Research

Publications

“COVID-19 Vaccine Misinformation in Middle Income Countries,” (w. Jongin Kim, Aditya Agrawal, Jiaxi Wu, Veronika J. Wirtz, Traci Hong, Derry Wijaya), In Proceedings of The 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. Link 

"A Cohort Analysis on the Patterns of Birth in South Korea" (w, Wonsik Ko), 여성경제연구, 2019, 16(1), 1-25. Link  

Working Papers

“Son Preference: Childbearing and Asian American Women's Labor Market Outcomes,” May 2024. (submitted)  Link 

This paper attempts to analyze the reduced labor supply of women with children by utilizing an instrumental variable based on the son preference of Asians in the IPUMS USA dataset, along with various supportive evidence for its identification. A couple with son preference would be more likely to proceed to have another child when their first child was a girl, and this preference is used to instrument for the number of children (Choi and Hwang, 2015). IV estimates reveal that having a second or later child negatively affects women’s labor supply, and the magnitude is significantly larger compared to that of OLS estimates, implying that women who are more likely to work choose relatively more often to have their second child. Due to potential heterogeneity in the effect across the compliers and the defiers under my specification, I discuss the severity of the violation of IV monotonicity assumption to ensure the consistency of the estimates. In addition, I provide suggestive evidence for the IV exclusion restriction.

“Comparative Analysis of Social Media Moderation Strategies in Combating COVID-19 Misinformation,” (w. Traci Hong, Nina Mazar, Pujan Paudel, Gianluca Stringhini), May 2024.

“Differential Effect of Premarital Pregnancy on Birth Outcomes,” (w. Sokchul Hong, and Wonsik Ko), Oct 2021. Draft aviailable upon request.

This paper explores how shotgun marriage negatively affects birth outcomes in South Korea and suggest that it is mediated by Confucianism which taboos sexuality and emphasizes sexual chastity. The results show that unplanned premarital conception decreases 9 grams of birthweight and increases 0.09 percentage points of low birthweight probability which takes up about 2.4% of total low birthweight proportion. With the sex ratio at birth of the third child as a proxy of the Confucian culture, our results show that higher sex ratio is associated with worse birth outcomes given shotgun marriage. Exploiting answers for survey questions regarding premarital pregnancies and sexual chastity leads to the same conclusion. Alternative channels such as differential prenatal care, selective abortions, and selection into shotgun marriage cannot fully explain the results.

Research in Progress

“Reassessing the Impact of Parental Absence: Diagnostic Use of Doubly Robust Estimator” May 2024

“How Does Education Affect Financial Planning Horizon?” August 2023.

“How Did Nigerian Twitter Ban Affected Misinformation on Twitter?” December 2023.

“Measuring Temporal Discounting Independently from Measuring Utility,” March 2021.

Teaching

Instructor, Econometric Analysis, Department of Economics, Boston University, Fall 2023

Instructor, Empirical Economic Analysis 2, Department of Economics, Boston University, Fall 2022

Teaching Assistant, Empirical Economic Analysis 2, Department of Economics, Boston University, Spring 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2021 (Zhongjun Qu) Fall 2021 (Jean-Jacques Forneron)

Teaching Assistant, Introductory Microeconomic Analysis, Department of Economics, Boston University, Summer 2021, Fall 2020 (Benjamin Koskinen)