Sung Eun Kim

• Korea University

Individuals in developing countries are the ultimate end users of foreign aid. While the international donor community has emphasized the importance of aligning aid with recipient countries’ preferences, the literature on public opinion and foreign aid has remained largely focused on donors. Using an original conjoint experiment conducted in seven...

Health and safety standards offer a convenient means by which governments can claim to be protecting the population, even while pursuing more parochial goals. In the realm of international trade, such standards have most often been studied as a means of veiled protectionism. Yet precisely because health and safety standards create ambiguity about t...

What implications might rising animosity towards political out-partisans have for public health? Vaccination has a significant social aspect, protecting not only the vaccinated, but also those around them. While political ideology in the United States was an important driver of individuals’ willingness to get vaccinated against COVID-19, with those...

Does political diversity affect the prevalence of selfless behavior across a society? According to a recurrent finding from the study of social capital, ethnic diversity reduces prosocial behavior. We ask whether the same applies to partisan identity, by turning to a frequently used proxy for social capital: blood donations. The question is especia...

Protectionist measures often have target countries, and public support for such measures depends on who the targets are. We identify such target effects on protectionist sentiments and examine the effects of information in tempering protectionist sentiments in East Asia. Using an original survey experiment in China, Japan, and South Korea, we test...

Air pollution is a pressing concern for the Chinese government. While an increase in public concern about air pollution can be politically costly for the regime, we show that the Chinese government proactively utilizes the news media to increase public awareness of air pollution instead of suppressing relevant information. By analyzing media covera...

China has embarked on various initiatives to win the hearts and minds of African citizens. Does this strategy contribute to China’s soft power in the region? To answer this question, we focus on two types of initiatives: cultural diplomacy and development finance. Using geolocation information on China’s aid projects and its Confucius Institutes, c...

Why do legislators support some free trade agreements but oppose others? Despite a wide variation in legislative support for free trade agreements, the heterogeneous preferences of legislators have received little attention in the literature, which largely focuses on general trade policy preferences of legislators and individual voters. We bring in...

China has expanded its economic footprint in Southeast Asian countries by providing a growing amount of development finance to the region. We examine the allocation of Chinese foreign aid toward Southeast Asian countries exploiting the exogenous variation of rotating leadership within Association of Southeast Asian Nation (ASEAN). As the ASEAN Chai...

COVID-19 has intensified public apprehension about foreigners. In this article, we examine two questions related to public opinion on immigration. First, we assess the importance of cultural and economic factors in studying why individuals support or oppose immigration. Second, we examine the role of public health concerns in shaping attitudes towa...

How responsive is the US’ Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) to the labor dislocation that results from trade integration? Recent findings suggest that the world's most ambitious trade adjustment program barely responds to import shocks, and that the shortfall is made up by disability insurance and early retirement. This holds considerable implicati...

Do voters reward politicians for trade liberalization? We examine this question by analyzing voter responses in South Korea to the US-Korea Trade Agreement. Exploiting a change in party positions on the FTA over time, we examine the effects of different party positions on outcomes in the legislative and presidential elections. We find that voters w...

Gasoline prices are often a heated topic during presidential election campaigns in the United States. Yet, presidents have limited control over gasoline prices. Do voters reward or punish the president for changes in gasoline prices? Why might voters blame the president for an outcome beyond direct presidential control? This study addresses these q...

Political-feasibility concerns are at the center of real-world air-pollution policymaking. Yet, these concerns are often not represented in leading decision-support tools that have been used for assessing policies' environmental impacts. Focusing on a wide range of clean-air policies in India, we assess their political-feasibility scores on the bas...

In response to President Trump instigating conflict over trade with China, the Chinese government countered by issuing tariffs on thousands of products worth over USD 110 billion in US exports. We explore whether China's tariffs reflected a strategy to apply counterpressure by hurting political support for the president's party. We also assess the...

Dealing with the distributional consequences of trade liberalization has become one of the key challenges facing developed democracies. Governments have created compensation programs to ease labor market adjustment, but these resources tend to be distributed highly unevenly. What accounts for the variation? Looking at the largest trade adjustment p...

The United States’ Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program seeks to help workers transition away from jobs lost to import competition. By contrast, trade remedies like antidumping seek to directly reduce the effect of competition at the border. Though they have very different economic effects, we show that trade adjustment and protectionism act a...

