Research Interests
Primary: Urban and Regional Economics, Housing Economics
Secondary: Public Economics, Computational Economics
Publications
Internal Structure of Consumer Cities: Core and Subcenters, Journal of Regional Science (2022)
Market Access Approach to Urban Growth, KDI Journal of Economic Policy (2020)
Working Paper
The Migration Effect of a Large-scale Public Sector Relocation Program: Evidence from South Korea’s Innovation City Project (with Jongkwan Lee)
During the 2010s, South Korea implemented one of the largest public sector relocation programs in history, the Innovation City Project (ICP), to relieve the economic concentration in the Seoul Metropoli tan Area (SMA). Using the synthetic difference-in-differences method, we examine whether this program achieved its policy goal of fostering the movement of people from SMA to selected cities outside SMA. The program resulted in a significant net in-migration for work-related reasons but only a modest inflow for non-work-related reasons, reflecting the limited improvements in local amenities. Furthermore, the in migration effect is highly localized, with approximately half of the effect driven by migration from nearby cities within local labor markets rather than from the SMA. Consistent with these findings, we observed little impact on local wages and housing prices. Our heterogeneity analysis, along with counterfactual simulations, suggests that the program could have been more effective if the relocation had been concen trated in a smaller number of non-SMA regions with larger populations.
Optimal Policy for Multimodal Roads: Bus Service, Congestion Pricing and Road Capacity Allocation (with Alex Anas)
We combine the flow model of congestion with the trinomial logit model of modal choice among driving, riding a bus and walking. We show an unnoticed property that reducing bus waiting time can increase road congestion on roads when a pedestrian market share is large as it is in megacities of many developing nations. We then use the model to simultaneously examine the first-best optimal public policies. How should car congestion tolls and bus fares be set? How bus waiting time and crowding-in-the-bus are optimally determined? How should the capacity of a road be allocated? Under what conditions should road capacity be shared by cars and buses, and when should it be segregated into portions dedicated to each mode?
An Economic Analysis of Mobility Service: Modeled from Taxi Demand (with Gong Lee)
Price Spillover Effects in Housing Market: Reconstruction of Apartment