Job Market Paper

Abstract: This paper studies how cognitive, manual, and interpersonal task-specific human capital shape the wage dynamics over the early career. The paper develops a model of multidimensional human capital accumulation and wage progression, where occupations differ in task intensities.  Task intensities are constructed based on the job descriptors of O*NET. Workers, with different initial skill levels, accumulate task-specific human capital from experience, which is transferable across occupations. Potential worker selection effects are addressed through a Markov model of occupation choice with unobserved worker types. The model is estimated using employment histories from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997. Decomposition exercises show that 63% of wage growth is explained by the accumulation of cognitive human capital, 25% by manual human capital, while only 9% comes from interpersonal human capital. The significantly smaller contribution of interpersonal skills is attributed to their slower rate of accumulation. Cross-sectional wage variation across workers is primarily explained by initial skills and occupation-level wage differences, with cognitive human capital accumulation accounting for the rest.


Working papers

Abstract: This study examines the impact of a no-exam semester on private education participation and expenditure, leveraging the Free Semester program in South Korea. Removing mid-term and final exams can reduce the incentive for students to achieve high grades, but it may also allow resources previously used for exam preparation to be redirected towards private education. Using a difference-in-difference-indifferences model on two educational panel surveys, this research finds that the Free Semester program does not significantly affect overall private education participation or expenditure during middle school. However, it does lead to an increase in participation and expenditure among low-income and low-parenteducation groups. Despite these changes, standardized test scores indicate that the increased investment in private education does not enhance cognitive skill.


Abstract: We consider a model of joint ventures where agents produce their revenue through collaborating with their superiors in a hierarchical network (a directed tree). Hence, a coalition with all superiors of its members has the collective ownership of the revenue. Our main axiom for revenue sharing is the standard monotonicity with regard to the collective ownership. We establish representation theorems of monotonic allocation rules. They are represented by hierarchical transfers of the revenue at each position to the superiors. When the rate of transfer is symmetric over the hierarchy, the rules coincide with the geometric rules (the sequence of ownership rights of superiors is geometric). When the rate of transfer is asymmetric, other fair allocation rules are admissible; a focal example is the hierarchical equal sharing rule, which is shown to be uniquely fair among all hierarchical transfer rules.


Work in Progress