Assist. Prof. Wookun Kim, Ph.D.

Optimal Public Spending

In a paper entitled “The Valuation of Local Government Spending: Gravity Approach and Aggregate Implications,” Wookun Kim tackles the following question: Is the observed distribution of public spending optimal? First, he builds a quantitative spatial general equilibrium featuring migration and commuting decisions of workers and public finance. Second, applying the model to the South Korean data and its quasi-natural experimental setting, he identifies how much people care about public spending by estimating a gravity equation – a key model implication. Lastly, based on the estimated model, he conducts counterfactual policy experiments to characterize an optimal fiscal arrangement. Methodologically, his paper shows theoretically and empirically that considering one margin of spatial mobility (migration vs. commuting) alone leads to large biases in key parameters governing worker mobility, thereby producing erroneous policy recommendations. In “Heterogeneous local employment multiplier: Evidence from Relocation of Public Entities in South Korea”, Mr. Kim leverages the exogenous variation in public sector employment from the series of relocation of public entities to estimate the change in private-sector employment. In particular, he studies the local characteristics that shape the heterogeneous effects.
Mr. Kim is an Applied Microeconomist with research interests in the fields of Public Finance and Urban Economics His research often focuses on quantifying the aggregate and regional impacts of economic shocks and public policies using micro-level data and disentangling economic forces shaping their impacts through the lens of an economic model. Currently, Wookun Kim has ongoing projects at the intersection of Urban, Public, and Population Economics, in one project examining the aggregate and distributional welfare consequences of barriers to college using the administrative panel data of the Texas student populations. In another study, he is estimating the heterogeneous effects of air pollution using health insurance claims of one million individuals over nearly two decades.
During his stay in Munich, he will deliver three CES Lectures entitled: Topics in Urban Economics.
Wookun Kim is an assistant professor of Economics at Southern Methodist University (SMU). He received his PhD in economics from UCLA in 2020.