Government reviewing study alleging civil servants 'disproportionately' bought homes near unannounced MRT stations

SINGAPORE: The Public Service Division (PSD) said on Monday (Sep 14) that it was reviewing information after a working paper by a US-based research organisation reported that civil servants disproportionately purchased homes near planned but not yet publicly announced MRT stations.

In response to media queries, PSD said that it was “aware of an academic working paper comparing home purchase rates near planned MRT stations”.

The paper reported that “civil servants, as classified by the authors, disproportionately purchased homes near planned but not yet publicly announced MRT stations”, PSD said.

“We take any integrity concerns extremely seriously. We are currently reviewing the data and methodology within the paper and will refer to CPIB if there is a material basis to do so.”

The working paper was published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and titled "Do Social Norms Substitute for Enforcement? Evidence from Public Officials' Home Purchases in Singapore".

“NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications,” according to the first page of the paper.

The paper was authored by Tomasz Piskorski from Columbia University, Jian Zhang from the University of Hong Kong, Amit Seru from Stanford University and Chun Zhao from Stanford University.

NBER is a Massachusetts-based private, nonprofit research organisation that conducts analyses on major economic issues, according to its website.