This project explores the impacts of two policy regimes on innovation and technology transfer in a global economy. The policy regimes in consideration include monetary policy and subsidy policy. Therefore, this project will consist of two research topics, including how (a) monetary policy (in terms of inflation) and (b) subsidy policy (in terms of research subsidies) on innovation and technology transfer in multinational firms’ foreign direct investment (FDI).

Technological innovation becomes increasingly important to sustain long-run economic growth in an open economy, especially for Asian economies. Inflation generates an extra cost burden in manufacturing and research and development (R&D) investments, whereas subsidization is one crucial policy instrument affecting technological improvement and economic growth. Therefore, these policy tools play a crucial role in transferring multinationals’ technologies across countries. This project expects to make significant contributions in terms of theoretical exploration and policy implications.

This project will systematically describe phenomenal observations. Then it will analytically study the effects of two policy instruments on innovation and technology transfer by setting up dynamic general equilibrium frameworks with optimization and endogenous economic growth. Finally, this project will quantify the effects of policy instruments by calibrating theoretical models to realistic data.

This project purports to study the course of tourism development in the Greater Bay Area from the economic perspective. It focuses on examining the spillover effects of tourism development among the regional cities so as to assess the extent of regional cooperation or competition with regards to their complementarity and substitutability. It also investigates the main determinants of regional tourism development for their implications on the regional allocation of resources. Results would provide insights into the current and future development and growth of the region’s tourism industry.

The unanticipated presidential election outcome in 2016 allows us a unique opportunity to estimate the effect of exogenous political shock in the US on the financial market and corporate strategy in China –its largest trade partner and creditor. We identify firms’ exposure to the shock by examining the stock market reaction and investigate the implication on corporate innovation among listed firms. Our results show that how the surprise victory of Donald Trump influences stock returns and its implications on firms’ innovation outcome. We further test if such relation continues to hold in a battery of robustness tests and is moderated by some firm level characters such as size and ownership. Our findings shed light on the broader implication on corporate innovation of US-China trade war.

China has emphasized promoting common prosperity in recent years to narrow the wealth inequality. Based on channels identified by Auclert (2019), this project investigates the impact of China’s monetary policy on households’ wealth levels and wealth distribution using data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) during 2012-2018. Analysis shows that: (1) household wealth is more affected by real interest rate adjustments than unexpected inflation; (2) the impacts of monetary policy loosening and tightening cycles on household wealth are not symmetric and a persistently accommodative interest rate policy may do more harm than good to social wealth; (3) financial development raises the sensitivity of household wealth to monetary policy adjustments with heterogeneous effect across different channels.

Procedures used for many school choice programs and centralized college admissions require the participants to submit a ranking over all the schools or colleges. The widespread use of the Internet, however, allows for new methods for determining these assignments through the use of sequential mechanisms. In these, participants choose their desired outcome from the options available, which are updated accordingly, before a final matching is produced. This allows students to focus their applications away from institutions that will not accept them, given other students’ choices. In this project, we evaluate sequential mechanisms currently being used to match millions of students to universities and proposed alternatives, testing their theoretical and empirical properties and the extent to which they help students make better choices and improve assignments. We will also provide a new mechanism to be used in these problems, which combines contemporaneous choices with historical statistics to produce assignments.

This project aims to assess how the career incentives of local leaders in China impact the entry and exit dynamics of firms. Despite having relatively weak formal institutions, China has achieved impressive economic growth. Emerging studies suggest that this may be attributed to the existence of a second-best, informal institution setup, where local politicians in China, facing the regional decentralized tournament system, are incentivized to promote economic development to advance their personal careers. Through the lens of firm entry and exit, we investigate both the advantages and limitations of this special institutional arrangement, contribution to the important literature that explores the institution-development nexus.

The Shanghai (Shenzhen) -Hong Kong “Stock Connect” program allows investors in mainland China and Hong Kong residents and foreign investors to trade eligible stocks listed on the other market, through the exchange and clearing houses in their home markets. This program, announced in April 2014 and begun in November 2014, is regarded as a major step toward internationalizing China’s security markets.

