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1 – 10 of 52This study aims to use a variant from the family of discrete choice models, i.e. the logit model, to analyse the relationship between the Y dependent and X explanatory variables…
Abstract
Theoretical basis
This study aims to use a variant from the family of discrete choice models, i.e. the logit model, to analyse the relationship between the Y dependent and X explanatory variables. This model addresses the linear probability model's main drawback by constraining the probabilities of the Y outcome between 0 and 1. The logit model also offers an extra advantage, in that it can provide odd ratio estimations.
Research methodology
This is a compact case written specifically to teach statistics, econometrics and research method. It has an accompanying data set for the case-users to do hands-on statistical analyses. The data set has been collected from a questionnaire survey from the students enrolled in Attitune, i.e. the music school that the case protagonist founded.
Case overview/synopsis
The case revolves around a relatively new music school, Attitune Music, established in July 2017 in the heart of the capital city of a northern state in Malaysia. Michael Lee Wei-Pin was the founder of Attitune Music Sdn. Bhd. He was also one of the four music instructors of Attitune Music. His speciality instruments were the guitar and the piano. The case opens with the case protagonist, Michael, pondering over Attitune’s performance in terms of its music students’ enrolment. Attitune faced a major challenge – its student enrolment had remained more or less constant since its establishment. Low and/or constant number of students could ultimately translate into stagnant or even worse, shrinking revenues for Attitune. To attract more students, Michael had been toying with the idea of injecting new elements into Attitune’s music lessons, something different from what other music schools were offering and that could be unique selling points for Attitune. With this in mind, Michael surveyed Attitune’s students to gather information that could help him gauge the potential and feasibility of his idea.
Complexity academic level
This case is well positioned to be perhaps the pioneer Malaysian teaching case to be written to teach courses in statistics, econometrics and research methods. The case can be easily adapted to teach at either the introductory or at an advanced level.
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By exploiting the exogeneity of the unexpected 2015 European refugee crisis, the paper’s purpose is to analyze the causal impact of the crisis on resident immigrants’ life…
Abstract
Purpose
By exploiting the exogeneity of the unexpected 2015 European refugee crisis, the paper’s purpose is to analyze the causal impact of the crisis on resident immigrants’ life satisfaction. Due to the ongoing anti-immigrant sentiments, we argue that the refugee crisis and the build-up to it affect how resident immigrants are looked upon in a negative light; this in turn could consequently be reflected in their life satisfaction. We anchor the natives’ hostility toward the refugees and immigrants on the group-threat theory.
Design/methodology/approach
Using two waves of the European Values Study, we exploit the exogenous source of variations generated by the crisis and employ a difference-in-differences estimation framework to identify the causal impact.
Findings
Our findings indicate negative impact of the refugee crisis on resident immigrants’ life satisfaction. We find negative impact of the refugee crisis on the life satisfactions of resident immigrants with low education levels. Our results also suggest that resident immigrants in Western European countries experience lower life satisfaction after the crisis.
Originality/value
The literature so far mostly revolves around the impact of the crisis on natives’ objective well-being. We find it surprising that the literature has not fully utilized the rare opportunity afforded by the refugee crisis to analyze its impact on resident immigrants’ subjective well-being.
Peer review
The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-01-2024-0093
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Even though Europe has recently undergone a difficult time and is recovering from the aftermath of prevalent unemployment, immigrants are still flocking towards Europe and taking…
Abstract
Purpose
Even though Europe has recently undergone a difficult time and is recovering from the aftermath of prevalent unemployment, immigrants are still flocking towards Europe and taking up citizenships of their host countries through naturalisation. The purpose of this paper is to look at the how naturalised immigrants fare in terms of income and employment chances, compared to immigrants.
Design/methodology/approach
Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design and the 2008 European Values Study integrated data set with a final sample of 4,460 observations, this paper isolates the causal effect of naturalisation on the income and employment chances of immigrants by exploiting exogenous variations generated by the eligibility rules for naturalisation in 41 European countries.
Findings
Main findings show that the probability of being naturalised increases for eligible immigrants, income and employment chances increase for eligible immigrants, and income and employment chances increase for naturalised immigrants.
Research limitations/implications
This study has a data limitation, where in using the discontinuity design, there is an unbalanced number of observations to the left and right of the design’s threshold value.
Originality/value
There are limited studies using causal models or potential outcome frameworks to examine the effect of immigrant naturalisation on labour market outcomes in Europe. This study fills this gap.
