Applying for the Job Market in 2025-2026,

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Economics at University of Southern California (USC).

My job market paper aims to evaluate the economic effect of the Basic Pension program of South Korea on its beneficiaries. The study applies econometric approaches to address not the most ideal conditions for causal inference.

Another statistical method to deal with the situation in which the ideal conditions for causal inference are not satisfied is also studied in the second chapter of my dissertation. The method of sub-sampling is the key of this study.

The last chapter of my dissertation is about developing the strategic network formation model of Graham (2016) to include the nodal centrality in the model. The proposed model can be applied to the panel data of social networks clarifying which factor most affects the networking decision among the state dependence of connections, the transitivity, and the centrality of nodes in the networks.

My Story as a Ph.D. Student

I was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea. When I was accepted to the Economics Ph.D. program of USC, I was so delighted for the great support of the university and for the fact that I could study abroad with Korean cultures nearby. Although I had never been abroad, I thought that everything would be fine. However, my life as a Ph.D. student has been a bundle of struggles, pressures, and deeep depression. There were shining stars near me, but I thought that I was always in the shadow where the light didn't come through. "How can I contribute to enlarging the frontier of human knowledge like them?" I'm not completely free from that pressure now, but I finally found what my best weapon to fight against the dark thoughts was. Steadiness & Resourcefulness. Maybe it could be uneasy for me to create something marvelous. But standing on the shoulders of giants, I think that I'm good at applying what we know and what we have to solve a problem. If you hire me, I might not be able to show you the best performance in a short time. However, you won't be disappointed because I will be able to solve the problems we have finally.

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