International tax evasion is a major source of discontent for tax authorities. State purchases of bank data on suspected tax evaders from international tax havens constitute one tool to combat such tax evasion. Increasing the risks of detection, such purchases may spur voluntary disclosures for fear of facing charges for tax fraud. Tax authorities in Germany have made repeated use of this tool in recent years, above all in North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany's most populous federal state. Using self-compiled data for North-Rhine Westphalia on the timing and content of data acquisitions and on monthly voluntary disclosures of international tax evasion involving Swiss banks, we study the effects that such acquisitions had on the evolution of voluntary disclosures over time. Our results show that purchases of data on potential tax evaders had a positive and sizeable effect on voluntary disclosures. Various robustness checks and additional explorations corroborate this conclusion.'

Smartphones enable both easy reservations of motel accommodations and carefree searches for sexual partners. This study investigates the relationship between smartphone use, motel spending, and the prevalence of sexually transmitted infections in South Korea. Monthly data (N = 72) from December 2017 to November 2023 were analyzed, combining information on diagnosed sexually transmitted infection cases from the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency, smartphone users from the Korean Statistical Information Service, and motel credit and debit card spending from the Korea Tour Data Lab. Using a vector error correction model from time series analysis, the results show that smartphone use Granger causes both higher motel spending and higher incidences of sexually transmitted infections. The latter effect is particularly pronounced in cases of condyloma, suggesting that smartphone use may disproportionately impact the gay community, as condylomas are more common among men who have sex with men. In addition to the effect of smartphone use, motel spending is found to Granger cause a higher incidence of sexually transmitted infections. The evidence thus indicates a direct and indirect influence of smartphone use on the spread of sexually transmitted infections. These findings highlight the complex relationship between technology adoption, behavioral patterns, and public health concerns, and underscore the need for targeted interventions and awareness campaigns to mitigate potential adverse effects associated with smartphone-driven behavior.

Purpose: We determine the impact of the increased risk of war resulting from the inter-Korean tensions of 2016, which culminated in two nuclear tests by North Korea, on the health of South Korean adolescents. Our health indicators are mental symptoms of depression and aggression, but also physical symptoms such as headaches and fever. Method: We use representative data from the Korean Children and Youth Panel Survey (KCYPS) for the Seoul Capital Area in 2014, 2015 and 2016 (N = 1745). In our regression analysis, we apply a difference-in-differences approach and use adolescents living near the border with North Korea in 2016 as the treatment group. Results: We find that adolescents residing in the border regions with North Korea during the crisis year 2016 had 3.67 percent more depressive and 5.52 percent more aggressive symptoms, but also more physical problems such as headaches (6.82 percent) and fever (5.44 percent), findings that are more pronounced for females. Discussion: We call on policymakers to keep the health of adolescents, especially young women, in mind during times of crisis. Schools in geopolitically tense areas can help build resilience.

The sinking of the South Korean ferry Sewol in April 2014 claimed a total of 304 lives. Among the victims were 250 students from Dan-won High School in the city of Ansan and 11 of their teachers. For the residents of Ansan, the tragedy marked the beginning of widespread psychological distress and overwhelming grief. Exploiting the disaster's quasi-experimental nature, we employ a difference-in-differences (DID) strategy to measure its impact on the academic performance of Ansan's high school students in 5 major subjects. Using peers from Ansan's neighboring cities as the control group, our results reveal that the disaster impaired performances particularly in mathematics and natural science, a finding that is more pronounced for female students. Our results highlight that it is of uttermost importance to provide comprehensive psychological support and interventions to traumatized students but also to the communities they live in to minimize adverse effects on educational attainment.

