Tien Foo Sing

Tien Foo Sing
National University of Singapore | NUS · Department of Real Estate and Institute of Real Estate and Urban Studies (IREUS)

Doctor of Philosophy

About

209
Publications
52,592
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2,299
Citations

Publications

Publications (209)
Article
The use of online listing portals helps improve search efficiency in real estate markets. Unlike the traditional channel, buyers could search more properties and find ones with characteristics that were closer to their preferences via the online channel. Using the merged data sets containing online listings and transactions in the private residenti...
Article
Working at home benefits entrepreneurs by lowering fixed costs and allowing them to engage in joint market and household production. We evaluate a large-scale reform in Singapore, the Home Office Scheme, that allowed business creation at one’s residential property and study whether home-based entrepreneurship spurs entrepreneurial activities. The d...
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Agglomeration of firms significantly increases pollution emission intensity and brings unintended consequences to public health. We develop the pollution emission indices using the firm-level pollutant emission data in China to track pollution intensities at the source using the locally weighted regression approach. Our constant-quality pollutant e...
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We investigate the impact of the Circle Line (CL) opening in Singapore on individuals’ vehicle kilometers traveled (VKT) using the two repeated cross-sectional travel surveys. In the unmatched difference-in-differences analyses, the CL opening reduces the average VKT by individuals living in the 500-meter buffer zone (treatment) by 38.3% relative t...
Article
Singapore uses public media campaigns to motivate public housing residents to conserve energy as part of its strategies to achieve sustainable energy goals. Using the energy conservation campaign conducted in selected housing estates in Singapore in January 2016, we ran a natural experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of the public campaign in nu...
Article
The equity premium puzzle argues that equity risk alone is insufficient to justify observed equity premiums with a reasonable value of risk aversion. Mortgages account for a substantial part of household debt. It is thus necessary to consider the mortgage payment obligations when addressing the puzzle. This paper examines how the mortgage payment o...
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This paper develops an artificial intelligence based automated valuation model (AI-AVM) using the boosting tree ensemble technique to predict housing prices in Singapore. We use more than 300,000 private and public housing transactions in Singapore for the period from 1995 to 2017 in the training of the AI-AVM models. The boosting model is the best...
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Singapore's government imposed a new transaction tax in the form of an Additional Buyer's Stamp Duty (ABSD) on developers who fail to sell all units within 5 years for projects that commenced after 2011. We find significant evidence that the ABSD shock triggers rational responses by private developers, who cut prices to clear unsold housing units....
Article
The unpegging of China's currency in 2005 creates positive wealth effects that trigger Chinese foreign buyers' responses to pay 3.42% more in housing prices relative to other foreign buyers. We find evidence of a higher propensity to purchase housing units with more visible features among Chinese foreign buyers after the policy shock relative to ot...
Article
This paper proposes the use of a semiparametric model based on a locally weighted approach that controls for dynamic agglomeration and diffusion effects in constructing localized housing price indices. Based on residential transaction records in Singapore, we create a three‐dimensional interactive heat maps that allow for better measurement and vis...
Article
This study empirically tests the volatility effects on land development options using the Singapore's government land sales data from 1996 to 2018. We find that development land option premiums increase by 5% on average with one standard deviation increase in conditional volatility, which is consistent with the prediction of the standard real optio...
Article
This paper examines the long-term effects of birth cohort size on life outcomes. Using administrative data from Singapore, we study the outcomes of large birth cohorts created by the Chinese superstitious practice of zodiac birth timing, where parents prefer to give birth in the year of the Dragon. This practice is followed exclusively by the Chine...
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Full-text available
This paper proposes the use of a semiparametric model based on a locally weighted approach that controls for dynamic agglomeration and diffusion effects in constructing localized housing price indices. Based on residential transaction records in Singapore, we create a three-dimensional interactive heat maps that allow for better measurement and vis...
Article
There are limitations in the understandings of investors’ overreaction to the volatility in less transparent industrial sectors. Investors investing in a less transparent sector are likely to over-interpret available market information. This article compares investors’ reaction to market shocks across different industrial sectors, through analyzing...
