Research

Working Papers

• Evaluating the Impact of South Korea’s SME Support Policies Using the Economic Shock of Covid-19 with Seunghoon Lee (submitted) [Draft]
  Abstract

  This study evaluates the impact of South Korea’s small and medium enterprise (SME) support policies on firm survival and performance by leveraging the exogenous shock of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using administrative data from the SMEs Integrated Management System (SIMS), we analyze the effectiveness of various SME support programs, including technology, human resources, export, domestic sales, startup, and management support. To address endogeneity, we exploit the natural experiment created by COVID-19; to mitigate selection bias, we restrict the sample to firms that received financial support in 2019 and examine how the timing of support (across 2019 quarters) affects outcomes. If firms receiving support closer to the pandemic show greater improvements, this suggests a policy effect rather than selection bias. Our results indicate that technology and domestic sales support are significantly associated with higher employment, revenue, and firm survival. We also examine complementarity and substitutability among support policies, finding significant interactions for certain combinations.

• Dutch Disease or Dutch Blessing? Resource Booms and Educational Decisions (solo-authored) (Draft available soon)
  Abstract

  This study investigates the impact of the shale gas boom on regional income and education. As opposed to the common fear of the Dutch Disease that resource booms extract resources from other sectors and deter education investments and related research literature that supports this view, we find that the shale gas boom had a positive impact on overall well-being in the subject regions, particularly on lower-income households. Based on a staggered difference-in-differences framework, we find that the shale gas boom has led to an approximately x%p increase in household income and x%p increase in the college enrollment rate in the households of the first quantile income in shale gas boom regions after three years of exposure to the shale gas boom. We also employ machine learning methods(XBART, causal forests, and matrix completion) to identify the heterogeneous effects of the shale gas boom on education and income in a data-driven manner and to cope with potential misspecification in the difference-in-differences framework. Our results show that the shale gas boom had a positive impact on education and income for lower-income households, but not for higher-income households. These results buttress our argument that the shale gas boom did not lead to the Dutch Disease in terms of education; rather, it alleviated social economic inequality and further replenished the college education opportunities for lower-income households.