TAEHOON KWON
I am an applied microeconomist and a deputy director at the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, Korea.
My research focuses on understanding how economic incentives can motivate people to escape from market failure and improve their quality of life. Especially, I am interested in contributing to achieving United Nations Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. I explore topics of early-life interventions in development, education, health, agriculture, and public policy contexts with non-experimental methods and randomized-controlled trial (RCT). I believe that evidence-based public policy plays a critical role of making the world a sustainable and better place for future generations.
PUBLICATION
"Countermarketing about Fruit Drinks, Alone or With Water Promotion: A 2019 Randomized Controlled Trial in Latinx Parents" with J. Krieger, R. Ruiz, J. Yan, L. Walkinshaw, and C. Roberto, American Journal of Public Health, October 2021.
Fruit drink countermarketing messages, alone or combined with water promotion messages, significantly decreased parental selection of fruit drinks and increased water selection for their children. Countermarketing social media messages may be an effective and low-cost intervention for reducing parents’ fruit drink purchases for their children. This study aimed to test whether fruit drink countermarketing messages alone or combined with water promotion messages reduce Latinx parents’ purchases of fruit drinks for children aged 0 to 5 years. We performed a 3-arm randomized controlled online trial enrolling 1628 Latinx parents in the United States during October and November 2019. We assessed the effect of culturally tailored fruit drink countermarketing messages (fruit drink‒only group), countermarketing and water promotion messages combined (combination group), or car-seat safety messages (control) delivered via Facebook groups for 6 weeks on parental beverage choices from a simulated online store. The proportion of parents choosing fruit drinks decreased by 13.7 percentage points in the fruit drink‒only group (95% confidence interval [CI] = −20.0, −7.4; P < .001) and by 19.2 percentage points in the combination group (95% CI = −25.0, −13.4; P < .001) relative to control. Water selection increased in both groups.
WORKING PAPER
College admissions competition is zero-sum game where students do care about their relative ranking resulting in the overinvestment of resources and an inefficient market outcome as the game participants are facing prisoner's dilemma. Can SAT and GPA grading policy reduce high school students' college prep activities? This paper estimates causal effects of the nationwide education policy in 2005 which introduces coarsening SAT grade structure and more competitive grading of high school GPA in Korea on students’ time allocation behavior in a college admission game. I model a student’s welfare maximization behavior to investigate the policy effects on her college admission preparation activities. Empirical estimation is done by difference-in-differences method using repeated cross-sectional data. The result shows that the policy did not achieve the goal as the SAT taking students reduced leisure by a half hour per day and increased private lessons by 0.8 hour per week and self study by 1.3 hour per day compared to the SAT non takers. Top GPA students respond to the policy more sensitively by decreasing 1 hour of leisure and increasing 1.2 hour of self study because of the heterogeneous marginal productivity and motivation. Changes-in-changes model and propensity score matching for difference-in-differences model estimations also provide robust results.