Sangwon Park’s research while affiliated with Hankuk University of Foreign Studies and other places

This study examines the impact of property rights institutions on the political budget cycle. A simple equilibrium model of political budget cycles suggests that property rights institutions implicitly constrain the electoral cycle by making pre-election fiscal manipulation less effective in gaining votes. Using a panel of 64 democracies over the period 1987-2016, we confirm that a political budget cycle is conditional on the strength of property rights institutions. Countries with stronger property rights institutions experience a smaller electoral cycle. Our findings imply that property rights institutions may provide a socially efficient mechanism for protecting the welfare of taxpayers.

This paper revisits the claim that members of legislative committees direct more earmark spending to their constituents. In South Korea's legislature, a national law regulating the budget committee provides an unusual source of exogenous variation in membership: members of the committee are rotated each year owing to 1‐year term limits. Using data from 226 local governments, and both within‐district and within‐member variations in membership, we find that districts represented by a budget committee member secure roughly 3% more subsidies than those represented by a nonmember. (JEL D72, D78, H70)

This paper examines the effect of redistricting on the law of 1/n, which posits that government spending increases with the number of legislative districts. Our analysis suggests that court-ordered redistricting in the 1960s significantly influenced the 1/n effect, because dividing districts (increasing their number) and merging districts (reducing their number) both reduce public spending. After redistricting, the positive relationship between seats and spending holds for lower chambers in bicameral legislatures. The US experience informs those interested in the design of bicameral institutions about the fiscal implications of legislative apportionment. © 2018 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature