团队

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 difference-in-differences estimate shows that the reform led to a significantly higher level of business creation and the firms newly created in response to the reform had a higher survival rate. The effect is more pronounced for low-income female individuals and industries with high start-up capital, implying that financial constraints and nonpecuniary benefits likely drive the effect. The reform also encourages entrepreneurs to become serial entrepreneurs, and they open a larger business with a similar survival rate for their second firm. Overall, our findings suggest that the program effectively attracted more entry into self-employment without significantly lowering the average quality of the pool.

有见近年的健康科学研究发现空气污染影响心理健康和认知，我们亦尝试加以探讨空气污染会否加剧金融市场中的认知偏差。此研究是根据一间中国大型证券投资基金的专有数据，当中包括于247 个城市、超过 773,198 个账户的完整交易资讯。我们发现空气污染显著增加了投资者卖盈持亏的处置效应。同时我们探究了两项影响空气质素的外生变化，即强风导致空气污染大幅度消散及淮河政策，证明以上发现存在因果解释。研究亦指出调适心情可成为一项潜在的应对机制。