Hi,
I am an economics PhD candidate at the London School of Economics.
My research focusses on questions in development economics at the intersection with political economy and organizational economics.
My JMP links the implementation of an industrial policy in South Korea between 1962 and 2001 to individual bureaucrats. I find that the policy’s success heavily depends on these bureaucrats.
More broadly, I seek to understand how economic development is affected by the interaction of policies and state capacity.
Does the success of industrial policy depend on bureaucratic capacity? We use novel archival data on South Korean bureaucrats who implement a formally uniform industrial policy. These bureaucrats promote Korean exports on appointments to 87 countries between 1965 and 2001. We exploit the rotation of bureaucrats between offices to show that individual bureaucrats matter greatly in boosting exports. Moving from a bureaucrat at the 20th percentile to the median is associated with a 50-60% increase in exports. This is comparable to the effect of an office opening, implying that export promotion is ineffective under a 20th percentile bureaucrat. Better bureaucrats may increase exports by transmitting information about market conditions. We find that Korean exports react more strongly to import demand under high ability bureaucrats. Finally, isolating quasi-random variation in bureaucrat experience, we find that exports increase in a particular product when the bureaucrat has previous experience with it. The effect of experience is small compared to the differences in bureaucrat effects, suggesting selecting good bureaucrats may be more important than training them.
LSE: 2019-2023 (MSc-level)
LSE Class Teacher Bonus Award, Economics Department - 2020-2023 (based on students’ ratings)
My overall teaching evaluations (out of 5) for recent semesters were 4.6 (Spring 2022), 4.7 (Spring 2021), 4.5 (Fall 2022), 4.7 (Fall 2021), 4.6 (Fall 2020)
LSE: Spring 2022 (MSc- and PhD-level)
LSE: Summer 2018 (BSc-level)
London Business School: Fall 2017 (PhD-level)
Universitat Pompeu Fabra: Spring 2017 (BSc-level)
Universitat Pompeu Fabra: Fall 2016 (PhD-level)