This paper identifies two distinct types of inequality affecting the advance of the Korean literacy in opposite ways. Literacy improvement in colonial Korea was checked by the presence of landed elite with pre-colonial origins, but helped by the development of profit-seeking land tenancy...

Using evidence on elite presence, land inequality, literacy, and primary schooling in pre-colonial, colonial, and South Korea, I show that inequality may help or check human capital accumulation depending on the nature of inequality and the type of learning. Little affected by the imposition of...

As the total fertility rate fell from 6.0 to 1.6 from 1960-90, the South Korean government implemented a family planning program focusing on the distribution of contraceptives. While the concurrence has been interpreted as evidence of the public provision of fertility control devices lowering...

This study calculates Robert Allen's "welfare ratio" for eleven cities in Japan, Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan from 1900-39. Although considerable gap in prices and nominal wages existed, real wages remained roughly comparable in the 1910s in different cities of East Asia outside Manchuria, where...

Applying difference-in-differences method to a county-level panel dataset comprising colonial and South Korea, this study finds that the post-colonial land redistribution lowered the level of total factor productivity by disrupting the efficient allocation of farmland across cultivators varying...

This paper empirically evaluates the two opposite representations of the pre-1945 Korean comfort women. Far exceeding the estimate advocated by contract view, the scale of mobilization as estimated using demographic information falls within the range proposed by enslavement view. Indicating one...

Korekiyo Takahashi is remembered as a wise finance minister saving Japan from the Great Depression, but the role of his policy remains to be rigorously measured, with proper control for other forces also driving the recovery. Vector autoregression analysis of previously unexploited monthly data...

To investigate the current status of Korea's income distribution, we decompose its income inequality index. Next, we analyze the effects of economic openness on income distribution with two different datasets: international country-level data and Korean industry-level data. Based on the analysis...

Korean Abstract: 본 연구에서는 한국의 분배구조에 대한 이해를 높이기 위하여 국내 소득불평등 현황과 원인을 정리하고 분배구조를 다양한 지표를 이용하여 분배구조를 측정하고 분해하였다. 또한 대외개방이 분배구조에...