of stay exceeding 5 years and (ii) fluency in Korean (as a local language) protect migrants from being heavily affected by the COVID-driven employment shock.

Our exploratory spatial data analysis covered Indonesia's district-level per capita incomes for 2004–2018 and found statistical evidence of a weak but monotonically increasing positive spatial association. The spatial income clusters/outliers were scattered nationwide and expanded geographically. Applying the filtering method, we found that regional cyclical shocks significantly influenced spatial association, largely in resource-rich districts, and identified the locations of persistent spatial association that were immune to shocks. We also specified new development targets, showing the adjacent coexistence of low-income agrarian clusters with high-income mining clusters in the undeveloped Papuan provinces. The overall national average is moving toward the narrowing of inter-district income disparities. However, nearly half of all districts have widened the income disparities with their neighbors; shocks increased income gaps rather than narrowing them.

Cashless payments discourage value-added tax (VAT) evasion through transaction records; and they essentially require cooperation from consumers and small business owners. As indirect VAT payers, consumers' payment methods decisively influence the final VAT declaration. However, the literature has yet to investigate consumers' collusive VAT evasion. This study uses data from approximately 7300 taxpayers as collected by the National Survey of Tax and Benefit of South Korea to examine the impacts of perceived trust paradigms on consumers' responses to payment methods when small business owners offer discount benefits. The results reveal that perceived trust in government significantly strengthens consumers' cooperative VAT compliance. We also discover that when the discount amounts are higher, trust has a greater impact on cooperative VAT compliance. The study contributes to the tax literature by demonstrating that trust can improve consumers' cooperative VAT compliance.

Nighttime lights (NTL) data from satellites are a useful proxy for local economic activity in developing countries where economic data are sparse. Yet most analyses use the flawed DMSP NTL data, a poor proxy for GDP in less densely populated and highly agricultural rural areas. In this article, we augment a novel NTL dataset of the newer and better VIIRS NTL data with more ubiquitous remotely sensed data, namely, net primary productivity (NPP) and land cover, and we test whether these satellite data predict subnational GDP in both urban and rural sectors of the Philippines. The results confirm that the higher-quality VIIRS NTL data predict urban economic activity sufficiently well for both light-intense and dimly lit regions but still do not explain rural economic activity very well. The use of croplands NPP as an intensive measure of agricultural productivity, however, dramatically improves the performance of land cover as a proxy. We demonstrate that remotely sensed data can be useful in various applications, including evaluating the long-run dynamics of province-level GDP growth, the local impact of natural disasters, and the effects of infrastructure projects at the city and municipal levels. Such applications point toward the need for empirical analysis of growth at finer scales of aggregation.

We study the impact of Aid for Trade (AfT) and analyze whether aid recipients participate in bilateral vertical specialization. Using data from 15 donors and 106 recipients for the years 2002 to 2018, we investigate whether bilateral AfT increases bilateral vertical specialization. To focus on the variation between donors and recipients over time, we absorb other sources of variation through donor–year, recipient–year and donor–recipient fixed effects. Our findings show that AfT helps expand bilateral vertical specialization for a particular group of countries, upper middle-income countries. Subsequent analysis reveals that AfT improves the infrastructure of upper middle-income countries, which promotes participation in vertical specialization. Our findings suggest that to promote vertical specialization in lower income countries, AfT should be provided more directly to improve their infrastructure.

The traditional literature on the role of intellectual property rights (IPR) in innovation highlights the strength of IPR protection in the context of the tradeoff between innovation and diffusion. More recent literature analyzes the role of diverse forms of IPR in promoting innovation and growth and delves into not only regular patents but also utility models (or petite patents) and trademarks. Using firm-level IPR (patents, designs and trademarks) data from Korea, we further extend this new strand of literature to explore the role of designs at different stages of development. The data spans five decades and can be divided into three subperiods that represent different stages of economic development. We find that design-intensive sectors tend to be more export oriented. Further, firms’ sales growth is significantly associated with the design intensity of firms. Such association is found only during the later stages of economic development in Korea. Taken together with earlier studies, our findings imply that different forms of IPR, in particular designs, matter differently for innovation and firm performance at different stages of development. Designs are not that important in the early stages of development when economic growth relies on the mass production of low-cost goods by low-wage workers. The importance of design rises with economic development at later stages when product differentiation becomes critical. A unique and smart appearance increases value in the eye of the customer value and, thus, could help firms’ sales performance.

This study examines people's response to well-known determinants in private education spending (PES). Based on the Korean Education Longitudinal Study, we divided the private education decision-making process into two parts: whether to spend and how much to spend. Due to omitted environmental factors, latent subgroups that share the same PES effects were classified using a clustering methodology. Empirical analysis found that people respond differently only to household income and school year. For 40% of the observations, household income has a significant impact on PES decisions. There is no effect of household income in the other subgroups, whereas different patterns of PES according to the school year induce heterogeneity in other subgroups. There is no heterogeneity for the effects of gender, educational environment and plans to attend college.