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Jan-Jan Soon, Roslina Kamaruddin and Abdul Rahim Anuar
The purpose of this paper is to analyse the determinants of actual evacuation decisions of victims of the unprecedented 2014 year-end flood disaster which wreaked havoc across two…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to analyse the determinants of actual evacuation decisions of victims of the unprecedented 2014 year-end flood disaster which wreaked havoc across two east-coast states in Malaysia.
Design/methodology/approach
The target population of this study is the group of victims affected by the December 2014 flood in the Malaysian east-coast states of Kelantan and Pahang. Sampling frames of the flood victims were obtained from the National Security Council offices of the two states. The empirical analysis of this paper is based on a unique data set obtained from a questionnaire survey of the flood victims. The final working sample consists of 372 respondents.
Findings
Important findings from this study are: victims who were given evacuation notices were five times more likely to evacuate, victims who participated in flood awareness programmes were less likely to move to evacuation centres, the further away victims’ homes were from the evacuation centres the more likely they were to evacuate, older victims were less likely to evacuate, larger households were more likely to evacuate, and victims with tertiary education were also less likely to evacuate.
Originality/value
This paper is unique because previous studies of Malaysian flood-related disasters are confined to floods of regular magnitude. This paper is also unique because it uses a semi-parametric estimation approach to obtain the marginal effects of the explanatory variables on evacuation decisions.
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Woei Chyuan Wong and Jan-Jan Soon
The purpose of this study is to examine the causal impact of international immigration inflows on housing prices at the state level in Malaysia from 2007 to 2018.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to examine the causal impact of international immigration inflows on housing prices at the state level in Malaysia from 2007 to 2018.
Design/methodology/approach
Hedonic regressions using both fixed effects and first difference approaches are used to estimate the impact of immigration inflows on house prices in Malaysia. This study deals with potential endogeneity of immigrants’ choices of destination states in Malaysia by using a shift-share instrument variable approach. Specifically, historical shares of immigrants in a state are used to predict current immigrant inflows to a particular state. The predicted value of immigration flows is then inserted into the house price regression models in place of the actual immigration flows.
Findings
Using annual data for 14 states from 2007 to 2018, this study documents the positive impact of immigration inflows on house prices in Malaysia. The authors find that a 1% increase in immigration inflows is associated with an increase of 10.2% (first difference) and 13.4% (fixed effects) in house prices. The economic impact is larger in magnitude than that found in developed countries. Contrary to existing studies that find immigration inflows to be associated with native flight, the authors find support for the attraction effects hypothesis, where immigration inflow is positive and significantly related to net native flows.
Research limitations/implications
The effects of immigration inflows are economically significant, considering that the effects are 10 times larger than those documented in the USA. Policymakers in Malaysia ought to monitor house price trends in immigrant-popular states to ensure that natives are not priced out by new immigrants.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is perhaps the first study to focus on the relationship between immigration inflows and house prices in Malaysia. Focusing on Malaysia has at least two originality aspects. First, Malaysia is relatively not an immigrant-popular destination. Second, Malaysia has a multiracial and heterogenous society among its natives. The findings, obtained within these two settings, would therefore provide a wider scope of result generalization, and natural experiment grounds for causal implications of our results.
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This paper focusses on how the educated and less-educated middle class react differently to income increases, against an intertwined literature backdrop of Engel's law, quality of…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper focusses on how the educated and less-educated middle class react differently to income increases, against an intertwined literature backdrop of Engel's law, quality of life, aspirational and conspicuous consumption. The paper seeks to answer two main questions: Is there evidence of the middle class, particularly the educated, trying to emulate the upper class by shifting towards aspirational consumption? Is there any distinct expenditure behaviour amongst the middle class?
Design/methodology/approach
Combining the Malaysian 2016 Household Expenditure Survey (HES) and the 2016 Consumer Price Indices datasets, quantile estimations are applied on the merged dataset of 14,326 households.
Findings
There is evidence of the educated middle class emulating the upper class in terms of food share, home furnishing and starchy produce expenditure behaviour. The less-educated middle class exhibits a predilection for home furnishing expenditures when income increases, whilst the educated shows signs of dissociating themselves from such material acquisitions. The paper concludes that the middle class is collectively an aspirational class, but with diverging paths towards upward social mobility between the educated and less-educated households.
Originality/value
Aspirational consumption of the middle class has not been given detailed empirical treatment at the household micro-level in the literature, especially for upper-middle income countries like Malaysia. The paper starts off by detecting an anomaly in the Engel's food share coefficients, where the middle class sees unexpected larger declines in food share than those of the upper class. This is the paper's departure point from the literature.
