Prof. Joon Mo CHO has been chosen for SKKU Fellowship Awardee by publishing 42 research articles in the field of labor economics at SSCI Journal, and receiving recognition for his outstanding performance.

There are several researches representing his work over the past 4 years and are introduced as follows:

(1)   Jobs in the Bureaucratic Afterlife: A Corruption-Facilitating Mechanism Associated with Law Enforcement (with Iljoong Kim), Southern Economic Journal, vol. 68, 2001

This article starts with an observation that the employment of former regulatory officers by a regulated firm might be an integral part of the corruption-facilitating mechanism (CFM). The article hypothesizes that such employment constitutes the deferred payment for the corruption previously supplied. Although anecdotal evidence of this kind of corruption abounds, it has proven difficult to substantiate. The article provides an explanation for why this deferred payment arrangement might be attractive to both demanders and suppliers of corruption. It also offers tentative empirical support for the hypothesis that it plays a role as CFM in Korea, with the implication that this CFM hypothesis can be generalized to a host of regulatory countries.

(2)   “Why do good performing students highly rate their instructors?”, Economics of Education Review, vol. 49, 2015

This article analyzes the behavior of students in a college classroom with regard to their evaluation of teacher performance. As some students are randomly able to see their grades prior to the evaluation, the “natural” experiment provides a unique opportunity for testing the hypothesis as to whether there exists a possibility of a hedonic (implicit) exchange between the students’ grades and teaching evaluations. Students with good grades tend to highly rate the teaching quality of their instructors, in comparison with those who receive relatively poor grades. This study finds that students with better grades than their predicted grades provide a psychological “gift” to their teachers by giving a higher teacher evaluation; whereas the opposite occurs with those students receiving lower grades than their predictions. These empirical results demonstrate that a previous interpretation on the effect of student grades in an incumbent course with regard to the teaching quality may have to be somewhat discounted.

(3)   “The impact of epidemics on labor market: Identifying victims of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome in the Korean labor market”, International Journal for Equity in Health, vol. 15, 2016

The vulnerability approach suggests that disasters such as epidemics have different effects according not only to physical vulnerability, but also to economic class (status). This paper examines the effect of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome epidemic on the labor market, to investigate whether vulnerable groups become more vulnerable due to an interaction between the socio-economic structure and physical risk.

This paper examines the effect of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome epidemic on the labor market by considering unemployment status, job status, working hours, reasons for unemployment and underemployment status. In particular, the study investigates whether the U-shaped curve becomes a J-shaped curve due to the interaction between medical vulnerability and labor market vulnerability after an outbreak, assuming that the relative vulnerability in the labor market by age shows a U curve with peaks for the young group and middle aged and old aged groups using the Economically Active Population Survey. We use the difference in difference approach and also conduct a falsification check and robustness check.

The results suggest that older workers faced a higher possibility of unemployment after the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome outbreak. In particular, they experienced higher involuntary unemployment and underemployment status as well as decreased working hours. It was confirmed that the relative vulnerability of the labor market for older workers was higher than for the other age groups after the epidemic outbreak due to the double whammy of vulnerability in the medical and labor market. The vulnerability in the young group partially increased compared to the 30s and 40s age groups due to their relative vulnerability in the labor market despite being healthy. We find that assuming the relative vulnerability in the existing labor market shows a U shape with age increase, the U-shaped curve became J-shaped after the outbreak.

Disasters like epidemics can occur unexpectedly and affect certain groups more than other. Therefore, medical protection should be enhanced for groups vulnerable to disease, and economic measures are also required for the protection of their livelihoods in the labor market to prevent unemployment stemming from inequality.