Youngwoo Song

Education

Ph.D. in Economics (in progress, from Fall 2021), University of California, Santa Cruz

M.A. in Economics (Aug 2021), Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea

B.A. in Economics, Minor in Applied Statistics (Feb 2018), Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea

Research Interests

Development Economics; Applied Microeconomics

Research

• "The Classroom of Babel": Effect of Local Language Instruction on Human Capital in Uganda
  [Abstract] This paper studies whether early exposure to local language instruction improves later human capital outcomes in Uganda. I exploit the 2007 rollout of Uganda's Thematic Curriculum, which introduced local languages as the medium of instruction in lower primary grades, and use birth dates around the January school-entry cutoff to compare adjacent cohorts with different intended exposure to the reform. Because a canonical regression discontinuity around the cutoff confounds policy exposure with relative-age effects and irregularities in recorded birth dates, I instead implement a difference-in-discontinuities design that compares January discontinuities across policy-transition cohorts and placebo cohorts. Using the 2024 Uganda Census, I find patterns consistent with positive effects on later outcomes, with estimates of about 0.72 additional years of schooling, a 5.5 percentage point increase in literacy, and a 1.6 percentage point increase in employment. The paper contributes by providing new evidence on the long-run effects of local language instruction on the extensive margin and by clarifying how birth-date quality and school-entry enforcement shape the interpretation of school-entry-cutoff designs in this setting.