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Asset‐backed securitization (ABS) is an interesting financial innovation whereby debt instruments backed by cash flows generated from income‐producing assets are issued for investment purposes in the capital markets. This study examines the characteristics of ABS transactions in Singapore and evaluates whether proper governance mechanisms have been developed to protect ABS investors. We examined the unique features of the Visor case, such as rental guarantee, large block ownerships of junior bonds, credit enhancement, embedded options, managerial relationships between the SPV and servicers, and critically evaluated the effects of these characteristics on the governance of ABS. Rules on separation of banks' participation in ABS and the accountant's requirement of “clean sale” that affect the ABS structure were also discussed. We also develop a simple information asymmetric model to evaluate the pecking order choice of two different financing methods: collateralized loans and ABS.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the nature of Singapore's private housing market with respect to its price movement using time series models.

This paper analyses the price dynamics in the Singapore private housing market using the integrated autoregressive‐moving average modeling coupled with outlier detection and autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity modeling techniques.

The paper finds that private house prices are better modeled as an ARIMA (1, 1, 0) model with corresponding dummy variables. This suggests that housing prices may be characterized as the combination of a stationary cyclical component and a non‐stationary stochastic growth component over the past almost three decades. This affirms that the Singapore's private housing market is characterised by the weak‐form inefficiency.

The results show that even though ARIMA with dummy variables performs better to ARIMA with ARCH in dynamic performance, there is only marginal improvement on the original model. This suggests that the method for selecting intervention variables in the ARIMA modeling is worth further research with the aim of improving its predictive ability.

This paper incorporates the detection of outliers and intervention procedure in the modeling in order to analyse the impacts of extraordinary events such the recent Asian financial crisis and excessive market speculation on property prices and take them into consideration in forecasting price changes.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the emergence of civil disobedience (CD) movements in Hong Kong in the context of the notion of civil society (CS).

The paper begins by rigorously defining the notion of CD, as well as the concept of CS and tracing its development in Hong Kong over the past several decades. By using a model of CS typology, which combines the variables of state control and a society’s quest for autonomy (SQA), the paper aims to outline the historical development of CD movements in Hong Kong. It also discusses the recent evolution of CS and its relationship with CD movements, particularly focusing on their development since Leung Chun-ying became the Chief Executive in 2012. Finally, by using five cases of CD witnessed in the past several decades, the relationship between the development of CS and the emergence of CD in Hong Kong has been outlined.

Four implications can be concluded: first, CD cannot emerge when the state and society are isolated. Second, the level of SC and the scale of CD are positively related. Third, as an historical trend, the development of SQA is generally in linear progress; SQA starts from a low level (e.g. interest-based and welfare-based aims) and moves upwards to campaign for higher goals of civil and political autonomy. If the lower level of SQA is not satisfied, it can lead to larger scale CD in future. Fourth, the CD movement would be largest in scale when the state-society relationship confrontational and when major cleavages can be found within CS itself.

This paper serves to enrich knowledge in the fields of politics and sociology.