Peer Reviewed Journal Articles
“South Korea’s Renewable Energy Policy: Coming Together or Drifting Apart?”, Journal of International and Area Studies, Vol. 25 No. 2 (December 2018) (with Min Gyo Koo)
Working Papers
Do Trade Shocks Mean Fewer Green Bills? - US Congressional Voting on Environmental Policy after China Shock
*Presented at GSIPE Spring Mini-conference (virtual, 2022 May); Climate Change Pipeline Workshop (Harvard, 2022 June); ISA (SF, 2024)
Trade Competition and the Demand for Environmental Deregulation, co-authoring with Lauren Peritz
*Presented at APSA IPE Panel (LA, 2023 August)
Securitization of Trade Among American Public, co-authoring with Brandon Kinne
*Presented at Graduate Students in International Political Economy Group (virtual, 2022 December); PIPCOSS (virtual, 2023 February)
When Interests Collide, Bureaucracy Shines, co-authoring with Junghyun Han
*Presented at MPSA 2022 (Chicago, April)
*Presented at GSIPE Spring Mini-conference (virtual, 2022 May); Climate Change Pipeline Workshop (Harvard, 2022 June); ISA (SF, 2024)
- While conventional belief suggests that economic downturns compromise environmental protection, the unique nature of international trade allows for a different dynamic between a trade shock and environmental legislation. A trade shock creates a window of opportunities for policymakers and domestic producers to use environmental policies strategically as protectionist measures. Furthermore, trade shocks bring structural changes to a national economy, disproportionately undermining the dirty industries compared to the clean industries, and thereby decrease resistance against environmental legislation from dirty industries and firms.
This study investigates the complex relationship between international trade and environmental legislation, focusing on the impact of trade shocks on pro-environmental votes by the Members of Congress. I leverage a sudden increase in Chinese imports in the U.S. after the two countries normalized their trade relation. To address potential endogeneity issues, I also conduct an instrumental variable analysis, using Chinese imports to non-US advanced economies. I then test disguised protectionism logic by examining whether bills with trade effects are more likely to receive pro-environmental votes while production-related regulatory bills are less likely. I use my own classification of bill types to see conditional effects by bill types. Furthermore, I disaggregate the trade shock variable into two -- one for clean industries and another for dirty industries -- and compare their separate impacts.
Across different model specifications and variable operationalizations, I consistently find a positive association between trade shocks and pro-environmental votes. My results suggest that this pro-environmental impact of trade shocks comes from a diminished dirty industry following structural changes, more than demands for disguised protectionism.
Key words: trade and environment, China shock, congressional roll call votes
Trade Competition and the Demand for Environmental Deregulation, co-authoring with Lauren Peritz
*Presented at APSA IPE Panel (LA, 2023 August)
- How does international trade competition affect industry demand for environmental (de)regulation? A debate in the literature highlights two plausible mechanisms. On the one hand, trade competition may strain some industries, forcing industry groups to seek economic relief wherever it can be found; those industries may pressure legislators to relax onerous and costly environmental regulations. On the other hand, the international trade competition may prompt some industries to lobby for stricter regulation as a form of de facto protectionism. The import or export intensiveness of the industry and the concentration of firms are further thought to mediate the effects.
To answer this question, we leverage the different levels of international competition faced by manufacturing and extractive industries to better understand the interplay between international competition and demands for environmental regulations in the US lobbying. Because the manufacturing industry is more exposed to international competition, we expect the manufacturing industry’s lobbying behavior to be more affected by trade exposure than that of extractive industries. To be more specific, we hypothesize that manufacturing industries will lobby more on environmental issues when they face a higher level of international competition. We also expect that the legislators who receive more lobbying on environmental issues will vote more favorably for the environmental policies.
We use the LobbyView data, and Congressional roll call votes regarding environmental bills in the US House of Representatives, 2005-2020. Our research design involves a two-step analysis. First, we have lobbying amount by each industry to a legislator given a congressional term as our dependent variable. The main independent variables are the share of workforce and employment-weighted imports for each industry in a given congressional district and congressional term. Second, we turn to how lobbying affects pro-environmental voting behavior. We take the lobbying amount as our main independent variable and the pro-environmental voting score of each legislator given a congressional term.
Key words: lobbying, congressional voting, trade and environment
Securitization of Trade Among American Public, co-authoring with Brandon Kinne
*Presented at Graduate Students in International Political Economy Group (virtual, 2022 December); PIPCOSS (virtual, 2023 February)
- What is driving the securitization of international trade? We use a survey experiment on a hypothetical US trade partner to explore when Americans think of trade as a national security issue, rather than just an economic issue. We test a set of hypotheses on different sources of trade securitization, including both security and economic causes: nonaligned rival, military gap, economic gap, micro economic impact and overall economic impact. In addition, we conduct a mediation analysis to examine what are the mediating factors of trade securitization.
Our results indicate multiple paths to securitization. We find that while overt security concerns can lead to strong securitization, so too can purely economic issues. In particular, our analysis highlights the importance of economic concerns -- especially a wide economic shock that affects the overall economy -- as a source of trade securitization. National economic concerns also mediate a large portion of trade securitization, comparable to the threat perception regarding the trade partner. Meanwhile, we find that trade securitization is not directly transferable to policy preferences, and even treatments that lead to strong trade securitization fail to increase support for military options.
Our project has wide and important implications, both at a theoretical and practical level. At a theoretical level, we offer a set of analytical frameworks to discuss trade securitization in a more structured way. We developed a typology of trade securitization to differentiate the sources and levels of trade securitization. Furthermore, to our knowledge, our study is the first to directly measure how much the respondents think of trade as a security issue, rather than make inferences relying on trade preferences. At a more practical level, our results raise an alarm against using aggressive rhetoric to discuss even economic issues. Our results suggest that equivocating `economic security' and 'national security' can aggravate any tension between two trade partners and hinder international economic cooperation.