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An Nee Lau, Mohd Hafiz Jamaludin and Jan Mei Soon
The purpose of this paper is to determine the understanding of halal concept among food production workers and to develop a generic Halal Control Point (HCP) Plan for the…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to determine the understanding of halal concept among food production workers and to develop a generic Halal Control Point (HCP) Plan for the manufacturing of processed foods.
Design/methodology/approach
A mixed-method (interviews, surveys and microbiological analyses) approach was used to analyze the hygiene and halal practices of four food processing plants in Penang, Malaysia. In total, 200 food production workers were surveyed (and quality assurance staff were interviewed) to determine their understanding of halal concepts and attitude towards halal food products. Adenosine triphosphate (ATP) swabbing tests were conducted to determine the hygiene of workers and food contact surfaces. End products were sampled and enumerated for total bacterial count.
Findings
The swabbing tests of food contact surfaces (i.e. tabletops) showed that only Company C (oat) and Company D (coffee powder) passed the ATP hygiene test (= 10 reflective light units [RLU]). The results obtained from all workers’ hands and aprons indicated a 100 per cent failure rate (>30 RLU). No ATP was detected on the packaging materials from all companies. The microbiological findings indicated that the end products are satisfactory and were below detection limits as verified by the enumeration done on the food samples. Besides, from the interview sessions conducted with the quality assurance staff, one generic Halal Control Points (HCPs) plan and four specific HCP plan tables were developed for the manufacturing process of halal food products for each company.
Originality/value
The HCP plans will be of value for food industry seeking to identify potential point sources of haram contamination and halal control points for their food production processes.
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Noorkartina Mohamad, Hock-Eam Lim, Norhafezah Yusof and Jan-Jan Soon
Previous studies on the effect of entrepreneur education are not comprehensive. Thus, estimating the effect of entrepreneur education is imperative. According to the Malaysian…
Abstract
Purpose
Previous studies on the effect of entrepreneur education are not comprehensive. Thus, estimating the effect of entrepreneur education is imperative. According to the Malaysian Ministry of Education (MoE), only 1.7 percent (as of 2013) of university graduates are self-employed, that is managing one’s own business or known as graduate entrepreneurs. Consequently, a huge gap exists between what is targeted by the government (5.5 percent by 2015) and the reality (a small number of graduate entrepreneurs). The purpose of this paper is to analyze the factors influencing a graduate’s choice to be entrepreneur, particularly the effects of different entrepreneur education, either formal or informal.
Design/methodology/approach
A total of 2,300 graduates from Universiti Utara Malaysia participated in this study.
Findings
The findings showed that the majority of the respondents are consistent in terms of their intent to become entrepreneurs.
Research limitations/implications
Due to time and resource constraints, the data are limited to only one university in Malaysia. It is suggested that future studies include more universities, especially entrepreneurial universities. Although it is believe that public universities’ undergraduates population are highly homogeneous, it is good that the findings of the present study to be further validated by future studies using larger sample that consists of varies of public universities.
Practical implications
This paper supports government policies in terms of cultivating educated entrepreneur such as promoting the entrepreneurship education among higher institutions of education (MoE, 2007). However, there are negative relationships among higher academic achievement of graduates toward their intention to be entrepreneurs. It is indicated that high academic achievements are negatively related to becoming entrepreneurs. Thus, it is suggested that entrepreneurship education in terms of both formal and informal education be implemented into the curriculum in order to cultivate entrepreneurial intentions.
Originality/value
There is still much more to be learned to fully understand the processes that leading to the decision to become an entrepreneur. Nevertheless, the results presented in this paper provide some understanding of the factors influencing the decision to become an entrepreneur among university students and graduates using a convenience sample. Thus, the results are exploratory and subjected to validation by future studies using more representative samples. Nevertheless, the study makes a contribution to the effort to predict and develop entrepreneurs in the country.
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Richard Entlich, Lorrin Garson, Michael Lesk, Lorraine Normore, Jan Olsen and Stuart Weibel
The Chemistry Online Retrieval Experiment (CORE), a five‐year R&D project, was one of the earliest attempts to make a substantial volume of the text and graphics from previously…
Abstract
The Chemistry Online Retrieval Experiment (CORE), a five‐year R&D project, was one of the earliest attempts to make a substantial volume of the text and graphics from previously published scholarly journals available to end‐users in electronic form, across a computer network. Since CORE dealt with material that had already gone through traditional print publication, its emphasis was on the process (and limitations) of conversion, the optimization of presentation, and use of the converted contents for readers. This article focuses on the user response to the system.