Our study explores whether lifelong learning is associated with the subjective wellbeing among the elderly in Singapore. Through a primary survey of 300 individuals aged 65 and above, we develop a novel index to capture three different aspects of subjective wellbeing, which we term “Quality of Life”, “Satisfaction with Life” and “Psychological Wellbeing”. Utilizing both supervised and unsupervised machine learning techniques, our findings reveal that attitudes towards lifelong learning are positively associated with quality of life, while participation in class activities is positively associated with all three measures of wellbeing. Although the study does not establish causality, it highlights a connection between lifelong learning and the perceived wellbeing of the elderly, offering support for policies that encourage lifelong learning among this population.

Human capital investment, especially in education, is a well-known precursor of economic growth in developing countries. In recent years, there has been a proliferation of microfinance programmes, yet evidence on whether microfinance leads to increased educational investment is tenuous at best. We utilise a large-scale cross-sectional household dataset from Bangladesh and geospatial data to study how microcredit participation and increasing microcredit incomes – that is, the extensive and intensive margins of microcredit – affects the probability of children’s school enrolment. The causal influence of microcredit participation on enrolments was estimated by utilising the propensity score matching (PSM) technique – a quasi-experimental treatment effects model. Whilst microcredit participation, the extensive margin, did not significantly influence the likelihood of school enrolment for boys, it increased girls’ enrolment. Further, microcredit income, the intensive margin, had a stronger influence on girls’ and younger siblings’ enrolment than on boys’ and older siblings’ enrolment. Omission of spatial influences can overstate microcredit influence on enrolment; while not utilising PSM can underestimate the influence of microcredit participation on enrolment. Results suggest policies that focus solely on increasing microcredit participation, without increasing the amount of microcredit incomes accessed by households, may be less effective at improving child education outcomes.

Rapid population expansions in urban areas have significant implications for housing costs, creating challenges for housing affordability. However, estimating the causal effect of population on housing costs is challenging due to various confounding issues, such as unobserved location-specific attributes, measurement error, and the potential bi-directional relationship between population and housing costs. To address them, we adopt a city-level analysis and introduce a novel instrumental variable (IV) that enables us to employ fixed effects IV estimation. Our findings indicate that housing costs tend to increase at a faster rate than population growth. As individuals and households with lower incomes tend to allocate a larger proportion of their earnings to housing expenses, an upward trajectory of housing costs may dramatically widen the inequality in income after housing expenditure.