Wei-Kang's Website

1. Wei-Kang Wong, How Good Are Trade and Telephone Call Traffic in Bridging Income Gaps and TFP Gaps, Journal of International Economics, 64(2), 2004, pp. 441-463.

Summary: Use gravity model to identify trade and telephone traffic's effects on cross-country income and productivity levels. Find that telephone traffic has a quantitatively larger effect on income per worker and TFP than trade.

2. Wei-Kang Wong, OECD Convergence: A Sectoral Decomposition Exercise, Economics Letters., 93(2), November 2006, pp. 210-214.

Summary: Decompose OECD convergence into sectoral contributions. Find that while productivity growth in services and agriculture contributed significantly to convergence, the contributions from employment shift and productivity growth in manufacturing are nost statistically significant.

3. Wei-Kang Wong, Economic Growth: A Channel Accounting Exercise, The B.E. Journals in Macroeconomics : Vol. 7 : Iss. 1 (Topics), Article 4, January 2007.
Summary: Provide empirical evidence that TFP growth, not aggregate factor accumulation, is what drives conditional convergence.

4. Wei-Kang Wong, Nominal Increases and the Perception of Likelihood, Economics Letters, 95(3), June 2007, pp.433-437.
Summary: A nominal increases in likelihood has a relatively small effect on individual’s own perception of likelihood, but a large and robust effect on beliefs about the perception of likelihood by others. These beliefs are consistent with actual choices.
An earlier version: Does Money Illusion Still Matter After Some Economics Education?
Summary: Compare the responses of economics and non-economics students with slightly different questions (and find no differences).

5. Wei-Kang Wong, Comparing the Fit of the Gravity Model for Different Cross-Border Flows, Economics Letters, 99(3), June 2008, pp.474-477.
Summary: Find that the gravity model works well for trade and telephone traffic, with a more ambiguous fit for M&A flows. Find evidence that the values for M&A are missing non-randomly.

6. Wei-Kang Wong, How Much Time-Inconsistency Is There and Does It Matter? Evidence on Self-Awareness, Size, and Effects, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 68(3-4), December 2008, pp.645-656.

Summary: Empirically identify the time-consistent, naifs, sophisticates, and partial naifs in two independent samples of undergraduates. Find that most students behaved time-inconsistently in their midterm preparation and most were at least partially aware of their future time-inconsistency.

7. Jack Knetsch and Wei-Kang Wong, The Endowment Effect and the Reference State: Evidence and Manipulations, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization (in press). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2009.04.015

8. Wei-Kang Wong, Ricardian Equivalence and Consumption Response to Government Transfers: Behavioral Motives Meet Savers and Spenders in the Real World (July 2008) Appendix - Survey Form
Summary: Most recipients spent the transfers under the Progress Package in Singapore. For savers, precautionary saving seems to be the main reason behind their saving decision, followed by the motive of Ricardian equivalence. For spenders, the main motive driving their consumption decision turns out to be the use of rule of thumb (based on either mental accounting or norms), followed by present bias. Future budgetary expectations matter, but less than expected.

9. Eddie Sue and Wei-Kang Wong, The Political Economy of Housing Prices: Hedonic Pricing with Regression Discontinuity (May 2008; Being Revised, Download Not Available)

1. Parental Valuation of Educational Choices: A Quasi-Natural Experiment in Singapore
Summary: Using a distance-based admission policy for primary school registration, we find that HDB flats that give priority to more schools yield significantly higher price premium, but only for top schools and good schools, not for normal schools.

2. Melvin Koh and Wei-Kang Wong, The Channels of Conditional Convergence During 1960-2000: Allowing for Variable Capital Shares Across Countries

Story Telling in the Teaching of Macroeconomics: An Economist's Tales (March 20, 2005). Paper for presentation in the FASS-CDTL symposium: Innovative Approaches to University Teaching and Learning
Summary: Tell the Reverse Causation Trilogy: I. The Dawn of a New Day; II: The IMF Strikes Back! III: Return of the White Wizard.

In Contrast to the unwritten rules whereby only certain stylized models are considered good economic theory, my own definition of "good economic theory" is that it poses interesting "if ... then ..." propositions relevant to some economic issue... There are two significant parts to this definition: one is the adjective interesting , the other is the phrase relevant to some economic issue . What constitutes an economic issue is empirically defined. According to Samuelson, interesting economic issues concern the what, how, and for whom of the distribution and use of economic resources... A second requirement for an interesting propositional (i.e., if ... then ...) statement is some surprise relative to what is implicit (or perhaps explicit) in the usual economics literature...

