Hello! I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Economics at the Pennsylvania State University. My research interests are the areas of Industrial Organization and Econometrics. I have recently worked on the estimation of knowledge spillovers and network formation in the U.S. interfirm R&D collaborations .
I will be on the job market for the 2023-24 academic year.
My CV is available here. Reach me at kul598@psu.edu.
Ph.D. in Economics (expected), 2024
The Pennsylvania State University
M.A. in Economics, 2018
Korea University
B.S. in Economics, 2015
Korea University
This paper examines the effect of private R&D investment on productivity, considering R&D collaborations and knowledge spillovers. While existing literature emphasizes R&D’s direct effects on innovation and cost reduction, it often neglects R&D's role in shaping collaborative networks. Investing in R&D enhances a firm's learning capacity and augments the firm's appeal as a collaboration partner. Consequently, the effect of R&D is underestimated without accounting for its role in fostering collaborations. To bridge the gap, I develop a dynamic model of a firm that internalizes its decision on whom to collaborate with and following spillovers. This framework allows R&D to improve productivity and affect the collaboration network, with varying propensities for collaborations across firms. Using the data on firm-to-firm R&D collaborations among U.S. firms from 1980 to 2001, I find the long-term effect of R&D is 16% underestimated if we ignore its subsidiary role in expanding the collaboration network.
In a first-price common value auction, bidders tend to bid less aggressively in consideration of the winner's curse, especially when competition, limited information, or high risks are involved. Joint bidding alleviates these problems and potentially benefits a seller by relieving the winner's curse and encouraging more aggressive bidding. The analysis on joint bidding is important for a government to ban or allow joint bidding in procurement auctions with common value features. However, there is little empirical evidence of that. In this paper, we study joint bidding behavior and its impacts on bids and the winner's curse using the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) auctions from 1954 to 1975. We provide reduced-form evidence that joint bidding leads to bid amounts 21.2% higher on average by introducing novel instruments leveraging a new dataset of firms' office addresses recorded in lease contract agreements and the history of joint bidding. We further develop a structural model that allows asymmetry in bidders---joint and solo types, revealing that solo bidders experience a more substantial winner’s curse relative to joint bidders.