Biographical
Publication list via Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University [link]
Family Photo My favorite picture Links to the homepages of my research collaborators: Edmund Phelps Kong Weng Ho Hiau Looi Kee Current Research Projects
(both individual and collaborative)
1. Labor Taxes, Wealth, and Hours Worked
A well-known paper, Prescott (2004), makes the argument that the bulk of the long-term decline in hours worked by Europeans (relative to Americans) can be explained by the rise of marginal labor taxes in Europe. This research project shows how wealth adjustment, in the context of a world with international trade in capital and goods, can undo the negative effects of punishingly high labor taxes in one country and lead to an international equalization of hours worked.
2. Overinvestment and Employment
Since the modern economy is one that is fraught with novelty, asset prices can turn out to have travelled along disequilibrium paths where expectations of the future turn out to be wrong. This may be one way to describe a "bubble." When the bubble comes to an end and the economy finds itself with "too much" capital---excess housing stock as well as plant and equipment---what does formal theory predict about economic activity in the post-bubble era? This research aims to answer this basic question.
3. Real Exchange Rates and Employment
A well-known mechanism in the open-economy Mundell-Fleming model under flexible exchange rates and free international capital mobility is that real exchange rate depreciation acts to shift spending towards the domestically produced good and thus expand employment. However, in models with a sufficiently rich supply side and trade frictions, a collapse in local asset prices lead customer-market firms to increase their mark-ups and labor-intensive firms to cut back their hiring with the result that real exchange rate depreciation is accompanied by a slump in employment. This research aims to find theoretical and empirical support for this non-Keynesian channel, particularly in the behavior of economies during and after the 2008-9 credit crisis.
4. Sources of Singapore's Growth
Singapore's relatively low productivity growth in the past decade became a matter of public interest and led the Economic Strategies Committee to set the goal of achieving productivity growth of 2 to 3 percent annually over the next ten years. What is meant by "productivity growth" here is the growth of labor productivity, more specifically, the growth of "Real GDP per worker." This research aims to deepen our understanding of the factors that contributed to the growth of real GDP per worker during the economy's catch-up phase and its current somewhat more mature phase. In particular, it identifies the contributions of physical capital accumulation, human capital accumulation, and multi-factor productivity growth. It also seeks to unpack the sources of multi-factor or total-factor productivity growth during the growth process.
5. A Book Project
I am working on a book with the tentative title, "The Singapore Economy in Transition: From Catch-Up Growth to Life in a Mature Economy."
Presentations
Talk on the topic, “Economic Growth and Social Cohesion.” March 2009. [slides in pdf] Talk on the topic, “The Global Credit Crunch and the Singapore Economy: Challenges and Opportunities." July 2009. [slides in pdf] Talk on the topic, “The Importance of Having a Global View for Grasping the Keys and Threats to Economic Prosperity." August 2009. [slides in pdf] | Recent Work on Wage Subsidy Programs
I had the opportunity to present a paper titled "Wage Subsidies in a Program for Economic Inclusion and Growth" at a wage subsidies workshop in South Africa organized by the Centre for Development and Enterprise on November 2, 2010. Section 4 of the paper briefly discusses the use of wage subsidies in the Singapore story. [draft]
A summary of my presentation is found on pages 19 to 22 of the report, Jobs for young people: Is a wage subsidy a good idea? CDE Roundtable Number 17, August 2011. [link] Here is another paper of mine, dated 3 December 2009, that studies the effects of a jobs credit (or employment subsidy) in a turnover-training model of the labor market. [draft] There is also a link to a video coverage of a short presentation of mine on Singapore's experience with an employment subsidy both as a tool of structural policy (to boost the earnings and employment of low-wage workers) and a temporary anti-recessionary policy (to save jobs) at the 7th Annual Conference on Post-Crisis Economic Policies organized by Columbia University's Center on Capitalism and Society. (The presentation is under Panel 4: Policies Towards Employment and Inclusion.) [link]
Links to the Work of Edmund Phelps on Wage Subsidy Programs
For at least a decade and a half, the 2006 Nobel laureate for economics, Professor Edmund Phelps, a teacher of mine at Columbia University and a research collaborator, has written about a wage subsidy (known also as an employment subsidy) program as a means to foster economic inclusion. As Singapore recently announced a Jobs Credit scheme as part of its Resilience Package to counteract the negative fallout from the global credit crunch, there might be some public interest in the links to a portion of his writings on this subject.