State policies shape firms’ incentives to lobby in the United States, but the existing lobbying literature mostly ignores these incentives. Using lobbying records for all electric utilities in the United States from 1998 to 2012, we examine how state policies affect federal lobbying by both proponents and opponents of federal support for the renewa...

Air pollution is a pressing problem of public health for developing countries, but governments have few incentives to abate air pollution without public awareness of the issue. Focusing on the case of Vietnam, we examine the determinants of public awareness of air pollution. Using representative survey data for the entire country from 2017, we find...

One of the great questions for scholars of international relations and economics concerns the relationship between the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the natural environment. Does membership in the multilateral trade regime constrain environmental regulation and increase the environmental burden of national economies? Do countries pay a heavy e...

While the rules of international trade regimes prevent governments from employing protectionist instruments, governments continue to seek out veiled means of supporting their national industries. This article argues that the news media can serve as one channel for governments to favor domestic industries. Focusing on media coverage of auto recalls...

Access to natural resources creates a political conflict between the expected economic winners and their environmental opponents, but the effects of such conflict on policy and politics remain unclear. To examine the scope of such effects, we exploit the rapid and unanticipated technological breakthroughs in the “fracking” of shale gas. During the...

Partisan polarization of public opinion is a major trend in American environmental politics. While the national pattern is widely recognized, scholars know much less about the polarization of public opinion over time at the state level. This lack of knowledge is unfortunate because geographic variation in the polarization of opinion is essential fo...

The partisan polarization of environmental policy is an important development in American politics, but it remains unclear how much such polarization reflects voter preferences, as opposed to disagreements between partisan elites. We conduct a regression discontinuity analysis of all major environmental and energy votes in the Senate and the House,...

Despite declining memberships, labor unions still represent large shares of electorates worldwide. Yet their political clout remains contested. To what extent, and in what way, do unions shape workers' political preferences? We address these questions by combining unique survey data of American workers and a set of inferential strategies that explo...

Both within the United States and across the world, power sector deregulation has changed the environment in which governments formulate renewable energy policy. Utilizing data from U.S. states for the 1991-2012 period, this article shows that there is no difference in the adoption of new renewable energy policy in states that have and have not alr...

Petroleum subsidies are economically costly and environmentally destructive. Autocracies tend to offer higher subsidies for petroleum products than do democracies. Why? This study uses a global dataset of gasoline prices in developing countries for the years 2003–9 to show that the autocratic subsidy premium stems from countries where much of the p...

When and why do individual companies lobby on environmental policies? Given the structural strength of business interests, the answer to this question is important for explaining policy. However, evidence on the strategic lobbying behaviour of individual companies remains scarce. We use data from lobbying disclosure reports on all major climate bil...

Access to natural resources creates a political conflict between the expected economic winners and their environmental opponents. To examine how such access influences the behavior of elected officials, we exploit the rapid and unanticipated technological breakthroughs in the 'fracking' of shale gas. During the past decade, shale gas production aro...

Energy demand is growing rapidly across the world, and international funding agencies like the World Bank have responded by emphasizing energy in their project portfolios. Some of these projects promote the use of fossil fuels, while others support cleaner forms of energy. For climate change mitigation, it is important to understand how internation...

Emerging regional powers, such as Brazil and India, are reshaping world politics. We conduct a game-theoretic analysis to examine how growing regional powers compete for influence against a global power, such as the United States, in different circumstances. If the global power regards dominant positions in different regions as strategic substitute...

When and how can advocacy groups influence the diffusion of new technologies, such as wind power? We examine the relationship between two different strategies that advocacy groups can adopt: political lobbying and campaigns aimed at potential end users of the new technology. Our game-theoretic analysis shows that without the opportunity to engage i...

Energy demand is surging in the developing world, and international organizations play an important role in the funding of energy projects. However, there is virtually no empirical analysis of how different organizations choose their project portfolios. This article examines the energy funding of different international organizations, with a partic...

This article investigates how commercial ties affect the cohesiveness of US alliances with East Asian nations. While the conventional wisdom views their effects as positive, we argue that economic interdependence does not markedly reinforce East Asian alliances because the alliances have an asymmetrical structure. To evaluate these competing argume...

A large amount of literature in international and comparative political economy emphasizes the importance of competitive rivalry as a concern in technology policy. How does such competition influence international cooperation to control negative externalities, such as pollution? Is technology competition between rivals an impediment to internationa...