Jeremy Nguyen

Vietnam's SCIC: a gradualist approach to sovereign wealth funds

Vietnams State Capital Investment Corporation (SCIC) was established in 2005, with the primary goal of helping the authorities to make, under market conditions, the most of state capital investments in business enterprises. To date, SCIC has had to grapple mainly with facilitating the ‘equitization’ (that is privatization) of large numbers of state-owned enterprises. As yet it is still too early to make a firm assessment of SCICs performance with regard to either of the above objectives. Nevertheless, a discernable picture has begun to emerge, in which SCIC appears to have been a typical example of Vietnams gradualist approach in transitioning to a more market-oriented economic system: the pace of change may have been slow and uneven, but there are clear indications of movements toward the end goal.

Online Learner Satisfaction and Collaborative Learning:Evidence from Saudi Arabia

Despite the considerable potential for e-learning to improve learning outcomes, particularly for female students and students who need to rely on distance learning, feedback from current users of e-learning systems in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) suggests a relatively low level of satisfaction. This study adopts a mixed-methods approach in investigating the underlying reasons for this situation. Results indicate that students are not unhappy with the information technology infrastructure or with other technical aspects. However, many students report a low level of interaction between them and their fellow students. When interactions do occur, students indicate overwhelmingly that they find such interactions useful. Together, these findings suggest that greater student interaction, which could be fostered through the use of collaborative learning, is likely to be both popular with students and beneficial to their learning outcomes.

GLS detrending in Sollis nonlinear unit root tests

The Sollis (2009) nonlinear unit root test has been shown to possess attractive power properties, especially where the series being tested follows an Asymmetric Exponential Smooth Transition Autoregressive (AESTAR) process. In this article, we propose a modification of this test, namely, using GLS rather than OLS to detrend the relevant series. Simulation results indicate that, in general, the modified Sollis test is more powerful than the original test. An application to real GDP data for 20 OECD countries is provided.

Mortgage product diversity: responding to consumer demand or protecting lender profit? An asymmetric panel analysis

ABSTRACT This article explores determinants of mortgage product diversity for owner-occupied and investment loans in the Australian housing mortgage market. From 2001 to 2012, 65 lenders introduced 1220 mortgage products in Australia. We examine whether the product proliferation was a result of consumer demand or a response to pressure to lower lending rates. We find that consumer demand for mortgages does not have a significant relationship with the number of mortgage products, but that decreases in the policy interest rate are highly significant as an explanatory variable for product proliferation. Such behaviour is consistent with information obfuscation, reducing the ease with which consumers can compare lending rates. Further, the relationship between mortgage products offered and the policy interest rate is asymmetric: decreases in the cash rate are associated with increased mortgage products offered, but increases in the cash rate have a more muted effect on decreasing the number of products.

Housing Costs and Inequality in Post-revolutionary Iran

In this chapter, we investigate the association between housing prices and income inequality in Iran over the last three decades. In the recent period, Iran has had the highest average Gini coefficient in the Middle East (see Table 5.1), a region where inequality has triggered social tension, political instability, and armed conflict (Azeng and Yogo 2013). Moreover, debates on inequality and poverty have featured prominently in Iran’s domestic politics since the 1979 Revolution. For example, popular dissatisfaction with inequality is believed to have contributed to an electoral victory in 2005 for the populist presidential candidate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (Farzanegan 2009)—whose subsequent management of the national economy nonetheless resulted in negative economic growth as well as double-digit inflation and unemployment rates.