Jisoo Hwang: Papers
Job Market Paper
Abstract: The fraction of U.S. college graduate women who ever marry has increased relative to less educated women since the mid-1970s. In contrast, college graduate women in developed Asian countries have had decreased rates of marriage, so much so that the term “Gold Misses” has been coined to describe them. This paper argues that the interaction of rapid economic growth in Asia combined with the intergenerational transmission of gender attitudes causes the “Gold Miss” phenomenon. Economic growth has increased the supply of college graduate women, but men’s preference for their wives’ household services has diminished less rapidly and is slowed by women’s role in their mothers’ generation. Using a dynamic model, I show that a large positive wage shock produces a greater mismatch between educated women and men in the marriage market than would gradual wage growth. I test the implications of the model using three data sets: the Japanese General Social Survey, the American Time Use Survey, and the U.S. Census and American Community Survey. Using the Japanese data, I find a positive relationship between a mother’s education (and employment) and her son’s gender attitudes. In the U.S., time spent on household chores among Asian women is inversely related to the female labor force participation rate in husband’s country of origin. Lastly, college graduate Korean and Japanese women in the U.S. have greater options in the marriage market. They are more likely to marry Americans than Korean and Japanese men do, and this gender gap is larger among the foreign born than the U.S. born.
Research in Progress
Abstract: Political reforms are often designed in a gradual manner, even though it would be more efficient to implement the reforms as “big bang.” We argue that when voters have present-biased preferences, gradualism may actually be welfare-enhancing relative to “big bang.” This is because time-inconsistent voters delay implementing reforms when reforms have front-loaded costs. Gradualism, however, offers the option of spreading out the costs across time and thereby relaxes the intertemporal trade-off. Using a citizen candidate model, we allow the agenda setting politician – one who decides which reform schedules to put to vote – to be endogenously determined. The model shows that when voters are sophisticated (aware of their time-inconsistency) they elect an agenda setter who is more “patient” than the median voter. That is, knowing ex ante that they would procrastinate, voters delegate the agenda-setting authority to an agent who is more time-consistent. Subject to majority rule, the elected agenda setter then proposes a gradual reform schedule with minimal loss of efficiency.
Abstract: This paper studies whether peer effects help people meet their targets in self-control problems. In a field experiment, we investigate how sharing gym attendance data with others affects exercise habits absent any monetary incentives or team competition. In our pilot study at MIT, we found that peer effects exist but that they do not play large roles when one’s partners are considered to have different fitness goals. Hence, in our continuing work, we pair subjects with those who have the same weekly exercise targets. We test if one’s partner meeting her target has a positive effect on one’s gym attendance (in addition to the effect from partner’s attendance per se), if there is convergence between partners in their exercise patterns, and if there are improvements in health outcomes from the intervention. The proposed experiment would shed light on the importance of an individual’s own target when studying peer effects in self-control problems.
© 2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College