The Public Service Division (PSD) is reviewing an academic paper alleging that Singapore civil servants disproportionately bought homes near planned MRT stations before the locations of those stations were made public.
PSD said on Monday, 14 September, that it was examining the paper’s data and methodology.
The division stressed that it takes integrity concerns seriously and said the matter would be referred to the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau (CPIB) if its review finds a material basis for doing so.
At this stage, the Government has not said that wrongdoing occurred.
Study Compared Civil Servants With Similar Non-Civil Servants
The September 2026 working paper is titled “Do Social Norms Substitute for Enforcement? Evidence from Public Officials’ Home Purchases in Singapore”.
It was written by Tomasz Piskorski of Columbia University, Amit Seru and Chun Zhao of Stanford University, and Jian Zhang of the University of Hong Kong.
The researchers used private-property transaction records from Singapore legal filings and linked buyers to information from the Singapore Government Directory Interactive, or SGDI, to identify people whom they classified as civil servants.
They then examined purchases of homes near planned MRT stations before the locations of those stations were publicly announced.
According to the paper, the rate of purchases near these planned stations was higher among civil servants than among a comparison group of non-civil servants with similar demographic characteristics and housing behaviour.
The researchers said the difference was particularly evident one to two years before the MRT station announcements.
Importantly, this is a statistical finding made by the paper’s authors. It does not establish that any individual civil servant used confidential information to buy a property.
Paper Says Pattern Was Stronger Among Certain Officials
The authors also reported that the pattern was more concentrated among people whom they classified as mid-level officials and among officials working in agencies connected with rail planning.
They argued that this was consistent with greater access to information about future station locations.
The study also compared civil servants with real estate agents and corporate board members. According to the researchers, those groups did not show a similar increase in purchases near planned MRT stations before the stations were announced.
The paper additionally reported a similar pattern involving relatives of civil servants, which the authors interpreted as potentially consistent with information being shared.
These remain the researchers’ interpretations of their data rather than findings by PSD or CPIB.
Paper Has Not Been Peer-Reviewed
The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a US-based non-profit research organisation, published the study as a working paper in September 2026.
NBER states that its working papers are circulated so researchers can discuss and comment on them. They have not undergone peer review or the review by NBER’s board of directors that accompanies its official publications.
Peer review generally involves other experts examining a study’s methodology, analysis and conclusions before formal academic publication.
PSD has not announced the outcome of its review or said whether the matter will ultimately be referred to CPIB.
