Eleanor Jawon Choi

Sex ratio at birth remains highly skewed in Asian countries due to son preference. In South Korea, however, it has declined to the natural ratio. In this paper, we investigate whether son preference has disappeared in Korea by analyzing parents' time and monetary inputs by the sex of their child. We exploit randomness of the first child's sex to overcome potential bias from endogenous fertility decisions. Our findings show that mothers are more likely to work after having a girl, girls spend twi

Sex ratio at birth remains highly skewed in many Asian countries because of son preference. The ratio in South Korea, however, declined beginning in 1990 and reached the natural range in 2007. We study changes in child gender effects on fertility and parental investment during this period of decreasing sex ratio at birth. We find that gender discrimination on the extensive margin (fertility), such as sex-selective abortions and son-biased stopping rules, have nearly disappeared among recent coho

This paper estimates an education production function using data on the College Scholastic Ability Test score and high school characteristics from Seoul, Korea, where, on entering high school, students are randomly assigned to schools within each school district. We derive a school production function by aggregating the individuals' potential outcomes under the random assignment and no cohort effect assumption. We find that the school production function coefficients differ between districts and

this paper. The views expressed in this paper are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the Keen observers of labor market statistics have noticed that the average size of establishments has been decreasing during the last decade. The graph immediately below presents the average size of establishments in the total private U.S. economy for the 1994-2011 time period (the publicly available data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics used to create this

This paper investigates the long-term effects of initial labor market conditions by comparing cohorts who graduated from college before, during, and after the 1997–1998 Asian financial crisis in South Korea. We measure the overall welfare effect by examining their labor market activities, family formation, and household finances. Using data from 20 waves of the Korean Labor and Income Panel Study, we find a substantial and persistent reduction in employment, earnings, marriage, fertility, and as

This study proposes an econometric framework to consistently estimate the average partial effects (APE) of school inputs on academic achievement when students are randomly assigned to schools within each school district but endogenously sort across school districts. We illustrate our method by estimating the APE of single-sex schooling and class size on standardized test scores using data from Seoul, Korea in the period of 2008-2009. Our APE estimates are smaller than the estimates from conventi