Article
We examine the impact of the opening of the Circle Line (CCL) in Singapore on individuals’ travel mode choice. Using data from cross-sectional surveys conducted before and after the CCL opening, we investigate how individuals’ travel mode choices changed in response to improved accessibility to the rail transit system. The difference-in-differences...
Article
This study uses the Markov switching vector autoregressive model (MSVAR) model to examine dynamic relationships between stock and housing market returns in the United States covering the period from 1987 to 2017. The results show significant regime-dependent auto-correlations in stock and housing returns in both the high volatility and low volatili...
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Full-text available
This study employs an administrative dataset containing high-frequency transaction records for approximately four million smart transit cards used by Singaporean residents in order to study the travel preferences of public transport commuters. We examine the impact of service attributes, including travel time, reliability and travel cost, on commut...
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This study examines two questions relating to the banking market structure. First, does the banking market structure influence banks’ decisions to originate new single-family home mortgages? Second, does the banking market concentration affect mortgage default risks? Using a two-stage approach with the inputs from two data sources on the banking ma...
Article
Full-text available
Singapore’s government imposes a new transaction tax in the form of additional buyer’s stamp duty (ABSD) on developers who fail to sell all units in 5 years for new developments commenced after 2011. We find significant evidence on the ABSD shocks, which trigger rational responses of private developers in cutting prices to clear unsold housing unit...
Article
This paper examines the causal effects of air pollution on the household consumption of water and electricity in Singapore. Using the transboundary haze pollution caused by forest fires in Indonesia as an exogenous shock, we find that increases in haze pollutant intensity in the air significantly increase water and electricity consumption. In parti...
Article
This paper investigates the role of ethnic matching between buyers and sellers in Singapore’s public housing market. We find that sellers sell homes in blocks with a high concentration of their own (other) ethnic group(s) at significant premiums (discounts). Chinese sellers earn 1.7% higher premiums when selling homes to Chinese buyers in high Chin...
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We study the effect of superstition and conspicuous spending motives on housing demand and price in Singapore. We find that buyers pay less for homes with unlucky addresses and more for homes with lucky addresses. There were fewer housing transactions on inauspicious days of the lunar calendar when people are advised to avoid making major economic...
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Full-text available
The government of Singapore imposed two rounds of demand restrictions in 2010 and 2013, respectively, which prohibited private housing owners from concurrently owning both a private housing unit and a public housing flat. These restrictions curb speculative and investment activities, but do not deter public housing owners from upgrading to private...
Research
This study examines the possible implications for real options models if developers are risk averse when exercising development options. In our empirical tests using data on first-price auctions of state lands in Singapore, we found evidence of risk aversion among developers. We also identified the two channels through which market volatility chang...
Article
We use a large housing transaction data set in Singapore to study whether real estate agents use information advantages to buy houses at bargain prices. Agents bought their own houses at prices that are 2.54% lower than comparable houses bought by other buyers. Consistent with information asymmetries, agent buyers have more information advantages i...
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This paper measures the impact of three types of defaulter-friendly foreclosure laws on the behaviors of mortgage lenders in loan origination, and borrowers in default decision. To disentangle the “pure” influence of foreclosure laws from that of unobserved regional factors, we use the border identification strategy to sort the loan sample in the z...
Article
Full-text available
Singapore's government imposed two rounds of demand restrictions in 2011 and 2013, respectively, which disallow private housing owners from concurrently owning a private housing unit and a public housing flat. These restrictions curb speculative and investment activities, but do not deter public housing owners from upgrading to private housing. Usi...
Article
This paper is the first to identify and estimate developers’ supply functions for real estate attributes. It introduces instruments that separate the demand side effects of real estate attributes and capture the nature of developers upon their initial business establishment into a two‐stage estimation model. We construct a unique dataset by merging...
Article