(George Akerlof, 1984, p.3.)

(Out in Five, part of David Romer's rules as told by Brad Delong.)

(Robert Solow's Nobel Lecture )

Why, for example, should a Ph.D. be necessary to teach calculus? Because there is a concept in the University about knowledge and how one should behave toward it... This view of the University is that there is more knowledge out there than you could possibly know. We cannot and will not teach you everything. But we will teach you something that is yet more valuable. We will teach you what it means to acquire knowledge... In undergraduate education you are told quite early on to specialize. You major in some field. You may spend a good share of your senior year writing a senior thesis. We want you to learn as much as you can about some specialized field in four years' time.

Our view of education then is two-fold. On the one hand we want this to be a humbling experience. We want you to know that the knowledge to be learned is vast. At best even the greatest genius among all of you can know only a tiny fraction of it. Think about how long it takes to read a single book. Then think about the Berkeley course catalogue. And think about the fact that for each course in that book-length catalogue there is a whole syllabus of articles and books. Think about the library. And also the checkout room, with its paneled ceiling that lists the greatest scholars. They include Shakespeare, Descartes, Dante, Newton, and Rousseau. Someone planned those names to be carved in those gold letters as a humbling experience. When you go into that library you are being told how little you know relative to how much there is to know, in a great University like ours, and in that great library of ours, how much there is to know.

But the purpose of the University is not just to leave you humbled. It is our real purpose also to teach you, like Frodo, how to operate in a world that is so potentially humbling.

Little by little, step by step, the aim of this education is to show you how in any chosen area, you can acquire the wisdom to deal with any given problem. An education is not a game of Trivial Pursuit. It is not just cramming odd facts into your head so you can win $1,000,000 on a TV quiz show. An education teaches you how to relate existing knowledge to any situation that may arise. This is what we are teaching when we tell Ph.D. students that their education is not complete until they have completed a new piece of research. They must understand then the relation between all existing knowledge and the question that they are trying to answer. By learning the procedures to sort out how all existing knowledge impacts one question, you learn the discipline necessary to do that for every other question.

I am a social scientist. As a social scientist I see the University then as changing who you are. I see the University as not just changing your views toward science, like physics or biology, or astronomy, or chemistry. I see it also as changing your attitude toward other people.

Every one of the social sciences teaches us that we can understand the motives of other people. People may be very different from us. Their motives may be very different from ours. Their means of expressing those motives may be strange indeed. Our knowledge about other people's problems makes their motives comprehensible to us. That means that we can see other people and their motives in our terms.

The uneducated too often believe that a conflict of interest occurs because other people are evil. The educated believe that conflicts of interest naturally occur. Moreover, these conflicts occur especially because other people are basically so very much like ourselves. So the University teaches us to see other people's views. We have mercy for them.

[George Akerlof, Trained to be a Hero]

[Thinking] this is my son, this is my wealth; such is a fool's way of thinking. If this self I cannot even call my own, what's more my son, my wealth?

Dhammapada

For the Apprentice

Working on your thesis or dissertations - Do's and Don'ts for the Sudents.
How to Study for Economics?
George Akerlof's December 2003 convocation speech at Cal - Trained to be a Hero (what undergraduate education is about)
George Akerlof's Advice to New Graduate Students (what PhD education is about).
David Romer's Golden Rules for graduate students
Susan Athey's Advice for Applying to Grad School in Economics.
David Laibson's Advice to Job Market Candidates (PhDs)
Mullainathan and Thaler's Brief Introduction to Behavioral Economics
Martha Olney's 11 Steps to An Honors Thesis for Cal students
Michael Kremer's Checklist for Writing Papers
John Cochrane's Writing Tips for PhD Students
Greg Mankiw's Advice for Aspiring Economists
For my thesis or ISM students, read Strunk and White's The Elements of Style or Joseph M. Williams's Style: Toward Clarity and Grace or William Zinsser's On Writing Well and Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

Disclaimer: These resources are provided as a public service. Please don't ask me for more advice.

NUS Economics Commencement 2007!