In June 2002, South Korea cohosted the 17th FIFA World Cup. Unexpected wins carried the Korean National Football Team to the semi-finals and sparked an unprecedented euphoria among Koreans. Die-hard fans and occasional football viewers, young and old, women and men flocked the streets side by side, cheered for their team, and partied through the nights. In the subsequent spring of 2003, the country experienced a temporary and significant increase in its fertility rate. Using a difference-in-differences design, we exploit the quasi-experimental nature of this episode to investigate the Beckerian trade-off between the quantity and quality of children born to parents in South Korea. Our results support the notion of an adverse effect on child quality. Students born approximately ten months after the World Cup tend to perform significantly worse in school. Moreover, our results uncover a hitherto overlooked aspect: the same students exhibit significantly higher degrees of mental wellbeing.

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Almost all South Korean men serve in the country's armed forces for two years. In this paper, we investigate whether the military service affects the health of draftees. Using an event study design, we use the conscription years to identify the effect the military service has on soldiers' physical health as well as on their smoking and drinking behavior. Our results show that the compulsory military service has a strong and long-lasting negative effect on physical health. Moreover, people who are drafted into the armed forces are more likely to consume more alcohol and cigarettes even years after they are discharged. Our results are of great interest to decision-makers weighing the pros and cons of conscription armies: mandatory military service adversely affects the male labor force and exacerbates drinking and smoking behavior.

In this paper, Newton's Theorem is used to derive a formula for the fractional moment of the binomial distribution. The formula is general enough to handle a continuous number of draws and thereby facilitates the analysis of representative agent models where discrete quantities are typically reflected by continuous variables. An application of the formula illustrates that it is easily implemented and can be quickly calculated using standard mathematical software.

In spring 2015, the South Korean province of South Gyeongsang stopped providing free school lunches to primary and secondary school students while large portions of schools in other provinces continued to provide free lunches at school. After the provincial government faced strong opposition, South Gyeongsang reintroduced the free-school-lunch program the very next year. Using a difference-in-differences design, we exploit these policy changes to evaluate their impact on students' body mass index (BMI) and on a measure related to students' mental health status (MH). Our results show that the abolishment of free school lunches harmed (female) underweight students by causing additional weight losses of about 4.5 percent whereas the reintroduction of free school lunches led to an average weight loss of 2.1 percent among overweight students (both male and female). Moreover, the school lunch policy changes had significant impacts on our MH measure: crying without any reason increased when the free-school-lunch policy was abolished and it decreased when the policy was reintroduced. The results are of great interest to decision makers: introducing free school lunches helps to achieve healthier weights and decreases crying without any reason and as a result, benefits student welfare. Free-school-lunch policies, therefore, may provide simple and inexpensive means to improve the health and welfare of students.

Using PISA 2018 data from nearly half a million 15-year-olds across 72 middle- and high-income countries, this study investigates the relationship between economic development and adolescent subjective well-being. Findings indicate a negative log-linear relationship between per-capita GDP and adolescent life satisfaction. The negative nexus stands in stark contrast to the otherwise positive relationship found between GDP per capita and adult life satisfaction for the same countries. Results are robust to various model specifications and both macro and micro approaches. Moreover, our analysis suggests that this apparent paradox can largely be attributed to higher learning intensity in advanced countries. Effects are found to be more pronounced for girls than for boys.

An elementary school student's relative age is defined as the child's age relative to the age of its classmates. To what extent relative age gaps influence academic outcomes is an ongoing debate in educational economics and related fields. Our study analyzes the existence, magnitude, and duration of relative age effects in South Korea for various school subjects. Our results show that relative age effects are stronger for science related subjects and that they disappear after students graduate from elementary school and start their secondary school education.

Using a rich longitudinal data set of married couples from the Korean Labor and Income Panel Study, this article seeks to uncover the intramarital allocation of experienced utility and its drivers. We find both substantial gains from marriage and effects of relative predicted earnings outside of marriage on relative gains from marriage. These findings are consistent with cooperative bargaining models and with models viewing individuals as having a demand for household production services by a spouse, with market forces influencing the price of such services. In addition, we find that men benefit more from marriage than women and that this gender gap is more pronounced for older couples. This is likely to be due to social norms and prescribed gender roles which are more prevalent within the older generation.

