Assistant professor (Lecturer in Australia), School of Banking & Finance, UNSW
Rating on a Behavioral Curve (with Utpal Bhattacharya and Yu Zhang),
-- Journal of Corporate Finance, 102708, 2025
Eye in the Sky: Private Satellites and Government Macro Data (with Abhiroop Mukherjee and George Panayotov ),
-- Journal of Financial Economics 141 (1), 234-254, July 2021
How does uncertainty influence target capital structure? (with Hyun Joong Im and Ya Kang)
-- Journal of Corporate Finance 64, 101642, Oct 2020
The Effect of Technological Imitation on Corporate Innovation: Evidence from US Patent Data (with Hyun Joong Im),
-- Research Policy 48(9), 103802, Nov 2019
Product Market Competition and the Value of Innovation: Evidence from US Patent Data (with Hyun Joong Im and Young Joon Park)
-- Economics Letters 137, 78-82, December 2015
The Echoes of Muted Political Speech in Financial Speech with Utpal Bhattacharya and Tse-Chun Lin
Does impairment of political speech affect financial speech? We exploit the introduction of the National Security Law (NSL) in Hong Kong in June 2020 to answer this question. We find that after the NSL enactment, local analysts self-censor their reports, compared to foreign analysts covering the same firms. Specifically, when firm-specific bad news hits, local analysts shade up their forecasts, use vaguer language, and respond more slowly to earnings announcements. This pattern is especially true for central state-owned enterprises as negative opinions on their poor performance may be deemed unpatriotic. Markets are aware of this self-censorship and respond accordingly.
The poor often delay seeking medical treatment, even when it is free, to avoid losing income due to missed workdays. I use a regression discontinuity design to show that access to credit can remedy this issue. I exploit a setting in Korea in which individuals below a certain income threshold are eligible for cheap credit. My main finding is that such individuals have a 46% lower probability of dying or disability than otherwise similar individuals who are ineligible for cheap credit. This reduction is partly due to the fact that the eligible individuals see a doctor more promptly than the ineligible individuals after the onset of disease symptoms, as reflected in a lower likelihood of emergency room visits. Further, these individuals start treatment on average 62 days earlier following their initial diagnosis. Another major determinant of the decline in mortality and disability is that eligible individuals with chronic diseases are more likely to visit clinics for regular treatment. I explicitly show that such differences in the timeliness of treatment are due to individuals with access to credit being 44% more likely to take time off from work to seek medical care. Overall, access to credit can make a life-or-death difference to the poor even when medical treatment is affordable.
The paper analyzes the effect of credit market frictions on labor mobility. We use a government credit program in Korea that sharply expanded credit access to some individuals but not others. Individuals eligible for credit were 37.5 percent more likely to switch jobs relative to those who were not eligible. The higher switching rates and subsequent wage improvements in response to improved access to credit suggests that credit frictions impede labor mobility. Furthermore, we find that individuals take greater risks when they have more credit; they exhibit a higher propensity to switch to employers in a different industry and move to different occupations at a higher rate.
R&R at npj Science of Learning
Several recent initiatives worldwide have promoted the “growth mindset” as means to improve educational outcomes and thereby develop human capital. However, the effectiveness of this approach is unclear and has remained controversial. The current study contributes to this debate by investigating the extent to which entering university students subscribe to growth mindsets and their performance trajectories during their four-year university careers. A longitudinal analysis of two cohorts involving 915 students, representing 6,918 student-terms and 33,607 student-courses, reveals nuanced relationships between mindsets and performance. Going beyond the dichotomized debate of whether growth mindsets are effective or not, we find that the effects of mindsets (growth or fixed) vary as students progress over time, and also depend on the domain in which outcomes are assessed. Importantly, there was a significant nonlinear association of mindsets with performance, falsifying an untested assumption in the literature. These findings reveal some important yet largely ignored dimensions in the discourse.
Inter-Industry Spillovers of Investment Spikes: Evidence from US Input-Output Tables, with Sudipto Dasgupta (CUHK) and Hyun Joong Im (Seoul)
Robot Taxes and Job Market Outcomes: Evidence from South Korea, with Seongjin Park (UNSW) and Seong Sik Kim (Seoul)
Tax Rates and Debt Financing for Speculative Investments, with Seongjin Park (UNSW) and Mandeep Singh (Sydney)