This study examines the effects of timing of exposure to the 1997–1998 Asian financial crisis on higher education and early labor market outcomes. We estimate an extended difference-in-differences model using variation in age at exposure and regional severity of the recession in South Korea. Using data from the Census and twenty waves of the Youth Panel, we find that individuals from regions more severely affected by the recession are less likely to attend and graduate from a four-year college and tend to shift away from humanities majors to STEM majors. We also find that the quality of the first job, as measured by wage, firm size, and white-collar status, deteriorates for those who grew up in regions hard-hit by the crisis. These effects are more pronounced for individuals who were younger (below age 13) at the time of the recession. We provide suggestive evidence that the adverse recession effects are driven by non-monetary and broader neighborhood factors, rather than household credit constraints.

This study examines the effect of internet job search (IJS) on job-finding rates among unemployed job seekers during the rapid expansion of the internet from the mid-1990s to the early 2010s. To address endogenous selection into IJS, I use an instrumental variables (IV) strategy exploiting the rise of IJS within occupations over time, which varied across occupations depending on pre-internet exposure to computers at work. The analysis sample includes unemployed workers from the December 1998, August 2000, September 2001, October 2003, and July 2011 Current Population Survey (CPS) Computer and Internet Use Supplements and the September 1992 Basic Monthly CPS, longitudinally matched with their employment outcomes from the subsequent monthly CPS files. The IV estimates indicate that IJS increased the 15-month job-finding rate by 12.9 percentage points (25.1% relative to the mean). Results from placebo exercises and various specification checks support a causal interpretation of the estimated effects. Additionally, the effectiveness of IJS remained stable over time throughout the analysis period.

Sex ratio at birth remains highly skewed in many Asian countries because of son preference. The ratio in South Korea, however, declined beginning in 1990 and reached the natural range in 2007. We study changes in child gender effects on fertility and parental investment during this period of decreasing sex ratio at birth. We find that gender discrimination on the extensive margin (fertility), such as sex-selective abortions and son-biased stopping rules, have nearly disappeared among recent cohorts. On the intensive margin (parental inputs), boys receive higher expenditures on private academic education, have mothers with fewer hours of labor supply, and spend less time on household chores relative to girls. These gender gaps have also narrowed substantially, however, over the past two decades. We consider alternative explanations, but altogether, evidence suggests the weakening of son preference in South Korea.

This study investigates the long-term effects of initial labor market conditions by comparing cohorts who graduated from college before, during, and after the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis in South Korea. We measure the overall welfare effect by examining their labor market activities, family formation, and household finances. Using data from 20 waves of the Korean Labor and Income Panel Study, we find a substantial and persistent reduction in employment, earnings, marriage, fertility, and asset building among men who graduated during the recession. For women, limited job opportunities at graduation resulted in an increase in childbearing. We also find evidence that family provides a risk-sharing mechanism for recession graduates. Our results suggest that labor market entry in a large-scale recession has prolonged effects on a young worker's life course even after the penalties in the labor market have disappeared.

This paper assesses the ability of a structural labor supply model to predict the impacts of a welfare policy change by studying two state welfare reform experiments conducted in Minnesota (MN) and Vermont (VT) during the mid-1990s. I estimate and evaluate a static discrete choice model of labor supply and welfare participation that incorporates heterogeneity in preferences, fixed costs of work, and disutility associated with welfare take-up. Although this type of labor supply models has been commonly estimated and applied to welfare and tax policy simulations, there have been very few attempts to verify the predictive ability of the existing models. I use the experimental impacts of the welfare policy change in each state as a benchmark for the structural model’s predictions. This approach is similar in spirit to LaLonde (1986). The utility parameters of the model are estimated using data from the MN control group. First, based on the parameter estimates, I make predictions regarding labor supply, welfare participation, and government costs under the treatment group program in MN and compare them with the observed effects of the MN experiment. Next, I apply the parameter estimates to the VT control group and compare the predicted and observed impacts of the policy change in VT. The results show that the model fits the estimation sample very well, but is unable to replicate the observed treatment effects on labor supply and welfare participation outcomes of the two experiments. Consequently, the effect on net government costs is under-predicted by 31 to 93 percent in MN. The prediction biases are even larger for the VT sample.

