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The purpose of this paper is to measure the long-run housing affordability of Malaysia over time for households at various income levels and to demonstrate how short- and long-run affordability measures can reach contradicting conclusions.

In this study, a long-run housing affordability index (HAI) for Malaysia was constructed for the sample period 1995 to 2014, using data from house prices and household incomes. The HAI was also modified to compute a mortgage affordability index (MAI) to account for intergenerational transfers.

The results show that households at the 25th income percentile cannot afford any of the four dwelling types in Malaysia. For households at the 40th income percentile and the median income levels, high-rise and terrace housing are affordable. However, significant downward trends in HAI and MAI are documented beginning 2009, which indicates increasing housing stress for households at or below the median income. The short-run affordability measure represented by the median multiple (MM) indicator showed bleaker conclusion for housing affordability, with all dwelling types considered unaffordable over the entire sample period

On the basis of the empirical results, this paper provided several long-term proposals to ameliorate the housing affordability problem in Malaysia.

With the MM ratio being the official affordability measure reported for Malaysia, this study introduces the nation’s first long-run housing affordability measure. It is hoped that this long-run measure will achieve widespread adoption in Malaysia. Given the deteriorating long-term affordability, this study offers several possible long-term solutions.

The purpose of this study is to use a lifetime income measure to evaluate the long-run housing affordability for an understudied cohort of households in the literature – the millennials. The authors do this in the context of Malaysia, measuring long-run affordability for four housing types across geographic locations and income distributions.

This study calculates a long-run housing affordability index (HAI) using data on house prices and household incomes. Essentially a ratio of predicted lifetime incomes to house prices, the HAI is computed for four common housing types in Malaysia from 2005 to 2016 and for six states in the country. The HAI is also compared across four income percentiles.

The analysis reveals varying patterns of housing affordability among different states in Malaysia. Housing affordability has declined since 2010, with most housing types being unaffordable for millennial-led households with the lowest income. Housing is most affordable for those in the highest income bracket, although even here, there are pockets of unaffordable housing as well.

Based on the findings, this study proposes three targeted interventions to improve housing affordability for Malaysian millennials.

This study fills a gap in the literature by examining the long-run housing affordability of Malaysian millennial-led households based on both geographic location and income distribution. The millennial population is understudied in the housing affordability literature, making this study a valuable contribution to the field.

This is a companion paper to our previous study in Cao and Wei (2005) on stock market temperature anomaly for eight international stock markets. The temperature anomaly is characterized by a negative relationship between stock market returns and temperature. This line of work relies on the impact of environmental variables, such as temperature, on mood and behavior changes. In this paper, we expand the sample in Cao and Wei (2005) to include 19 additional financial markets. Our evidence confirms the identified negative relationship for the expanded sample. More importantly, our nonparametric tests, as opposite to the parametric or semi-parametric approaches used by previous related studies, demonstrate that this negative relationship is robust to distributional assumptions. Based on the sub-sample analysis, we find that this negative relationship is stable over time. Furthermore, we consider temperature deviation and demonstrate that this negative relationship is not just a level effect.

Using 3,994 observations of Chinese listed firms from 1995 to 2001, we find a significantly positive correlation between state ownership and cash dividend payment, and a significantly positive relation between private ownership and stock dividend payment. In particular, we find that the relation between dividend payment level and ownership structure is nonlinear. The higher the proportion of state ownership, the higher the cash dividend rate. The higher the proportion of private ownership, the higher the stock dividend rate. We conclude that the managers of Chinese listed companies are likely to cater for the preference of different shareholders.

Starting from 2003, Microsoft and many other companies have either gradually reduced or completely replaced stock options with restricted stocks in their compensation plans. This raises an interesting question: which form of compensation is better, stock or options? This chapter makes an economic comparison between the two compensation vehicles and concludes that stock is preferred to options. The backdrop of the study is dynamic asset allocation within a utility maximization framework whereby the company may go bankrupt. The incorporation of bankruptcy risk into the analysis is motivated by the recent downfalls of companies such as Enron and WorldCom.

We demonstrate that vesting requirements and bankruptcy risk can lead to significant value discounts. When the restricted stock and options have a vesting period of 5 years, and account for 50% of the total wealth, the total discount is more than 60%, out of which 20% is due to bankruptcy risk. More importantly, we find that stock is a better compensation tool than options. For a given dollar amount of grant, the higher the stock proportion, the higher the expected utility. In fact, replacing options by stock can lead to a substantial amount of cost savings for the firm, while maintaining the same level of utility for the employee. For example, when options account for 50% of the total wealth and are subsequently replaced by stock, the granting cost is reduced by about 60%. Our findings therefore provide a theoretical support for the move to stock-only style of performance compensations.

Stock ownership and incentive options are used by companies to retain and motivate employees and managers. These grants usually come with vesting features which require grantees to hold the assets for certain periods. This vesting requirement makes the grantee's total wealth highly undiversified. As a result, as shown by previous researchers, grantees tend to value these incentive securities below market. In this case, grantees will have a strong desire to hedge away the firm-specific risk. Facing the restrictions of direct hedges such as shorting the firm's stock, employees may implement a partial hedge by taking positions in an asset highly correlated with the firm's stock, such as an industry index. In this chapter, we investigate the effects of such a partial hedge. Using the continuous-time, consumption-portfolio framework as a backdrop, we demonstrate that the hedging index can enhance the employee's optimal portfolio holding and increase his intertemporal utility. Consequently, his private valuations of these grants are higher than that without the partial hedging. However, because the partial hedge makes the employee's total wealth less sensitive to the firm's stock price, it will also undermine the incentive effects. Therefore, the presumed incentive effects of these restricted assets should not be taken for granted.