Gender gap can arise due to various factors-socio-economic, culture, risk attitudes, and macro-economic circumstances. Using a unique dataset that merges motor vehicle events with bankruptcy outcomes and personal data from Singapore, this study finds significant evidence of a gender gap in personal bankruptcy risk. We show that women's odds of bein...
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Using non-agency securitization data consisting of mortgages originated between 1991 and 2007, we find that fraction of defaulted mortgages increases from 10.8% in the pre-crisis period (July 2007) to 19.6% in the post crisis period (July 2009). This paper then applies a split population hazard model, or widely known as a mixture cure model in biom...
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Full-text available
This study uses the opening of the new Circle Line (CCL) in Singapore as a natural experiment to test the effects of urban rail transit networks on non-landed private housing values. We use a network distance measure and a local-polynomial-regression approach to identify the CCL impact zone with discontinuity in housing price gradient between a tre...
Article
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine developers’ optimal development timing when developers are heterogeneous and have different marginal costs in a real estate development market. Design/methodology/approach This study uses a multiple-player game theoretic real option model and provides tractable results of asymmetric development strat...
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Based on Diebold and Yilmaz’s (International Journal of Forecasting 28:57–66, 2012) methodology, we estimate three return spillover indices in a four-asset system comprising equity REIT (EREIT), mortgage REIT (MREIT), stock, and bond for the sample period from January 1972 to September 2014. We find that the total return spillover risks account for...
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Full-text available
This study uses the opening of the new Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) in stages between 2010 and 2012 in Singapore as the exogenous event to empirically test the impact of the new Circle Line (CL) on housing wealth. Applying a “differences-in-differences” approach to the non-landed private housing transaction data covering the period from 2009 to 2013, w...
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This paper empirically tests the interactive effects of air pollution and economic spillovers in Chinese cities from 2003 to 2010. The results show that Chinese cities benefit from the economic spillovers from surrounding cities, but bear the costs of negative air pollution externalities created by neighboring cities. We use wind direction and the...
Article
Full-text available
This study uses the opening of the new Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) in stages between 2010 and 2012 in Singapore as the exogenous event to empirically test the impact of the new Circle Line (CL) on housing wealth. Applying a “differences-in-differences” approach to the non-landed private housing transaction data covering the period from 2009 to 2013, w...
Article
Can children effectively nudge their parents to change their energy consumption behavior? This study sets up a quasi-experiment using the “Project Carbon Zero” campaign, an energy-saving contest in Singapore, to empirically test the effectiveness of school children nudges in bringing electricity conservation messages home and influencing behaviors...
Article
We study the participation of women in golf, a predominately male social activity, and its influence on their likelihood of serving on a board of directors. Exploiting a novel dataset of all golfers in Singapore, we find that woman golfers enjoy a 54% higher likelihood of serving on a board relative to male golfers. A woman's probability of serving...
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This study aims to empirically test the effects of negative environmental externalities (i.e. noise pollution) due to construction activities within half to one kilometer (km) radius and how households react to such externalities by increasing the use of air-conditioners to mitigate noise from the construction work. We use a unique dataset of elect...
Article
This study uses a unique distance-based priority school allocation rule in Singapore as an identification to test school relocation effects on housing prices in the school zone. Using housing samples during the period from 1999 to 2009, our main results show that private housing prices within 1-km zone and in 1-km to 2-km zone from the old school z...
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The creation of real estate investment trusts (REITs) facilitates the conversion of illiquid commercial real estate assets into liquid tradable securities in the public market space. The process increases liquidity and generates significant growth in cross-border real estate transactions. This study uses a large sample of proprietary commercial rea...
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This study aims to empirically test the effects of various housing options, which include renting, owning, living with parents/siblings, living in houses bought by parents and living in staff housing, on fertility decisions of families. This study uses micro-data obtained from the Taiwanese Panel Study of Family Dynamics (PSFD) surveys for the peri...

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