Here is a link to an OECD conference paper of his, entitled, "The importance of inclusion and the power of job subsidies to increase it." [link] Here is a link to his Introduction chapter in Edmund S. Phelps (ed.), 2003, Designing Inclusion: Tools to Raise Low-End Pay and Employment in Private Enterprise, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [link] Here is a link to Hoon and Phelps, 2003, Low-Wage Employment Subsidies in a Labor-Turnover Model of the `Natural Rate', in Edmund S. Phelps (ed.), Designing Inclusion: Tools to Raise Low-End Pay and Employment in Private Enterprise, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [link] Professor Phelps has written a book, published by Harvard University Press in 1997 and re-issued with a new preface in 2007, on the subject entitled, Rewarding Work: How to Restore Participation and Self-Support to Free Enterprise. [link] Professor Edmund Phelps visited SMU in January 2003 and gave two public lectures on "The State of Macroeconomics"
The webcasts of the two public lectures are available in the following link under January 22 2003 and January 24 2003. [link] | Commentaries and Op-eds
Several opinion pieces and commentaries of mine on the Singapore economy since the year 2000 grapple with the theme of the nature and challenges of growth and business fluctuations, joblessness, and rewards to low-wage earners.
Growth and Business Fluctuations
My thoughts on Singapore's wage share of GDP drawn from my answers to questions posed to me by Senior Political Correspondent Sue-Ann Chia for her review article titled "First World country but not First World wages?" published in The Straits Times (ST) on 15 May 2010. [draft] Here is a link to the ST review article. [link]
9 June 2009 op-ed in The Business Times, titled, Mapping Out S'pore's Economic Strategies. [link] 14 June 2006 op-ed, joint with Kong Weng Ho, in The Business Times, titled, Perspiration, Inspiration and Singapore's Growth. [link] Unemployment 29 July 2008 op-ed in The Business Times, titled, Less room for MAS to influence Inflation Rate. [link] Low-Wage Workers 30 September 2005 op-ed in The Straits Times, titled, Making Work Pay for Low-Wage Earners. [link] Selected Papers and Publications (Some links require your library's subscription) Macro Hoon and Phelps, 1992, Macroeconomic Shocks in a Dynamized Model of the Natural Rate of Unemployment, American Economic Review. [link] Hoon and Phelps, 2010, Macroeconomic Effects of Over-investment in Housing in an Aggregative Model of Economic Activity. Center Working Paper No. 63, July, Center on Capitalism and Society, Columbia University. This paper is one in a trilogy of papers on the analytics of the crisis and the ensuing slump. [link] Hoon, 2009, Payroll Taxes, Wealth and Employment in Neoclassical Theory: Neutrality or Non-Neutrality? SMU Economics and Statistics Working Paper Series No. 08-2009, May, Singapore Management University. To appear in Edmund S. Phelps and Hans-Werner Sinn (eds.), Perspectives on the Performance of the Continent’s Economies, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, forthcoming. [draft] Hoon and Phelps, 2003, Low-Wage Employment Subsidies in a Labor-Turnover Model of the `Natural Rate', in Edmund S. Phelps (ed.), Designing Inclusion: Tools to Raise Low-End Pay and Employment in Private Enterprise, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [draft] Trade, Jobs and Wages Hoon, 2001, Adjustment of Wages and Equilibrium Unemployment in a Ricardian Global Economy, Journal of International Economics. [link] Singapore Economy Ho and Hoon, 2009, Growth Accounting for a Technology Follower in a World of ideas: The Case of Singapore, Journal of Asian Economics. [link] [draft] Book Reviews Review of Barriers to Riches by Stephen L. Parente and Edward C. Prescott, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000 published in Singapore Economic Review, April 2001, Vol. 46, No. 1, pp. 145-148. [draft] |