Key words: trade and security, securitization of trade, survey experiment
When Interests Collide, Bureaucracy Shines, co-authoring with Junghyun Han
*Presented at MPSA 2022 (Chicago, April)
- Does bureaucratic structure matter for trade policy? Trade policy is at the intersection of not only domestic and international politics but also industrial and foreign policy. The optimal trade policy may be different for industrial ministry and for foreign ministry: Industrial ministry will prioritize the country's economic growth, whereas foreign ministry will emphasize the international relations aspects. Furthermore, when there is strong party polarization, politicians may face significant pressure from their supporters to take a strong stance in terms of trade policy. We argue that depending on the structure, bureaucracy can serve as a moderator when a variety of interests collide. In this paper, we examine the effects having trade under industry ministry versus under foreign affairs, or as an independent agency on initiating of a dispute at the World Trade Organization's dispute settlement mechanism. To explore this question, we create our own dataset on trade bureaucratic structure, categorizing countries into three groups: independent trade agency, industrial ministry leading trade policy, and foreign ministry leading trade policy. Then, we examine how the number of trade disputes and likelihood of initiating a dispute are different based on the types of bureaucratic structure.
Key words: trade dispute, World Trade Organization, bureaucracy
Current Projects
Do Ends Justify Means? – Protectionism in the Era of Climate Change
*Presented at Climate Change Pipeline Workshop (Brown, 2023 June)
Is Competence Issue-Transferrable? Testing the Effects of Parties’ Issue Ownership on the Perceived Economy-Environment Trade-Off, co-authoring with Timea Balogh
*Presented at Climate Change Pipeline Workshop (Brown, 2023 June)
- Can protectionist measures increase support for climate change legislation? Many national governments, including the US, have buried protectionist measures in climate change legislation. Advocates argue that the protectionist aspect is necessary to win political support for climate change legislation. However, such a claim has not been empirically tested.
This study examines when protectionism contributes to winning public support for climate change legislation. Public support for climate change legislation is essential as we need everyone’s participation to effectively mitigate and adapt to climate change. Advocates of protectionism argue that the protectionist measure is necessary to win political support, but their claim has not been empirically tested. In particular, I focus on a type of protectionism called local content requirement (LCR), which is essentially a quota for domestic manufacturing, as it is often used in renewable energy policies.
I propose an experimental research design, composed of a conjoint and a survey experiment, to explore when protectionism contributes to public support of a climate change policy.
Key words: protectionism, climate change politics, local content requirement, survey experiment
Is Competence Issue-Transferrable? Testing the Effects of Parties’ Issue Ownership on the Perceived Economy-Environment Trade-Off, co-authoring with Timea Balogh
- One of the main obstacles to the successful promotion of environmental policies is their distributional consequences. Yet, what influences perceptions of an environmental policy’s economic impact is lesser known. In this paper, we build on theories of issue ownership to argue that parties’ reputations for competence on issues moderate individuals’ perceived trade-off between the environment and the economy. We test our argument using a difference-in-difference design, leveraging the European Union’s ‘Fit for 55’ package as an exogenous shock. Fit for 55 imposes upon member states an ambitious action plan for significantly cutting greenhouse gas emissions and decarbonization. Using Eurobarometer data, we compare the assessment of government effectiveness and state of the economy by citizens in countries that already had an independent gas boiler ban prior to the package and those in countries that are now forced to implement such a ban in accordance with the action plan. We expect that, compared to other countries, individuals in countries governed by parties that “own” the issue of the economy will perceive the state of the economy more positively following implementation of a gas boiler ban. In contrast, when the ruling coalition includes the Green Party, which "owns" environmental issues, individuals will be more stringent in their assessment of the government’s ability to achieve economic goals.
Key words: issue-ownership, environmental policy, environment-economy trade-off
Past Projects
Daarstad, Haley; Park, RyuGyung; Balogh, Timea (2023) : A comment on Herzog, Baron, and Gibbons (2022), I4R Discussion Paper Series, No. 97, Institute for Replication (I4R), s.l., available at www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/280748/1/I4R-DP097.pdf
Does Police Patrol Matter When There are Fire Alarms? – Role of Self-Reports in the WTO
*Presented at Political Science Research Workshop, UC Davis, 2020 (virtual)
Graduate Student Researcher for Professor Heather McKibben, Civil War Negotiations Dataset, funded by NSF Grant (Winter 2020 –Spring 2021)
Student researcher, Sustainable Development Goals and Global Governance on International Immigration, funded by the Asia Development Institute (Summer 2017)
Does Police Patrol Matter When There are Fire Alarms? – Role of Self-Reports in the WTO
*Presented at Political Science Research Workshop, UC Davis, 2020 (virtual)
- I empirically explore what roles can self-reports play in international trade regime, and challenge the conventional disregard for police patrol mechanism when there is a strong fire-alarm system. I argue that even with a strong dispute settlement mechanism, self-reports at the WTO play a role in the enforcement of international agreements, just as policy patrols and fire-alarms are complements in real life. The self-report system at the World Trade Organization, the Trade Policy Review Mechanism (TPRM) has been understudied and regarded only as transparency mechanism. I reassess the TPRM's potential role through text analysis of the self-reports submitted by the Member States.
Graduate Student Researcher for Professor Heather McKibben, Civil War Negotiations Dataset, funded by NSF Grant (Winter 2020 –Spring 2021)
Student researcher, Sustainable Development Goals and Global Governance on International Immigration, funded by the Asia Development Institute (Summer 2017)