ICLE Academic Affiliate Ivan Png produced a video with Yun Hou and Ivan Png  describing a benchmarking experiment they did with food-stalls hawkers in Singapore, which found that showing firm owners their relative performance increased exit among poor performers. The full video is embedded below.

Come Thursday (Jan 11), students will receive their 2023 GCE O-Level examination results.

The stress over performance can take on a slightly different dimension at this juncture – on the one hand, there is a greater range of education options from the academic to the practical-oriented; on the other, teenagers will have to start thinking ahead to university and even career possibilities.

As educators, we are often asked by students for advice. In particular, those keen on pursuing the more academic A-Level route seek help deciding which subjects they should take at the Higher 2 (H2) level.

Our short answer tends to be a pragmatic question: Think ahead – what would you like to study at university? Take subjects that open those doors for you.

Read the full piece here.

Abstract

Becker and Murphy (1992) proposed that task specialization raises productivity but is limited by the costs of coordinating workers. We propose that automation enables workers to specialize without coordination costs. To the extent that the cost of effort exhibits increasing differences, workers increase effort in non-automated tasks and productivity. The proposition is supported by a field experiment among supermarket cashiers. Conventionally, supermarket cashiers perform two tasks — scanning purchases and collecting payment. Cashiers exhibited increasing differences in the cost of effort: when they scanned faster, they took longer to collect payments. We rotated cashiers between the conventional job design and one in which they specialized in scanning. The new job design increased cashier productivity in scanning by over 10 percent. The faster scanning was not due to customer sorting or cashier learning. The proposition is also validated by a survey of taxi drivers. Drivers who reported that difficulties in way-finding affected their driving were more likely to use map apps.

Abstract

How should a technology firm adjust resource allocation between external and internal R&D in response to stronger patent protection? External R&D provides the firm with another channel of earnings to mitigate diminishing returns to internal R&D, but yields the firm only a fraction of the additional profit generated. Theoretically, if the marginal return to external R&D diminishes more slowly than the marginal return to internal R&D, the firm should increase external R&D more than internal R&D. Exploiting regional differences in the strengthening of patent protection due to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), we find that the CAFC was associated with 35 percent more external R&D vis-a-vis 20 percent more internal R&D. The difference was more pronounced in industries where patents were less effective in the appropriability of product inventions and among firms more specialized in technology.

Before writing this commentary, I checked trending searches on Google over the last quarter. Among Singapore’s favourite three-letter acronyms, the top was HDB, followed by CPF and COE. That is until May 4, when the Certificate of Entitlement (COE) trumped Housing and Development Board (HDB) and Central Provident Fund (CPF).

It’s worth stressing that COEs are not the top concern of all Singaporeans. They are the top concern of a relatively vocal segment – especially recently, with COE prices crossing S$100,000 (US$75,000) and continuing to trend upwards.

Read the full piece here.

Abstract

How do changes in patent law affect the exchange by which society awards an exclusive right of limited duration and the inventor discloses technology that others may freely use after the period of exclusivity? Between 1983-1985, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit shifted the law in favor of patent owners, to degrees varying geographically by judicial circuit. We find that the Federal Circuit was associated with an increase in the commercial value of patents by 11.7 percent, but no significant increase in the technological quality of the patented inventions followed. Apparently, the value of the patent monopoly increased substantially without a commensurate increase in inventors’ contributions of knowledge to society.

One major way by which the Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB) seeks to attract foreign investors is the Pioneer Certificate Incentive. This exempts businesses that introduce substantially more advanced technology, skillsets, or know-how from corporate tax or taxes them at a concessionary rate of 5 or 10 per cent for five years. The Pioneer rate is a large discount relative to the normal corporate tax rate of 17 per cent.

Read the full piece here.