Sam Flanders

Asia School of Business · Business

High vaccination rates are integral to reducing infection and severity rates of COVID-19 infections within a community. We examine the role of social expectations in COVID-19 vaccination take-ups and its interaction with potential government actions in Malaysia. We find that individuals’ expectations of others in their social groups towards vaccina...

This paper examines the experiences of refugees in a developing country during its first COVID-19 lockdown by utilizing a two-stage qualitative data analysis of 39 interviews with refugees and asylum-seekers. We find that their experiences during the lockdown are shaped by identity, trauma and help from external parties-such as community leaders an...

Purpose Entrepreneurship studies have established various antecedents leading to eventual entrepreneurship by measuring entrepreneurial intention (EI). However, evidence has shown that intention does not necessarily translate into behaviour, especially for complex behaviours such as creating a business venture. Hence, this paper aims to examine how...

Does exposure to an unfamiliar migrant community change implicit biases? We conducted an experimental study by exposing Malaysians them to a few hours of volunteering with Rohingya refugees, and we examined the effect of this treatment on their attitudes through a textual analysis. We measured changes in attitude through pure valence and multiple m...

Purpose Youth entrepreneurship has been identified as a key driver in overcoming the economic crisis spurred by youth unemployment. However, the understanding of youth entrepreneurship is largely based on research in high-income countries. Furthermore, entrepreneurship studies to date are largely limited to the independent effects of individual tra...

This report summarizes preliminary findings from a survey experiment with 1307 Malaysian respondents. We study 1) trust levels in institutions and norms surrounding the choice to get vaccinated in this country, 2) perceptions on state “carrots” versus “sticks” in incentivizing vaccinations, and 3) whether a cash lottery of RM 500 is an effective in...

How do refugees economically cope in host countries where they have no legal right to work? Most Southeast Asian countries have not ratified the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention. This implies that many refugees in this region do not enjoy any protection from the law, do not possess the legal right to work, and often resort to participation in...

Market design uses various economic tools, such as game theory and experimental analysis, to aid in the design, implementation, and the fixing of broken markets whenever needed. One application of market design is to study two-sided matching markets, such as marriage and labor markets. Market design and matching theory also relate to the study of p...

Practitioners’ experiences and perspectives on social interventions with refugees are underexplored in Southeast Asia. This gap limits the ability to create impactful public policy in the region. In this report, we present findings from an interdisciplinary research workshop held in Kuala Lumpur in 2018. The workshop included sixty individuals from...

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a global crisis, and, while Malaysia has controlled the infection more than most countries with early exposure to the virus, the Movement Control Order (MCO) has required major economic sacrifices. This, in addition to a COVID-19-caused global economic slowdown, threatens a budget crisis for Malaysian households. Ma...

We study the effects of different pricing schemes on the overall surplus in a privately managed retirement system with multiple service providers and switching costs. We develop a theoretical model based on the Chilean retirement system and consider a repeated auction for monopoly rights over new enrollees. We consider a dynamic model solved by pen...

The is a comprehensive report based on qualitative and quantitative data from 288 Rohingya construction workers in Peninsular Malaysia, collected from May to August 2018. This report covers all aspects of refugee life and work in the construction industry – this includes data and ethnography on the demographics, language, family structure, and fina...