Gordon Kuo Siong Tan

Singapore University of Technology and Design · Humanities Arts and Social Sciences

A burgeoning literature on ‘left behind’ places has emerged that captures the backlas against globalization and highlights the locales that lag world cities. This paper integrates the ‘left behind’ and world cities literatures through the lens of discontent in the context of Singapore, using sentiment analysis and topic modeling as well as intervie...

International financial centres (IFCs) are regarded as important nodes in governing global flows of money and capital. With increased globalization and rapid technological changes, the rivalry among IFCs has further intensified competition for financial labour—as a concentrated pool of highly skilled finance workers in an open and flexible labour m...

Fintech is celebrated for its disruptive and democratizing qualities that dis/reintermediates the finance value chain. Claims of a ‘fintech revolution’ assume that fintech is ‘disruptive’ because of its innovative capabilities, but the extent to which these disruptive forces have reconfigured consumer financial knowledge and practices is not well u...

Effective social data governance rests on a bedrock of social support. Without securing trust from the populace whose information is being collected, analyzed, and deployed, policies on which such data are based will be undermined by a lack of public confidence. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digitalization and datafication by governments fo...

The rising popularity of fintech‐driven solutions has reshaped financial markets and retail consumer behavior. This paper examines the growing “buy‐now‐pay‐later" (BNPL) phenomenon as a novel, platform‐driven financial innovation to understand how this digitally mediated economic arrangement has produced new financial subjects and subjectivities. U...

It is widely claimed that financial technology democratizes financial access and promotes financial inclusion. This paper challenges this dominant narrative of financial technology using the popular US-based mobile investing platform Robinhood as a case study. Analyzing press articles on Robinhood and regulatory filings of online brokerages, the co...

The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated digitalisation efforts in many countries as they try to contain the virus. With the physical handling of cash posing as a potential virus transmission risk, digital payments have become important in the urgent transition to a cashless society and a key feature of smart city projects. Critical analyses have typi...

Sustainability reporting has seen increased adoption as more businesses are recognizing wider societal and environmental obligations outside of traditional shareholder commitments. Several jurisdictions such as Malaysia and Hong Kong have passed regulations to encourage or mandate sustainability reporting. Likewise, Singapore has instituted mandato...

The rising ubiquity of mobile-enabled devices has greatly accelerated the spread of online disinformation. Media production and dissemination capabilities are within easy reach of consumers, who may become key nodes in sharing fabricated information. Social media platforms' advertisement-driven revenue models have encouraged the proliferation of vi...

The burgeoning financial technology scene in Singapore has seen the emergence of robo-advisors, which aim to disrupt traditional financial advisories by using algorithms to automate client advising and investment recommendations. Using an ecologies concept to explore how lay investors are articulated into global financial networks through robo advi...

While studies have paid attention to the activities of firms and their financial flows in offshore tax havens and secrecy jurisdictions, there is scant work on role of advanced business services (ABS) intermediary providers in shaping the geography of these jurisdictions. Yet such a study is needed in light of the recent release of the Panama Paper...

The observation that large cities pay higher wages for the same skilled work has caught the attention of scholars recently. The urban wage premium thesis suggests that urban sorting, skill matching and learning externalities in large cities result in a spatial wage gap between large and small cities. In this paper, a different spatial lens of wage...