RESEARCH INTERESTS

My research interests is fairly diverse. They cover a number of areas. In what follows, I try to describe the topic I have worked on and those I am either currently working on or are interested to work on in the future.

Industrial Organization

In the late 1990s, my main area of research was the economics of the motion picture industry (Hollywood). Working under the supervision of Professor Arthur De Vany at UC-Irvine, I looked that competition dynamics and the nature of uncertainty in the motion picture industry. Aside from examining the statistical distributions of box office revenues, I undertook computer simulations to uncover the choice and information dynamics that generated such distributions.

Papers:

Economics of Regulation

In the mid-1990s, I was asked by my colleague, Professor G.Naidu, to participate in a research project that was part of the World Bank's World Development Report 1994. The focus of our research was primarily the privatization experience in the Malaysian infrastructure sector. It was not until I completed my PhD and upon returning to Malaysia, that I began looking into regulatory issues in Malaysia again. This began with a paper on regulatory reforms in the telecommunications sector (2000- 2002) and later on tariff issues in the water sector (2006-2008). In 2007, I carried out a survey on the state of regulatory governance in Malaysia.

Papers:

Competition Policy

I got interested in competition policy when I was working on my PhD thesis. One of my thesis chapter critically examined the use of measures of concentration in the motion picture industry. After completeion of my thesis, I was engaged as an advisor on competition policy to the Ministry of Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs . In subsequent years, I have written on a number of papers in this area. One of the early topic that I was interested in was the use of template or model competition laws provided by various agencies e.g. World Bank and UNCTAD. Later, I got interested in the influence of legal traditions on how competition laws are drafted in various countries. My more recent work in this area are primarily surveys of competitoon policy in Malaysia and in the Southeast Asia region.

Papers:

Economics of Innovation

Between 2001-2006, I carried out three three waves of surveys on innovation in the Malaysian Manufacturing sector for MASTIC. I have used some of these data to write a number of empirical papers on the determinants of innovation and more recently, on the relationship between innovation, trade and productivity. My interest is to provide some firm-level econometric analysis on this topic using Malaysian data.

Papers;

Complexity and Computable Economics

I first got interested in complexity theory or theories about complex adaptive systems after reading Michael Waldrop's book in the mid-1990s. This led to my decision to do PhD at UC-Irvine under the supervision of Arthur De Vany. A key influence in this decision as well as in my subsequent research has been Professor K. Vela Velupillai who encouraged and inspired me to follow the literature on computable economics. Over the years, I have writted a few papers on related to complexity and computability.

Papers:

History of Economic Thought, Economic Philosophy and Methodology

I have a long standing interest in economic philosophy and methodology. This interested is related to some extent to my work on complexity and economics. I am also interested in the history of how economics have been mathematized.