South Korea has boasted one of the world's most successful economies since the end of World War II. The South Korean labor market has recovered quickly from the depths of the Asian crisis in 1998, and has since remained surprisingly sound and stable. The unemployment rate has remained relatively...

This study consistently estimates the trade-off between child quantity and quality by exploiting exogenous variation in fertility due to son preferences. Under son preferences, childbearing and fertility timing are determined conditional on the first child's gender. For the sample of South...

This study examines whether people optimally respond to prize incentives for risk taking in tournaments. I exploit the television game show World Poker Tour as a natural experiment. The results show that professional players strategically choose the degree of risk taking depending on the...

We compare two groups of the non-student Korean population - native-born South Koreans (SK) and North Korean refugees (NK) - with contrasting institutional and cultural backgrounds. In our experiment, the subjects play dictator games under three different treatments in which the income source...

We compare the performance of high-ability adolescent girls and boys who participated in a a long-running Korean television quiz show. We find there is a gender gap in performance - in favour of boys - across episodes of the quiz show. To investigate underlying mechanisms that might explain...

Does single motherhood adversely affect infant health? This question is not easy to answer because of the endogeneity of coresidence during pregnancy. In this paper, we exploit quasi-natural variation in single motherhood from the moment of conception to that of birth arising from marriageable...