Jensen’s inequality can be tightened in the context of discrete random variables. The suggested new inequality coincides with Jensen’s inequality only when the expected value of the random variable is an integer, in all other cases the inequality is tighter than Jensen’s. This improvement is used to derive a welfare result in the context of a mating market where male agents are exposed to paternal uncertainty. It is shown that social welfare is highest when paternity is certain, a result that cannot be obtained when relying on Jensen’s inequality.

In belligerent countries, male-to-female sex ratios at birth increased during and shortly after the two world wars. These rises occurred amidst dramatically changed marriage-market conditions caused by war-related declines in adult sex ratios, and still defy explanation. Based on county-level census data for the German state of Bavaria in the years just before and immediately after World War II, we explore the reduced-form relationship between changes in marriage-market tightness (the adult sex ratio) and changes in the offspring sex ratio, and we discuss potential mechanisms that might link the two. Our results suggest that war-induced shortfalls of men significantly increased the percentage of boys among newborns.

In a stylised Robinson Crusoe economy, we illustrate basic dynamic programing techniques. In a first step, we define state-like and control-like variables. In a second step, we introduce the value-function-like function. While the former step reduces the number of variables that have to be considered when solving the model, the latter step reduces the dimensionality of the Bellman equation associated with the optimisation problem. The model's solution is shown to be saddle-path stable, such that the phase diagram associated with the Bellman equation has two solution branches. The simplicity of our model allows us to state both the stable and the unstable branch explicitly. We also explain the usefulness of logarithmic preferences when studying the continuous-time Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation. In this case, the utility maximisation problem can be transformed into an initial value problem for an ordinary differential equation.

Based on county-level census data for the German state of Bavaria in 1939 and 1946, we use World War II as a natural experiment to study the effects of sex ratio changes on out-of-wedlock fertility. Our findings show that war-induced shortfalls of men to women significantly increased the nonmarital fertility ratio at mid century, a result that proves robust to the use of alternative sex ratio definitions, post-war measures of fertility, and estimation samples. The magnitude of this increase furthermore appears to depend on the future marriage market prospects that women at the time could expect to face in the not-too-distant future. We find the positive effect on the nonmarital fertility ratio of a decline in the sex ratio to be strongly attenuated by the magnitude of county- level shares of prisoners of war. Unlike military casualties and soldiers missing in action, prisoners of war had a sizeable positive probability of returning home from the war. Both current marriage market conditions, therefore, and foreseeable improvements in the future marriage market prospects of women appear to have influenced fertility behavior in the immediate aftermath of World War II.

Women can bear own children or adopt them. Extending economic theories of fertility, we provide a first theoretical treatment of the demand for adoption. We show that the propensity to adopt a child increases in the degree of own altruism, infertility, relatedness to the child, costs of own child birth, and any adoption-specific monetary return that is received net of the costs of adopting the child. Our model makes several testable predictions which receive empirical support. These include a higher propensity to adopt among infertile adults, relatives, women with high earnings potential, and celebrities.

We introduce a simple method for computing value functions. The method is demonstrated by solving for transitional dynamics in the Uzawa and Lucas endogenous growth model. We use the value function approach to solve both the social planner’s optimization problem in the centralized economy and the representative agent’s optimization problem in the decentralized economy. The complexity of the Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman equations is significantly reduced to an initial value problem for one ordinary differential equation. This approach allows us to find the optimal controls for the non-concave Hamiltonian in the centralized case and to identify the symmetric equilibrium in the decentralized case.

The institution of marriage is both old and ubiquitous. Yet, little work has been done by economists on why this social institution exists and why throughout history it has been intimately linked to fertility. We explain the institution of marriage as a societal consensus on the need to curb cuckoldry for the purpose of paternity certainty and biparental investment in offspring. By raising the costs of mating to individuals, marriage reduces cheating in society, a source of mating market failure, and makes paternity more certain. Men, in consequence, invest more in their putative offspring, a fact that also benefits mothers.