【主讲】Minchul Yum (助理教授，曼海姆大学)
【主题】Status Externalities and Low Birth Rates in Korea (with Seongeun Kim and Michèle Tertilt)
【时间】2018年12月18日 (周二) 15：30-17：00
【地点】上海财经大学经济学院楼702室
【语言】英文
【摘要】South Korea has been experiencing a low fertility rate in recent several decades. We document that this is particularly driven by low income households, making the cross-sectional fertility-income relationship positive in sharp contrast to other developed countries such as the United States. We also document that parental educational investment is considerably high across all income distribution in Korea. To study the underlying sources of these facts, we develop a heterogeneous-agent general equilibrium model with endogenous fertility in the presence of both quantity and quality margins of children. An important innovation of our model is the status externality: parents care about the relative quality of their children. We calibrate the model to the cross-sectional facts obtained from recent cohorts in the Korea Labor and Income Panel Study. Our calibrated model suggests that an important source of low fertility in Korea is the status externality, thereby calling for policy interventions to correct market inefficiency. We conduct policy experiments to suggest several candidate policy instruments to overcome inefficient allocations in the presence of the status externality.
