Taehee Whang

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Full) at Yonsei University

This article explores when and why sanction threats succeed in extracting concessions from the targeted country. We focus on two different, albeit not mutually exclusive, mechanisms that can explain the success of sanction threats. The first mechanism relates to incomplete information regarding the sanctioner’s determination to impose sanctions and...

Selection effects in crisis bargaining make it difficult to directly measure audience costs because state leaders have an incentive to avoid incurring audience costs. We overcome this inferential problem of selection bias by using a structural statistical model. This approach allows us to estimate the size of audience costs, both incurred and not i...

What is the relationship between international cooperation and the success of economic sanctions? Although it is commonly assumed that international cooperation is an important condition for the effectiveness of sanctions, empirical results have been mixed. We focus on the role of the sanctioned country’s major trading partners and develop a theore...

Why do we observe economic sanctions despite strong doubts regarding their effectiveness? While the symbolic use of sanctions is advanced as an alternative to the instrumental use explanation, no one has assessed this alternative explanation empirically. I investigate the symbolic use of sanctions for domestic political gain in the United States, a...

The literature on economic sanctions has long studied sender countries’ policymaking as a simple choice between imposing sanctions to extract concessions from the targeted country and doing nothing. We depart from this simplifying assumption and analyze sanctions as a multi-faceted foreign policy instrument. We argue that senders design sanction po...

What explains aid allocation–donor interests or recipient needs? This research debate has generated a number of studies, which generally conclude that both motivations matter. One limitation of this literature is that donor governments are conceptualized as unitary actors with coherent preferences. In this study, we relax this assumption and focus...

Earlier policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. have often treated natural gas as a clean fuel due to its higher energy output per unit of carbon dioxide emitted compared to other fuels. However, recent local decarbonization initiatives seek to restrict residential uses of natural gas. Public support for such policies could be a key...

Do political institutions matter in explaining how economic sanctions are used? The current understanding of sanctions imposed by non-democratic sender countries is limited in the literature, as existing theories predominantly focus on the behaviors and strategies of democratic sender countries, leaving a notable gap in systematic comprehension. Us...

Existing research on the relationship between economic coercion and foreign direct investment suggests that sanctions have no effect on investments in targeted countries or may even encourage investment inflows. A key limitation of this research, however, is its aggregate country-level focus, which fails to capture company-level decision-making pro...

What is the relationship between economic sanctions and the human rights conditions of target countries? We suggest a two-stage mechanism to explain how sanctions deteriorate the human rights condition in the target country. In the repressive capacity stage, sanctions increase the capacity the target government can use for political repression. We...

In this article, we argue that the degree to which audience costs work depends on the challenger state's leader stability. Unlike in the previous literature, we attempt to depart from a simple categorical comparison among regime types. Instead, we argue that the magnitude of audience costs varies continuously throughout the spectrum of a leader's s...

Policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the US have largely treated natural gas as a clean fuel due to its lower dioxide-to-energy content than other fuels. However, recent local decarbonization initiatives seek to ban residential uses of natural gas. Public support for such policies will determine whether other localities adopt natural gas...

What effects do domestic and international policies have on household solid fuel consumption? Previous studies analyze some of the policies that national governments and international organizations have implemented to reduce solid fuel dependence, but these studies tend to examine one policy and/or one country at a time. In contrast, this article s...

Sanctions restrict or terminate economic relations between two or more countries, directly and negatively influencing sanctioned countries’ companies. We argue that sanctions are similar to recessions—both reduce economic activity in affected countries. Less economic activity results in a lower accident risk as companies use their productive facili...

Economic sanctions research suggests that sanctioned countries’ overall economic costs tend to be low. This article argues that, despite this, sanction costs can force the governments of these countries to reallocate budget resources from low-priority spending categories to other categories in an effort to minimize their political costs. One such l...

