Around 100 academics from prestigious institutions from countries such as Hong Kong, United Kingdom and Japan came together for a three-day conference at Asia Business School from 16th to 18th of August 2018. This conference features discussion of papers and activities on the theme of ‘Innovation and Entrepreneurship: The Changing Frontier’. Notably, this year’s conference was also the first AIEA-NBER conference hosted in Southeast Asia after six years of collaboration between the two bodies.
The focal point of this conference series is on research in the economics and management of innovation and entrepreneurship while providing a forum bringing together leading scholars from both the US and Asia to enhance collaboration within the global research community. The sessions also emphasised the role of universities, especially on innovation and entrepreneurship in shaping economic prosperity.
In one of the sessions, PhD candidate Su Wang from the London School of Economics and Political Science discussed the Returns to Capital in Small and Medium Enterprises, basing the research on evidence from a UK Loan Guarantee Program. Among the facets of discussion was the returns to capital averaging at 35% per year yet that this is only representative of a very small fraction of eligible firms that increase investment in response to the loan guarantee program. 2.5% of small and medium enterprises in UK face financial constraints, and are open to using government-guaranteed loans to overcome such constraints.
This strongly rejects a common belief that any company would bend over backwards for public guarantees should they be offered, but suggests there is misallocation of capital in the UK economy. National University of Singapore’s Professor Changcheng Song presented his findings on the relationship between Workplace Flexibility and Entrepreneurship. Studying whether large-scale reform in Singapore that allows the possibility of business creation at one’s residential property spurs entrepreneurial activities, he found that the reform leads to a significantly higher level of business creation.
The reform also encourages entrepreneurs to become serial entrepreneurs, and they open a larger business with similar survival rate for their second firm. These results show that the home office scheme effectively spurs entrepreneurial activities and attract more entry into self-employment without significantly lowering the average quality of the pool.
The conference also included visits for the participants to three notable Malaysian organizations namely Malaysian Digital Economy Company, Top Glove and Catcha Group to give an insight on the numerous parts of the Malaysian economy, from a government-owned institution responsible for technology and commerce to one of the largest investors in the digital sector in emerging markets, notably ASEAN.
Photo Courtesy By: BERNAMA NEWS