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In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic resulted in full or partial lockdowns of higher education institutions (HEIs) in most countries worldwide. On the other hand, HEIs around the world were faced with the difficult questions of how to continue to provide training, learning and research activities to students during outbreaks, epidemics and pandemics. Online and blended learnings are relatively new modes of teaching and learning activities which enable HEIs to offer either online only or a combination of online and physical-based programs of study respectively. Adoption of such learning practices helped ensure continued HEIs operations during outbreaks, epidemics and pandemics. However, there are HEIs which still have no or limited investment in online and blended learning. This chapter outlines the different models of online and blended learning that HEIs can adopt, demystify the benefits, values and challenges posed by these models, necessary infrastructure including information and communication technologies (ICTs) as well as required staff and student support services to ensure effective and efficient uptake and usage. It further shows that with a deliberate initial investment in the necessary infrastructure, staff and student support services, the resources of and potential for online and blended programs can be enormous. It also outlines remote learning models that HEIs can adopt, how to support students’ readiness for online and blended learning, the benefits and challenges posed by employing online and blended learning in HEIs and the necessary infrastructure and support services.

In Chapter 2, the author will develop the theoretical framework of the sociological analysis of youth delinquency in SEA. The author will introduce the control theory (both self-control and social control), in order to understand under what circumstances youths are more and less likely to behave in a deviant manner. The author will, then, mention the general strain theory, to draw the relationships between the encounters of negative life events, the development of strain, and the disposition to perform delinquency. The author will also, address the cultural deviance and social learning theories that help justify the expression of juvenile delinquency from a sociocultural perspective, alongside pathing the way to explaining how social costs of youth delinquency can be raised by policy amendments in order to mitigate adolescents’ exercises of smoking, drinking and sexual misconduct behaviours. In this chapter, the author will highlight how poverty, the availability of delinquent opportunities, peer influence and pressure, a lack of parental and school socialisation, and deviant social and cultural norms are all risk factors for youth delinquency.

In Chapter 4, the author will discuss the youth drinking epidemic regionwide, in order to demonstrate why the impacts of alcohol products on youths are concerning. The author will present the major youth drinking trends within SEA, to further study how the rampant alcohol trade regionally has adversely affected local youths to a troublesome degree. The author will point out the causes of the youth drinking epidemic, which are susceptibility and toxic culture. Next, the author will evaluate the national and regional costs of youth drinking, discussing how such a lifestyle results in consequences in relation to delinquency. The author will recommend policies for alcohol control that the SEA governments should take into account when amending or forming their policies to contain the epidemic of youth drinking. The outputs of Chapter 4 will draw a close association between youth smoking, youth drinking, and youth sexual misconduct. Therefore, the author indicates that these youth delinquency problems should be addressed simultaneously in order to eradicate the issues of holistic youth misbehaviours in the long term.

In Chapter 6, the author will reiterate the importance for SEA countries to build sustainable futures, and such a process cannot be fulfilled without active and positive youth involvement. With the continual encounters of youth delinquency, SEA countries are significantly harming their international competitiveness and bearing a substantial amount of societal costs and risks. The author will revisit the policy recommendations made in the previous four chapters, and summarise what future policy development SEA countries should be committed to implementing. The author will address how relevant (1) academics, (2) policy-makers, and (3) laypersons should digest the content of this book, in favour of broadening their understanding of socio-criminological issues and policy development in the SEA contexts. The author will additionally point out the limitations of the scholarly discourse this book presents, suggesting that future research and intellectual endeavours (prospective) authors should take into account when expanding the investigation of the topics mentioned in this project.

The standard method to estimate a stochastic frontier (SF) model is the maximum likelihood (ML) approach with the distribution assumptions of a symmetric two-sided stochastic error v and a one-sided inefficiency random component u. When v or u has a nonstandard distribution, such as v follows a generalized t distribution or u has a χ2 distribution, the likelihood function can be complicated or untractable. This chapter introduces using indirect inference to estimate the SF models, where only least squares estimation is used. There is no need to derive the density or likelihood function, thus it is easier to handle a model with complicated distributions in practice. The author examines the finite sample performance of the proposed estimator and also compare it with the standard ML estimator as well as the maximum simulated likelihood (MSL) estimator using Monte Carlo simulations. The author found that the indirect inference estimator performs quite well in finite samples.

This research examines stock traders' disposition effects and contrarian/momentum behavior in the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TWSE). Specifically, we first investigate disposition effects across all trader types and then examine the relationships between disposition effects, trader types, and order characteristics. Next, we explore contrarian and/or momentum behavior and analyze the relationships among the contrarian/momentum behavior, investor type, and order characteristics. Finally, the links among trader types, order characteristics, and investment performance are detected. This chapter yields the following findings. (1) Individual investors exhibit the strongest disposition effects compared to other investors. (2) Foreign investors, investment trusts, and individual investors tend to use large orders to sell loser stocks. (3) Investment trusts are inclined to be momentum traders, while individual investors tend to perform contrarian strategies. (4) Institutional aggressive and large orders perform better than individuals' orders. (5) The performance of foreign investors' selling decisions is better than that of retail investors.