The project analyzes the effects on Chinese firms of the “China Connect” equity market liberalization. Because China is a capital abundant country, unlike typical emerging markets in the literature, the benefits and costs of liberalization are logically different. Nonetheless, the liberalization brought benefits: lower funding costs, higher stock prices, and more investment for connected firms compared to unconnected firms, despite a common negative effect on all firms from capital outflows. These benefits come from a new channel: reducing domestic credit misallocation between private- and state-owned enterprises. The project also documents costs: connected firms became more sensitive to external shocks than unconnected firms.

Motivated by the urgent need for inclusive finance in Macau, we plan to develop a Robo-advisor system to provide Macau residents with low-threshold, low-cost, and effective investment advice and financial planning services. This system is based on big data and machine learning technologies. We plan to collect and analyze data on investors’ personal traits, assess their risk attitude, evaluate their portfolios, optimize portfolios based on modern asset pricing theory, and further provide comprehensive and whole-life financial planning for households. We will further utilize the advantage of university education and build in financial literacy and education into the system.

The scope and potential of Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) including the Block Chain in the enhancement of economic development and effective governance are increasingly realized in various countries and markets around the world. The nature of the technology, warranting the development and use of different nodes of a network that could span across various borders, creates numerous technological and legal challenges, which needs to be comprehensively addressed in order to ensure the adoption of any transparent, reliable and efficient DLT applications. The proposed interdisciplinary project intends to

1. assess the potential of specific DLT applications for enhancement of economic development and effective governance,
2. identify relevant technological and legal challenges facing its prospective deployment in Macau SAR and Greater Bay Area (GBA) and
3. propose relevant remedial and facilitation measures for wider adoption of the technology. Firstly, the project will systematically study the technology, infrastructure and legal environment necessary for the potential deployment DLT applications in various facets of the economy and public governance in Macau SAR in a comparative assessment with China, Hong Kong and other relevant jurisdictions. Secondly, the project will explore specific cross-border technological and legal cooperation/harmonization measures essential for facilitating economic transactions in the GBA region.

Financial Technology (Fintech) has brought in swift evolution to the financial system, and Fintech finance has grown rapidly to become new sources of funding, which distinguishes from traditional banking by using a lot more information through, for example, Big Data, particularly on credit checks of borrowers, while allowing small investors new choices of flexible and attractive investments. On the payment side, Fintech has facilitated financial inclusion that allows people in even remote areas to be able to use sources of funding as well as change consumption behaviour. This powerful source is however not without downside. When Fintech finance is offered outside of the banking sector, it becomes a new source of shadow banking beyond the scrutiny of the macroprudential banking system, creating a new source of financial fragility. This project attempts to include a collection of studies that analyze issues of Fintech. The first study covers theoretical and empirical analyses on the potential financial risks that Fintech can create to the financial system. The second is an analysis of the opportunities and risks created by the P2P platforms. The third one is to analyze the impact of Fintech financing and online payment platforms on patterns of consumption.

Differences exist in the laws between Mainland China and Macau SAR on cross-border data flow. To ensure the legal compliance of cross-border data flow has become a prominent issue faced by businessmen in mainland China and Macau SAR in their business transactions. In this case, by seizing the opportunity of developing the Hengqin In-depth Cooperation Zone, it will be an effective solution to establish a data circulation base in Hengqin to enable businesses to exchange their data. The establishment of such a base must be dependent on the laws of the two sides. The legal system in Macau has strong historic origin of and high similarities with Portuguese-speaking countries. Therefore, before studying the cross-border data flow regulation between Mainland China and Macau SAR, it is necessary to make an understanding of the relevant legislations of Portuguese-speaking countries. At the same time, data legislations in the European Union, the United States and some other countries, are earlier than that of China, and have certain international influential power. Their mature experiences in data legislation can also provide a reference for the research of this project.

Valuations in Initial Public Offering (IPO) are notoriously difficult, and the related literature is controversial regarding the initial mispricing and long-run performance. Finding comparable peers is critical in solving the disputes. Traditional peers matched by industry, size, and profitability have two limitations. First, the traditional industry classifications fail to classify firms with innovative business or covering multiple industries. Second, due to the high growth potential and high uncertainty of IPO firms, the current profitability fails to reflect the future prospects, which are critical in the forward-looking financial valuation.

