The COVID-19 is an unexpected pandemic raging across the world. In this proposal, we plan to investigate the responses of Singaporeans to this pandemic and how the Government helps build up socioeconomic resilience. Specifically, we aim to portray details in how COVID-19 impacts the small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), food and beverages (F&B) businesses, as well as the mobile patterns of general population. In addition, with multiple rounds of generous support from the government, we propose to examine the effectiveness of such policy interventions over short and long terms. The crisis of COVID-19—although heavily disrupts the economy—creates opportunities as well, in fostering adaptive culture and adoption of new technology. We thus further investigate the impacts of this pandemic on changes in cultural values and technology adoption.

According to the WHO’s statistics, Singapore’s healthy life expectancy increased from 71.3 years in 2000 to 76.2 years in 2016, the highest among more than 180 countries globally. As people are living longer, their post-retirement well-being is an imperative for public policy. Recent trends of rising life expectancy, low fertility rate, and increasing healthcare costs for the elderly all enhance intertwined complexities to the welfare of retirees, who reasonably would not have anticipated these trends earlier in their lives. This project evaluates the effectiveness of the Silver Support Scheme, an ongoing government scheme that provides financial support for the bottom 20% of elderly Singaporeans. The findings of this project can inform the government’s policy design of effective spending to achieve its goal of building a society where the nation’s elderly can age comfortably with financial assurance. More broadly, this project will provide new empirical evidence for the life-cycle consumption dynamics and will shed light on the optimal design of retirement finance.

One key pillar of Singapore’s social security system is home ownership. By conducting longitudinal household surveys and combining them with high-quality housing transaction records in Singapore, we aim to examine the impact of housing policy on intergenerational mobility via three steps: (i) examine the intergenerational mobility pattern by parent’s housing types; (ii) estimate the degree of intergenerational mobility by different housing-policy eras; (iii) investigate mobility pattern by social classes and explore underlying mechanisms. We also propose to evaluate the impact of a specific housing policy—the BTO Scheme—on marriage decision, which is a prominent contributor to intergenerational mobility. We propose to examine the impact of housing policy on long-term marriage stability, measured by divorce rate, under this research framework.

Rising public expenditure that aims to improve the wellbeing of the aging population and emerging young couples requires sustainable financing through either tax or bond issuance. According to the Ricardian equivalence, whether governments finance their spending with tax or debt does not matter for private consumption because consumers internalize governments’ budget constraints (Barro, 1974). Tax cut financed by public debt implies more tax in the future given the path of government spending. Anticipating for lower disposable income in the future, consumers will save rather than spend the extra income from the tax cut. This theorem is confronted by the recent observation of economic boost from U.S. Republican tax cut bill in December 2017. It is also challenged by a vast of empirical studies that show that changes in taxes have substantial effects on household consumption (Cloyne & Surico, 2017; Johnson, Parker, & Souleles, 2006; Souleles, 1999). These studies generally focus on positive and often one-off income shocks such as tax rebates (Agarwal, Liu, & Souleles, 2007; Agarwal & Qian, 2014). We explore the consumption response to a permanent negative income shock originated from tax rate increases for the top income earners and seek to provide new evidence of the Ricardian equivalence. If the Ricardian equivalence holds in Singapore, it provides an important empirical solution to raising fiscal income without affecting aggregate demand.