No abstract

Sovereign wealth funds are government controlled investment vehicles that have recently been accused of politically motivated investment, lacking in accountability and lacking in transparency. Yet, there is little analysis of the actual investments made by sovereign wealth funds. We analyse the Singapore based investments of Temasek Holdings, a the Singapore government controlled sovereign fund, using its web site and the annual reports of a sample of large listed Singapore companies over the period 2000 to 2004. Firm size, director block-holding and the proportion of independent directors on the board have explanatory power over Temasek Holdings investments over the period. JEL Classification: G11, G23

The collection of data on values through instruments such as the World Values Survey has focused attention on two opposing but inter-related trends, namely the combination of substantial cultural change in many countries and the persistence of distinctive traditional values. This reflects the interplay between social changes associated with modernisation and globalisation—including increased global trade and the rise of global popular culture—with traditional values country-specific systems. In this paper, we introduce a focus on another potentially important source of change, that of widening higher education participation and attainment, and the extent to which self-reported values differ between university graduates and non-graduates. We investigated this question using data from the most recent collection of the World Values Survey (2017–2020) for six core values—family, friends, leisure, work, politics, and religion—and tested for the influence of higher education attainment on the perceived “importance” of each value and the extent to which this influence differs across values and in gender, generation and country grouping sub-samples. We find evidence for consistent effects in most contexts, with no statistical differences between graduates on non-graduates in relation to the propensity to view family and work as important, statistically significant positive effects on the propensity of graduates to view friends, leisure, and politics as important, and a significant negative effect in relation to religion.

No abstract

No abstract