Does industrial policy work? This is a subject of long-standing debates among economists and policymakers. Using newly digitized microdata, we evaluate the Korean government's policy that promoted heavy and chemical industries between 1973 and 1979 by cutting taxes and building new industrial...

The authors apply the analysis of Hsieh and Klenow (2009) to assess the degree of resource misallocation in the Republic of Korea manufacturing sector from 1982 to 2007. They find improvement in the aggregate allocative efficiency during the first decade and a strong reversal after 1992. This...