The persistence of the employment shock by COVID-19 has various policy implications during the pandemic and beyond it. After evaluating the impact of the health crisis at the individual level, this study decomposes employment losses into persistent and transitory components using the observed...

This paper examines the effects of a universal childcare subsidy on childcare decisions and mothers' employment by using Korea's policy reform of 2012, which provided a full childcare subsidy to all children aged 0 to 2. I find that the introduction of a universal childcare subsidy increased the...

Health capacity to work for the elderly is an essential piece of information for designing social policies in an aging society. Here, we assess the health capacity to work of older men in South Korea and provide a cross-country comparison. Following the methodology proposed by Milligan and Wise...

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...

This paper analyzes job creation when the Korean economy transitioned to a knowledge economy from the 1990s to the 2010s. During this period, the ratio of service to manufacturing jobs increased, knowledge intensive industries grew, and job creation became geographically concentrated around...

Using the Census on Establishments collected by Statistics Korea, we analyze how the patterns of job creation and destruction differ across counties (si-gun-gu). We measure aggregate employment changes due to establishment startups, expansions, contractions, and shutdowns for each county and...

This paper studies how COVID-19 has affected the labor market in Korea through a general equilibrium model with multiple industries and occupations. In the model, workers are allocated to one of many occupations in an industry, and industrial or occupational shocks alter the employment...