Joonhyung Lee’s research while affiliated with University of Memphis and other places

We study the impact of Aid for Trade (AfT) and analyze whether aid recipients participate in bilateral vertical specialization. Using data from 15 donors and 106 recipients for the years 2002 to 2018, we investigate whether bilateral AfT increases bilateral vertical specialization. To focus on the variation between donors and recipients over time, we absorb other sources of variation through donor–year, recipient–year and donor–recipient fixed effects. Our findings show that AfT helps expand bilateral vertical specialization for a particular group of countries, upper middle‐income countries. Subsequent analysis reveals that AfT improves the infrastructure of upper middle‐income countries, which promotes participation in vertical specialization. Our findings suggest that to promote vertical specialization in lower income countries, AfT should be provided more directly to improve their infrastructure.

We study the role of foreign affiliate productivity in the operations of multinational firms. We use the panel data of Multinational Corporations (MNCs) headquartered in South Korea during 2006–2013 and exploit the significant variation in affiliate productivity and its operation. With other variables held constant, including the parent firm or affiliate fixed effects, we find that a more (less) productive affiliate exports less (more) to the parent and sells more (less) to other unaffiliated entities. We then provide a possible theoretical scenario that is based on the MNC's optimal integration strategy literature. By allowing foreign affiliates to have varying productivity levels, the model bears predictions consistent with the empirical findings.

This paper addresses foreign direct investment (FDI) externalities using capital market data of Korean stock exchange and examines the effects of FDI in both manufacturing and service sectors. The empirical findings in this paper are generally consistent with previous findings based on the traditional productivity measure from Cobb-Douglas production function: 1) the market value of listed stocks in the manufacturing sector responds to the Horizontal (intra-industry) effects in a positive way, and 2) the market value of listed stocks in the manufacturing sector benefits from foreign invested downstream manufacturing firms, which is often called backward linkages (i.e. supplying manufacturing goods to foreign invested firms generates positive externalities to domestic manufacturing suppliers. The new finding of this paper is that the market value of listed stocks in the manufacturing sector benefits from foreign invested service firms through forward linkages (i.e. service from foreign invested firms generates positive externalities to domestic manufacturing firms).