In South Korea, nearly 40% of the elderly population lives in poverty, one of the highest rates in the developed world. As the country undergoes a rapid demographic transition and the share of older individuals increases, understanding the drivers of old-age poverty becomes increasingly...

Asia presently houses some of the top and dynamic economies in the world. These economies have also experienced high fintech adoption in their banking sectors. This paper examines the impact of fintech adoption and integration on the efficiency and stability of banks in 9 Asian countries, using...

This study empirically investigates how Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) discourses among major Korean Business-to-Business (B2B) corporations (POSCO, LG Chem, and HD Hyundai) were reconfigured in the context of former President Trump's re-election campaign and the 2024 U.S....

This paper examines the gap between what nurses need and what actually gets built, through a three-month ethnographic study at Mirae Hospital (MH) in Seoul, South Korea, combining interviews, ward observations, and participatory design workshops with hospital staff and union nurses. Our findings...

We examine the local effects of South Korea's large-scale place-based industrial policy of constructing industrial complexes in left-behind regions. We compile a novel dataset on industrial complex designations dating back to the 1960s and link it to administrative establishment surveys. Using a...

Germany is facing a security policy Zeitenwende whose industrial dimension has not yet been sufficiently addressed. The war in Ukraine, rising military threats in Europe, and the long-term underfunding of the German Armed Forces have exposed the limits of existing defence industrial capacity,...

The Value of Lost Load (VoLL) is a key metric in electricity system planning and market design, informing reliability assessments, scarcity pricing, and capacity remuneration mechanisms. This study conducts a comprehensive review of VoLL estimation methods and identifies the most appropriate...

In an era of fragmented global production and domestic decentralization, middle-income countries confront the complex challenge of industrial upgrading. While national governments remain central to industrial policy design and funding, upgrading unfolds through multi-level interactions between...

Central Asia has emerged as a key region where the convergence of geopolitics and development cooperation is most visible. Major powers are redefining their approaches: Japan combines official development assistance (ODA) with commercial partnerships to advance connectivity and reform; the EU is...

Germany is facing a security policy Zeitenwende whose industrial dimension has not yet been sufficiently addressed. The war in Ukraine, rising military threats in Europe, and the long-term underfunding of the German Armed Forces have exposed the limits of existing defence industrial capacity,...

We examine the local effects of South Korea's large-scale place-based industrial policy of constructing industrial complexes in left-behind regions. We compile a novel dataset on industrial complex designations dating back to the 1960s and link it to administrative establishment surveys. Using a...

South Korea's social protection system has undergone a profound transformation from a developmental welfare state, in which social protection policies were subordinated to the economic development goal, to a universal welfare state. This study traces this trajectory by examining six key...

The impact of sudden asylum seeker inflows on host residents' mental health is largely unexplored. The present study addresses this research gap and provides the first causal evidence from the non-Western context by exploiting the unexpected influx of Yemeni asylum seekers to Jeju Island, South...

Objective: The study aims to evaluate the internal validity of a scale measuring cultural traits in relation to Hofstede's framework and to identify the individual cultural characteristics of young people across three countries: Poland, South Korea, and the United States. Research Design &...

This paper investigates the impact of South Korea's rapid robotization, driven by the country's proactive robotization policies, on subjective well-being using individual and householdlevel panel data. We measure individual exposure to robotization by estimating the probability that individuals...

The speed of both the rise and fall of US inflation in 2021–23 took many economists by surprise. This paper shows that the rise of COVID era inflation reflects three independent shocks: a plethora of pandemic-related shifts in demand patterns and supply disruptions; the largest commodity price...

The Korean economy has remained resilient against multiple shocks. Economic growth has recovered, inflation has steadily declined, and financial stability risks have decreased. However, downside risks have increased amid high uncertainty from policy shifts in major trading partners and recent...

We estimate natural-disaster impacts on children's school enrollments and math skills and test for impact heterogeneities with respect to age and gender in seven countries in Asia and the Pacific, which is the world's most disaster-prone region. We link survey data on children aged 5 to 17 to...

Driven by both political camps in Seoul, relations between South Korea and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) have deepened significantly since their initiation in 2005. While this intensified relationship was shaped to a large extent by geopolitical developments and increasing...

This study examines changes in sales by business category and area in Korea's small commercial districts. Unlike previous studies that focused primarily on overall sales levels before and after the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper emphasizes temporal variations in the inequality of sales...

In this paper, we analyze the impact of external uncertainty shocks on the Korean economy, focusing on Russian geopolitical risks and U.S. monetary policy uncertainty. We find that increases in external uncertainties negatively affect the Korean macroeconomy, with a particularly pronounced...

This study investigates whether cryptocurrency investments have a distinct impact on corporate liquidity depending on when they are held and the stage of a firm's life cycle at the time of holding, using a sample of Korean companies. The empirical findings first show that cryptocurrency...

Economic inequality remains a persistent and widely studied issue in the social sciences. South Korea provides a striking example where the top 23 business groups, controlled by ultra-wealthy, family-owned conglomerates (chaebols), have maintained significant economic persistence and resisted...

While FTA negotiations are proliferating, our paper shows that targeting the appropriate sector is crucial for generating employment opportunities subsequent to FTA. In particular, we show that, countering conventional wisdom, targeting skill-biased exports and not the sector that employs...

This study aims to understand how InsurTech has developed in Korea. To achieve this, we collected InsurTech-related news articles published in the Korean media over the past eight years. Using a relatedness analysis based on the TopicRank algorithm, a text mining technique, we extracted the top...