Dongkeun Choi
Thank you for visiting my website! I am a PhD Candidate in Economics at UC San Diego.
My research focuses on macroeconomics, monetary economics, and financial institutions.
I will visit the Federal Reserve Board as a Dissertation Fellow this summer and will be on the job market in 2026–2027.
Curriculum Vitae: CV
Email: dochoi@ucsd.edu
Job Market Paper
Unintended Risks of Bank Capital Regulations
[Abstract] Nonbank financial intermediaries (NBFIs) have reemerged as major credit suppliers in the U.S., with their market share exceeding their pre-Great Recession levels in the mortgage market. Using loan-level mortgage data, I document that NBFI-originated loans are associated with looser underwriting standards and higher default rates than bank-originated loans. I explain these facts by developing a general equilibrium model where banks and NBFIs endogenously choose loan rates and underwriting standards but differ in their funding structures and regulatory exposure. Banks fund their lending with deposits and face capital requirements, while NBFIs rely on market-based funding and operate outside the scope of bank capital regulation. The calibrated model shows that tighter bank capital requirements shift loan origination toward NBFIs and raise aggregate default risk. Counterfactual policy experiments show that underwriting rules applied to NBFI-originated loans reduce credit losses more effectively than tighter bank capital requirements.
[Abstract] The falling relative price of equipment, long viewed as the signature of investment-specific technological change (ISTC), has a countervailing force: rising structures prices. We establish four facts: high-income countries' structures prices rise as equipment prices fall; each investment rate falls with its own price; equipment prices predict income growth more strongly than structures prices; and U.S. structures price rises are broad-based. KLEMS data attribute roughly half the post-1996 rise in construction prices, in the U.S. and abroad, to declining construction TFP. We build a two-capital endogenous growth model with structures in production and R&D. Calibrated to the U.S., structures impose a structural drag of 0.50 percentage points per year, partially offsetting a 1.32 percentage point equipment boost. A nested CES extension finds structures-unskilled substitutability alongside equipment-skilled complementarity. These margins shrink the drag by 20-30% and reveal a novel channel whose omission overstates the 1963-2019 U.S. skill premium rise by 30%.
Selected Work in Progress
Why Is Monetary Policy Less Effective at Low Interest Rates: The Role of Banking Sector Profitability
Redistribution from Safe to Risky Borrowers through the Secondary Mortgage Market