Market Access Approach to Urban Growth / Yoon Sang Moon

This paper studies urban growth in Korean cities. First, I document that population growth patterns change over time and that the current population distribution supports random urban growth. I confirm two empirical laws—Zipf’s law and Gibrat’s law—both of which hold in the period of 1995-2015, but do not hold in the earlier period of 1975-1995. Second, I find a systematic employment growth pattern of Korean cities in spite of the random population growth. I examine market access effects on employment growth. Market access, a geographical advantage, has a significant influence on urban employment growth. The market access effect is higher in the Seoul metropolitan area than in the rest of the country. This effect is stronger on employment growth in the manufacturing industry compared to employment growth in the service industry. These results are robust with various checks (e.g., different definitions of urban areas). The results here suggest that policymakers should consider geographical characteristics when they make policy decisions with respect to regional development.

Do Patents Lead to an Increase in Firm Value? Evidence from Korea / Jangwook Lee

Patents are widely used in the literature as a measure of firm-level innovation. It is regarded that patents improve a firm’s operational environment and ultimately increase the value of the firm. However, the relationship between patents and firm value in Korea is under-explored in the literature due to the difficulty of constructing datasets. This paper examines whether patents in Korea increase the market value of a firm. To do this, I exploit novel data on firm-level patents and financial information of all listed Korean companies during the period of 1993-2015 and estimate the non-linear production-function type of Tobin’s q equations on R&D, patents, and citations. Surprisingly, I find that patents and citations are weakly associated with firm value, while R&D is strongly associated with an increase in firm value. These results direct imply that policymakers in Korea should enhance patenting incentives to encourage firms to innovate.

Disability and Occupational Labor Transitions:Evidence from South Korea / Serena Rhee

We examine how certain occupational physical requirements affect labor transitions of disabled workers by exploiting a unique feature of South Korean Disability Insurance (DI), where award rules are based solely on an applicant’s medical condition, independent of his previous occupations. We estimate the labor market response to a health shock by constructing a physical intensity measure from O*NET and applying it to longitudinal South Korean household panel data. Our results suggest that health shocks initially lead to a 14 to 20 percent drop in employment and that this effect is greater for workers who previously held physically demanding occupations. Those who remain part of the labor market exhibit higher occupational mobility toward less physically demanding jobs. These findings imply that the magnitudes of income risks associated with health shocks vary depending on occupational and skill characteristics.

Market Access Approach to Urban Growth / Yoon Sang Moon
　Ⅰ. Introduction
　Ⅱ. City Size Distribution and Urban Growth
　Ⅲ. Market Access and Urban Growth
　Ⅳ. Data
　Ⅴ. Results
　Ⅵ. Concluding Remarks
　APPENDIX
　REFERENCES

Do Patents Lead to an Increase in Firm Value?Evidence from Korea / Jangwook Lee
　Ⅰ. Introduction
　Ⅱ. Data
　Ⅲ. Empirical specification
　Ⅳ. Estimation
　Ⅴ. Robustness Check
　Ⅵ. Conclusion
　REFERENCES

Disability and Occupational Labor Transitions:Evidence from South Korea / Serena Rhee
　Ⅰ. Introduction
　Ⅱ. Background: DI Award Criteria in South Korea
　Ⅲ. Data
　Ⅳ. Estimation
　Ⅴ. Conclusion
　REFERENCES