This study proposes an econometric framework to consistently estimate the average partial effects (APE) of school inputs on academic achievement when students are randomly assigned to schools within each school district but endogenously sort across school districts. We illustrate our method by estimating the APE of single-sex schooling and class size on standardized test scores using data from Seoul, Korea in the period of 2008-2009. Our APE estimates are smaller than the estimates from conventional linear regressions with school district fixed effects, which do not fully correct for endogenous district choice and thus suffer from selection bias.

Sex ratio at birth remains highly skewed in many Asian countries due to son preference. The ratio in South Korea, however, has declined from 1990 and reached the natural range in 2007. This paper studies over-time changes in child gender effects on parental behaviors during the period of decreasing sex ratio at birth in Korea. Following Dahl and Moretti (2008), our empirical strategy exploits randomness of the first child’s sex to overcome potential bias from endogenous fertility decisions. We find that child gender discrimination on the “intensive” margin (parental inputs) is diminishing after discrimination on the “extensive” margin (fertility) has disappeared. Relative to girls, boys receive higher expenditures on academic private education, have mothers with fewer hours of labor supply, and spend less time on household chores. These gender gaps have narrowed down substantially, however, over the past two decades. No gender difference is observed in breastfeeding duration. We consider alternative explanations, but altogether, evidence suggests the existence, and weakening of, son preference in Korea.

We investigate how the selection of offspring gender in the presence of son preference affects the parental investments in girls and boys in South Korea. To identify the magnitude of parental son preference, we exploit two types of variations in the extent of sex selections, namely, (1) the provincial variations in the sex ratio at birth that result from regional differences in cultural norms and religious beliefs, and (2) the temporary increase in the sex ratio at birth in 1990 (the year of the White Horse), which has been driven by zodiacal preference. We conduct triple difference estimations to examine how the gender differences in parental investment in the health and education of children change across regions and cohorts. We find that the relative parental investments in girls in the forms of prenatal care, breast feeding and private out-of-school education are significantly larger for cohorts born in 1990 and that the effect of the year of the White Horse is more strongly observed in regions with higher sex ratios at birth. A higher prevalence of sex-selective abortions led to greater parental investments in girls than in boys. The rise of sex-selective abortions in Korea from the early 1980s to the early 2000s unintendedly improved the human capital development of females who were selectively born to parents with weaker bias against daughters. 1 We benefited from helpful comments and suggestions of Eleanor Jawon Choi, Ryuichi Tanaka and participants of the 2014 SNU–Tokyo University Joint Conference, the 2015 APEBH Conference, and the 2015 Korean Allied Economics Conference.

Sex ratio at birth remains highly skewed in Asian countries due to son preference. In South Korea, however, it has declined to the natural ratio. In this paper, we investigate whether son preference has disappeared in Korea by analyzing parents' time and monetary inputs by the sex of their child. We exploit randomness of the first child's sex to overcome potential bias from endogenous fertility decisions. Our findings show that mothers are more likely to work after having a girl, girls spend twice as much time as boys in housework activities, and parents spend more on private education for boys.

This paper estimates the average partial eects (APEs) of single-sex schooling and school resources on academic achievement exploiting the unique student assignment mechanism in Seoul, Korea. Middle school graduates were randomly assigned to high schools within each school district in Seoul until 2009. Exploiting the within-district random student assignments, we derive a school-level education production function by aggregating individual potential outcomes. We propose a two-step method to estimate the school-level education production function and the APEs of school inputs. The coecient estimates in the education production function considerably dier across school districts, which implies that there may be a substantial degree of endogenous sorting and treatment heterogeneity. The APE estimates show that single-sex schools have a large positive eect on male students’ academic performance whereas the eect is much smaller for female students. The eect of school resources is positive but nearly zero for both male and female students. We also show that the APEs of school inputs can be inconsistently estimated when endogenous district choice and heterogeneous treatment eects

This paper estimates an education production function using data on the College Scholastic Ability Test score and high school characteristics from Seoul, Korea, where, on entering high school, students are randomly assigned to schools within each school district. We derive a school production function by aggregating the individuals' potential outcomes under the random assignment and no cohort effect assumption. We find that the school production function coefficients differ between districts and that the single-sex school effect estimate is much larger than that found in previous studies.

Although the average size of establishments rose through the expansionary years of the 1990s, it has fallen during each year of the first decade of the 2000s; a primary explanation is that new establishments are starting and staying smaller