2020. "Democracy and Reserves" Foreign Policy Analysis. 16(3): 417-437.
In “Democracy and Reserves,” he contends that democratic regimes are more likely than their autocratic counterparts to amass a large volume of foreign exchange reserves when the size of exporting sector of the country is small. This relationship is reversed when the exporting sector is substantively large as the special interest groups (exporting firms) become strong. A panel dataset covering 127 countries from 1975 to 2012 is used to test this argument.
2020. "Interpersonal Trust and Confidence in Labor Unions: the case of South Korea," Journal of East Asian Studies. 20(20: 267--290.
In “Interpersonal Trust and Confidence in Labor Unios,” he finds that interpersonal trust affects the public confidence in labor unions in South Korea, conditional on the partisanship of the presidential party. When a conservative party is in power, low-trust people tend to see labor unions ‘deserve’ to demand redistribution as conservative governments have been long viewed as anti-labor. When a liberal party is in power, on the other hand, lost-trust people now find the labor in a more favorable political climate and discount the legitimacy of the unions’ redistributive demands. Multi-round, multi-source survey data are used to offer evidence corroborative to this argument.
2020. "Doi Moi and Vietnamese Threat Perception of Chinese Economic Growth," Japanese Journal of Political Science. Forthcoming. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1468109920000067.
In “Doi Moi and Vietnamese Threat Perception of Chinese Economic Growth,” he documents the effect of Doi Moi (liberalization in Vietnam between the late 80s and early 90s) on Vietnamese public’s perception of China. He argues that Doi Moi essentially undermined the ‘two-world theory’ that dominated the traditional Soviet-style socialization narrative in Vietnam. The birth cohorts of Doi Moi, therefore, are significantly less optimistic about the economic expansion of China than those who were born right before this generation. Since these two birth cohort groups are otherwise very similar, he uses a regression-discontinuity design (RDD) to obtain an experiment-like research design and find evidence consistent with the argument.
November 23, 2020