Existing literature argues that the expression of delinquency is common during childhood and especially adolescence. Here, the practice of delinquent behaviours increases the risk of disrupting one’s trajectories of educational and labour market attainment. Delinquent youths, particularly those behaving delinquently severely, are prone to be undereducated, under- or unemployed, earning less, enjoying fewer employment welfare benefits and entitled to fewer job promotion opportunities. Given their sociological background, the author is interested in understanding how juvenile delinquency is socially constructed and reproduced. There are a variety of major key risk factors of the social construction of juvenile delinquency, including familial, or parental in particular, issues, the experience of any form of violence, the act of imitation, and psychological and emotional distress. In this book, the author will examine the socioeconomic, sociocultural and psychosocial factors that lead to the entrenched problems of youth delinquency. Per the United Nations, youth is defined as individuals aged from 15 to 24 years old. There are ample practical problems in adopting a legal definition to understand delinquency, because, for example, what is regarded as legal or not is often poorly defined and rather subjective. Also, legal definitions vary over time, barring a clear, standardised understanding of the word ‘delinquency’. In scholarly discourse, juvenile delinquency covers a multitude of sins, such as robbery, vandalism, violence, drug or alternative psychoactive substance use and the performance of some kinds of heterosexual or homosexual acts. While youth is widely interpreted as comprising individuals aged 24 years or below, the upper age limit for juvenile delinquency adopted by the English and American laws is much lower – under the age of 18 years. Given such contexts, in this book, the author primarily addresses youth/juvenile delinquent behaviours as relevant acts performed by individuals aged below 18 years. However, occasionally, the author presents survey data indicating youths’ expression of delinquency among respondents aged 24 years or below.

In this book, the author will provide reasoning on how Southeast Asian (SEA) governments, individually and collectively, have not taken an adequately aggressive, strict approach to regulating their policies against youth delinquency, prompting adolescents’ involvement in delinquent behaviours to be growing rampantly. The lack of appropriate legislative and law enforcement efforts results in significant individual and societal costs, jeopardising SEA’s pursuit of sustainable futures. Therefore, it is necessary to develop this book in order to analyse the causes and consequences of a variety of youth delinquent behaviours and its associated unequal power of relations, alongside expanding the insights of sociological inquiry into a current, ongoing phenomenon of inequalities. Policy recommendations are presented at the end of Chapters 3–5, allowing local policy-makers to evaluate the current policy development and seek possible policy amendments to efficiently and effectively cope with the notable, entrenched and multifaceted problems of youth delinquency. Outputs of this book, additionally, enable (under-)graduate students and relevant scholars and specialists focusing on SEA studies to understand the causes, effects, costs, and policy development and gaps with respect to the youth smoking epidemic, the youth drinking epidemic and youth delinquency of sexual misconduct.

One of the key highlights of this book is that the outputs suggest ways to attain more sustainable, equitable, liveable and inclusive futures in SEA other than the assessments of youth delinquency per se. In doing so, the author hopes to contribute scholarly to the understanding of how regional economic competitiveness, social cohesion and habitability can be sharpened when youth delinquency is addressed thoroughly and aptly. Moreover, when the author addresses youth delinquency, they identify how digitalisation and informationisation diversify the means for the SEA youths to gain access to tobacco products, alcohol goods, commercial sex clients and casual sex partners. Recommended policies in response to youth delinquency regionally, in part, target tightening the imposition of e-regulations by SEA governments to narrow any regulatory loopholes that relevant parties can instrumentalise on to earn lucrative profits at the expense of raising the rates of youth delinquency. In-depth analyses of both conventional and digitalised youth delinquency add further value to this book to readers’ understanding of the corresponding timely issues and recommended policy-making.

The author will, therefore, primarily explores the contexts of Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. Here Thailand and Malaysia are, currently, the only two regional upper-middle-income countries that share the same prospect of becoming high-income countries in the future. Indonesia, alternatively, has overtaken the Philippines as the biggest economic market and political powerhouse within the region. Therefore, compared to their less or least developed neighbouring counterparts, these countries are more prepared to develop sustainable, habitable and equitable futures while maintaining their Asian and global standings by raising economic and social competitiveness. Indonesia and Malaysia are among the two largest Muslim-majority countries in the globe. In the next chapters, the author will theorise how religious conformity deters local youths from expressing delinquency. Per Islamic laws, smoking, drinking and premature sex are prohibited. It will be interesting to explore whether religious deterrence helps prevent Indonesian and Malaysian youths from expressing delinquency. If not, the author will investigate what factors prompt local youths to behave delinquently, despite religious deterrence. Although these three countries are prioritised in the sociological discussion, the author will present some arguments and data with respect to the contexts of other SEA countries, such as the Philippines and Vietnam, to support their evaluation of youth delinquency regionwide.

In Chapter 3, the author will problematise the youth smoking epidemic within SEA, in order to justify why the regional impacts of the tobacco trade on youths are worrisome. The author will present the major youth smoking trends in SEA, for the purpose of illustrating how the presence of tobacco products has adversely affected regional youths to a concerning degree. The author, next, will highlight the causes of the youth smoking epidemic, namely susceptibility and positive advertising. The author follows by emphasising the national and regional costs of youth smoking, by arguing how such a lifestyle results in negative consequences in relation to the delinquency itself. Lastly, the author will recommend policies for tobacco control that SEA governments should consider to contain the epidemic of youth smoking. It is noteworthy that all SEA governments have some degree of tobacco control policies in place. However, many lack the implementation of comprehensive national tobacco control strategic plans and tightened law enforcement endeavours to specifically target the problem of youth smoking. Therefore, the outputs of this chapter should contain scholarly values that are conducive to the betterment of policy-making.