Publication

Working Papers

More Money, More Marriages, and More Babies? Evaluating Policy Impacts on Marriage and Fertility in South Korea

This paper evaluates the effects of a pronatalist policy introduced by local governments in South Korea, a country with one of the lowest fertility rates worldwide. Given marriage is largely a pre-condition to childbearing in South Korea, I address possible selection into marriage, using a policy aimed at promoting marriage as an exclusion restriction. I estimate effects on the decision to have a child and also explore whether the policy affects the time-to-child delivery. For identification, I exploit the rich variation in transfer amounts in the pronatalist policy in South Korea, which is at the district level. This also allows me to estimate fertility responses at different transfer levels. The estimation results suggest that the policy has no substantial effect on the probability of having a child, finding only a statistically significant timing effect: A 1,000 USD baby bonus prompted females to have their first child 8 months earlier. The detailed investigation of the policy effect suggests that a 7,000 USD transfer, about 7 times higher than the average baby bonus for the third child, would not change a woman’s childbirth plans substantially. Yet, marriage promotion programs operated by the upper-level governments show policy effects. The marriage promotion programs increase the marriage probability of women by 2.48% and expedite marriage by about 2.78 months with 1,000 USD. Findings suggest that only marriage decisions, which could be the first step toward childbirth, are modified with the existent pronatalist policy packages in South Korea.

Threat or Empty Threat: Perception toward North Korea's Missile Launch

This paper investigates the effect of North Korea's repeated military provocations on the housing market in South Korea. Especially, the study focuses on the two nuclear weapon tests in 2009 and 2013. The unique feature of this event in the hedonic analysis literature is that it does not change any physical characteristics of houses in the affected areas. Using the difference-in-differences method and the actual acquisition price of real estate from the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport, I find weak evidence of a decline in housing price located near the border by 1.8 to 3.4% after the second provocation in 2009, while the third provocation in 2013 does not show any impact on housing price. Also, the total number of transactions decreased by 2% after the second provocation.

Works in Progress

Gender and Racial Bias in Texts: The Case of RateMyProfessor.com (with Donghwa Bae)