Faculty Research

The spatial distribution of economic activity (e.g., where people live and work, where their consumption activities take place, and where firms choose to operate) is uneven. Wookun Kim’s research aims to understand economic forces that shape the observed distribution of economic activity across cities and within a city system, and to quantify the welfare consequences of changes in these forces. In one of his recent works, titled “The Valuation of Local Government Spending: The Gravity Approach and Aggregate Implications”, Woo takes a novel approach to estimate how much people care about local government spending by developing a quantitative spatial general equilibrium model, in which people simultaneously make migration and commuting decisions. Leveraging the empirical setting of South Korea, which is ideal for this research for its data and policy changes, Woo estimates the model and computes the valuation that people have for local government spending. Furthermore, he sheds light on the importance of accounting for both migration and commuting decisions when a) estimating key elasticities shaping the spatial distribution of economic activity and thus b) producing policy implications based on these estimated elasticities. 

In other research, Woo and his coauthors recently launched a new project, the primary objective of which is to evaluate how different barriers to postsecondary education interactively affect the student population and their labor market outcomes in the long run through college enrollment decisions. His research team proposes a theoretically tractable quantitative framework and applies it to the Texas Education Research Center (ERC) data to unpack financial, institutional, and geographical barriers to college enrollment and characterize how they affect the Texas student population depending on the socioeconomic characteristics of students. Ultimately, the team aims to elucidate the consequences of these barriers in terms of individual earnings, social welfare, and inequality, thereby providing policymakers and stakeholders with evidence-based policy insights.

Tim Salmon's Public Policy Research

In November of 2021, federal vaccination data reported by the CDC showed that 98.5% of people over 65 had received at least one COVID vaccine dose. A poll conducted for The Economist by YouGov at that same time found that 14% of the respondents in this age range said “I will not get vaccinated” in response to a question about vaccination status. There is a problem there in that many of those responding to the opinion poll were obviously intentionally misrepresenting their vaccination status. This is a manifestation of a common problem with opinion polls which is that they often yield very inaccurate information. This is because respondents have no incentive to provide accurate information but political partisans may perceive an incentive to respond to these polls in a way that flatters their partisan agendas. This can be a substantial problem for public policy when that policy is constructed based on the assumption that this polling data is accurate.

Tim Salmon and his co-authors have been working on methods to improve opinion polls to combat this problem. In an early version of their work they have already shown that even on very hot-button political issues such as views on COVID vaccination effectiveness, election fraud and gun deaths, Republicans and Democrats provide wildly divergent answers when simply asked about the issues as they would be in standard polls yet they provide roughly similar answers when given even minimal incentives for providing accurate answers. The implication here is that political partisans may actually possess a common understanding of facts about the world even on these issues, despite the fact that much public discourse suggests otherwise. Tim and his co-authors are working on furthering refining these methods so that they can be applied more widely as accurate information on these issues is vital not just for well designed public policy but also for the purposes of maintaining civil discourse in our country on political issues.