Publications and Projects

Navigating and negotiating change in risky markets: A case study in Vietnam

The project centers on understanding financial deal-making and decision-making in a cycle of shaping, maintaining, and reshaping market in a translocal context. It focuses on how political elites operate under the influence of domestic and transnational economic forces, along with how economic elites navigate the legal systems in a high-risk market without eliminating civilians’ voices and positions from the conversation. In doing so, my research aims to question how political elites, economic elites, and civilians operate in relation to one another, which leads to changes in the market.

The Impacts of Global Economic Sanctions on Corruption: A Global Analysis

This paper investigates the influences of global economic sanctions on corruption by using the structural gravity model for 148 sanctioned countries (108 developing countries and 40 developed countries) during the 1995–2018 period. We consider various forms of sanction, including arms, military, trade, finance, travel, and others. The results reveal that the imposition of sanctions, especially arm, financial, travel, and other sanctions have a significantly negative effect on the prevalence of corruption of target countries. The effects are also largely heterogeneous across sanctioned countries in terms of their economic development. Furthermore, the properties of the institutional quality of the sanctioned state critically affect the relationship between global sanctions and national corruption. Particularly, the well-developed institutional quality helps target countries address the consequences of global sanctions on national corruption. The empirical findings of this study are expected to provide vital insightful lessons for economists and policy makers in the target countries in combating the corruption pervasiveness.

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In the face of gender: Does competence matter for internal promotion in Social Enterprises? A study in Vietnam

Using Zaccaro’s (2008) four categories of executive attributes, the paper aims to scrutinize potential discrimination in the promotion process under a highly resource-constrained environment of social enterprises. Drawing from four matched paired case studies of social enterprises in Vietnam, research has shown that promotion within a company plays a certain role in motivating employees. Furthermore, research has also identified that the motivation of employees in a social enterprise is formed by two factors: social interests and personal interests. In my findings, for a social enterprise, the competency factor should be the foremost priority. Therefore, instead of categorizing the factors into four groups as in the initial framework, I propose that the SE framework must have the competency factor as a prerequisite, then the other factors will have significance. Additionally, I have found that gender may not affect the promotion in SE, but the leaders' assessments of being "kind-hearted", "good or bad person", or "enthusiastic" have a significant impact. Most of the evaluations regarding the "good or bad" level come from subjective evaluations of business owners, creating opportunities for discrimination based on emotions.

Bribery, Collateral Requirements, Credit Information Sharing, and Institutional Constraints: Evidence from Cross-country Firm-level Data

We investigate the effects of greasing bribery on collateral requirements on loan contracts for firms operating in the country with well-developed credit-information-sharing mechanisms or/and facing institutional constraints by employing the firm-level data, including 109 countries over the 2005-2019 period. Our empirical results provide evidence to advocate the hypothesis that bribery can substitute for collateral, but only for the credit or loan granted by state-owned banks and/or government agencies. Furthermore, firms’ bribery of public officials decreases their probability of being required to pledge collateral more if they operate in a country with a high level of credit information sharing, or they face no institutional constraint. More importantly, better credit information sharing among lenders plays an essential role in mitigating the adverse impacts of institutional constraints on the substitution between bribery and collateral requirements.

The connectedness of Covid-19 Pandemic and Cryptocurrency Markets in Vietnam: A Multivariate and Partial Wavelet Analysis: Covid-19 Pandemic and Cryptocurrency Markets

In 2021, Vietnam experienced its largest outbreak to date that has heavily disrupted Vietnam’s economy. Under this circumstance, investors in Vietnam redirected their assets to safer markets like cryptocurrency. Different major players in this market, such as investors regulators, and other financial actors have different time horizons. By applying innovative multivariate wavelet analysis tools, including partial wavelet coherency and partial wavelet gain, this paper examines the nexus between the prevalence of Covid-19 in Vietnam and the return and liquidity of the four largest cryptocurrencies in the time and frequency dimensions. We find that volatility in the cryptocurrency market leads to an anti-phase relation with the pervasiveness of Covid-19.