This project applies the text-based approach of Hoberg and Phillips (2016) to identify peers matched by the business scope. The text-based peers can accommodate new-technology business, capture cross-industry relatedness, and does not rely on historical financial information. The project plans to explore the performance of various peers in IPO valuations. Preliminary evidence shows that the text-based peers have the highest aftermarket return correlations with IPO firms. The project plans to further investigate IPO pricing and long-run performance using the text-based peers as the benchmark. The results are expected to make important contributions to the IPO valuation literature and provide references to investment bankers in IPO underwriting.

A part of the building’s cultural history preserved in oral form has disappeared recently. In this project, we build a smart guided tour platform to collect and share the models and introductions of many buildings with historical significance and characteristics. the real-world buildings are digitally recorded based on 3D modeling. The platform shows the 3D models, structural materials, and internal details with virtual reality (VR) technology.

With the building of infrastructure for the region, such as new transportation, new flight routes, new highway and metro, the tourism demand of the region becomes more depending on nearby cities and countries. For example, the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge could connect Macao, Hong Kong, and Zhuhai, three major regions on the Pearl River Delta. The building on this bridge not only promotes economic development of the whole Pearl River Delta, but also creates a tourism clique with significant reducing on traveling time (Tian & Jiang, 2018). Accordingly, tourism demand of these three regions could be deeply changed and influenced by every city within the tourism clique, and existing tourism demand forecasting methods on single destination is insufficient to allow the public and private sectors to make the collective plan within the tourism clique. Hence, this project aims to explore the predictivity of tourism demand forecasting for the tourism clique, build the graph deep learning model to forecast the multi-destination tourism demand for the tourism clique and analysis the competitiveness circumstance within the tourism clique.

The presence of strangers, socially unrelated but physically near, is often an integral part of a travel and tourism experience. The COVID- 19 pandemic has abruptly and artificially changed the spatial relations among strangers. Mandatory and voluntary social distancing may lead to estrangement behavior in post-pandemic era travel and tourism such as distancing behavior, open hostility and micro-aggression towards travelers. Guided by the theoretical framework of strangership, this research examines the phenomenon of estrangement and tourism in the post- pandemic era through a socio-psychological lens. Using a sequential mixed method approach comprised of a quantitative study and a qualitative study, the objectives of this research are to evaluate the extent of estrangement in the post-COVID travel and tourism behavior in the aspects of emotional estrangement, self-estrangement and other-imposed estrangement and offer a phenomenological account of estrangement behavior in travel and tourism. Important theoretical and practical implications are also discussed.

Smart tourism has been adopted in many countries. However, despite the advantages of using digital tools for smart tourism, potential risks to privacy and data protection have raised increasing attentions. This paper analyses smart tourism-related mobile applications (apps) used in selected Asian countries, with a focused exploration on the following perspectives. 1) What services do they offer?; 2) How do they portray the services? 3) What benefits and risks of using smart tourism Apps are mentioned? 4) how do they address the informed consent issues? And 5) what strategies used to ensure the protection of users’ information? Based on the study findings, this study will then discuss potential privacy challenges for the adoption of smart tourism. It will make recommendations for regulatory improvements that meet the development of the smart tourism market and the increasing demand for privacy protection.

Sense of place, what a tourist thinks and feels about a geographically-defined region or community, has been a central concept of tourism. The traditional conceptualization of sense of place is based on the assumption that a constellation of place-related cognitions and affects is contained within the physical boundaries of a place. However, the advent of metaverse, a confluence of multiple advanced technologies, has challenged the long-held assumption of clear geographical demarcation of a place. Metaverse also extends the temporal, spatial and experiential dimensions of a place. In other words, what constitutes a place is being redefined. In addition, latest sensory technologies have significantly augmented our senses, redefining what constitutes senses. It is not a stretch to suggest that metaverse significantly alters and expands the meanings of place, sense, and sense of place. Given this context, this research attempts to explore how metaverse as a confluence of technologies and as a new paradigm is redefining sense of place. Specifically, the objectives of the research are to: (a) conceptually redefine sense of place in a metaverse realm; (b) identify key attributes of sense of place in a metaverse realm; and (c) empirically investigate sense of place in a metaverse context.