Why do donors continue to provide foreign aid despite its failure to help poor countries over the past several decades? While some scholars argue that foreign aid is purely for humanitarian purposes, others assert that such aid serves as a tool to pressure recipient countries into accepting policy concessions. In this study, we subject these argume...

Objectives In this study, we develop a model based on big data analysis to find patterns in North Korean nuclear provocations. Methods Using automated text analysis classification through supervised machine learning techniques, we analyze the North Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) from 1997 to 2013. Results We find an interesting difference betw...

President G.W. Bush’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) has been rated as one of the successful US aid interventions of recent decades. We investigate the impact of PEPFAR on economic development, democracy, and human rights by comparing focus countries that received PEPFAR with other countries that did not receive PEPFAR from 2003 to 2008. M...

In this paper, we seek to explain (1) how the rise of Internet communication is related to the level of social capital and (2) the role of internet and social capital in shaping civic engagement in Asia. We use cross-national public opinion data of thirteen Asian countries from 2010 to 2012 to investigate these questions. Our results show that soci...

How do non-governmental organizations (NGOs) affect sanction policies? Using two datasets of sanctions and NGOs, we study whether and how US-based NGOs working in a target state can influence the threat and implementation of sanctions initiated by the USA. At the threat stage, the sender government tends to perceive NGOs as a signaling device such...

What is the relationship between interstate wars and the probability of civil war onset? We argue that defeated interstate wars of higher conflict intensity are more likely to result in civil war onsets than victorious wars of lower intensity. Using the Doyle and Sambanis dataset (2000) for civil wars and the Correlates of War dataset (2010) for in...

For the past two decades, North Korea has made a series of military provocations, destabilizing the regional security of East Asia. In particular, Pyongyang has launched several conventional attacks on South Korea. Although these attacks seem unpredictable and random, we attempt in this article to find some patterns in North Korean provocations. To...

How does foreign aid affect government stability? Previous research presents mixed answers to this question. We start with the largely uncontroversial finding that donor interests are major determinants of aid allocation. Donors may use aid to support loyal government leaders; on the other hand, aid suspensions are a form of foreign economic pressu...

Do economic sanctions serve international signaling purposes? A fully structural statistical model that employs a signaling game as a statistical model is used to investigate the existence of signaling effects of sanctions. Estimation results suggest that sanctions fail to work as a costly signal. The cheapness of sanctions prevents a target state...

What is the relationship between Official Development Assistance (ODA) and human rights? Applying quantitative and qualitative approaches, we explain the effects of ODA on human rights practices conditional on the level of globalization. Our panel data analysis of 145 recipient countries from 1981 to 2010 shows that ODA helped to improve human righ...

We generalize two classes of statistical sequential incomplete information games: (1) those resembling typical signaling games, in which a single agent represents each player, allowing for information to be revealed about future play; and (2) those in which each player is represented by a set of independent agents, where moves do not reveal private...

What explains the Japanese experience of one-party-dominated democracy over the past five decades? More generally, and looking across Asian democracies, what explains variations in the degree of political volatility? We propose a theory of government turnover rate that not only explains political rigidity in Japan and the experience of precarious d...

Given the mixed findings of extant research on the impact of low-cost carriers (hereafter LCC) on aviation markets (with some studies showing stimulation of new demand, other studies showing LCCs encroaching on the turf of full-service carriers), the emergence of LCCs in Korea raised an interesting question as to whether or not they actually contri...

When are economic sanctions expected to succeed? Previous studies predict that sanctions will be more effective when the issue at stake is important, when the sender and target are allied, when the target's domestic institutions are more democratic, and when the target's economy is dependent on the sender's. This article subjects these explanations...

Signaling models are ubiquitous in political science. An essential characteristic of these models is that actors can update their beliefs about their opponents. An actor observes the behavior of his opponent, and this behavior functions as a signal that allows the actor to learn more about his opponent's true "type." As a result, the actor is able...

Abstract will be provided by author.

Abstract will be provided by author.