ABSTRACT This study investigates the nonlinear relationship between financial development (FD) and air pollution – conceptualised as the Finance-Environment Kuznets Curve (FEKC) – across 36 Asian economies (1996–2022). Using panel data, we examine multiple FD dimensions, including domestic credit, private bank credit, liquid liabilities, and stock market capitalisation, with PM2.5 as a proxy for pollution. Results confirm an inverted U-shaped FEKC for most indicators, indicating that early financial deepening worsens pollution, but later reduces it beyond identified thresholds. Institutional quality both directly lowers pollution and moderates the FD-environment nexus, weakening early adverse effects and accelerating later environmental gains, highlighting the importance of governance in green financial development.

ABSTRACT We study two-player contests over a continuum of battlefields under probabilistically enforced resource caps. Players independently draw allocations from chosen distributions; the higher allocation wins each battlefield and both bear costs. Extending the generalized equality of payoffs principle (Hwang, Koh, and Lu, 2023, “Constrained Contests With a Continuum Of Battles.” Games and Economic Behavior 142: 992–1011) to step function constraints, we characterize equilibrium strategies. Imperfect enforcement incentivizes over-allocation beyond the cap, even when enforcement probability is high. Under asymmetric caps, players may exceed even the higher cap. Our framework recovers canonical equilibria under perfect enforcement as special cases.

ABSTRACT This study evaluates the impact of South Korea's small and medium enterprise (SME) support policies on firm survival and performance under economic crisis conditions by leveraging the exogenous shock of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using administrative data from the SMEs Integrated Management System (SIMS), we analyze the effectiveness of various SME support programs, including technology, human resources, export, domestic sales, startup, and management support. To address endogeneity, we exploit the natural experiment created by COVID-19; to mitigate selection bias, we restrict the sample to firms that received financial support in 2019 and examine how the timing of support (across 2019 quarters) affects outcomes. If firms receiving support closer to the pandemic show greater improvements, this suggests a policy effect rather than selection bias. Our results indicate that technology and domestic sales support are significantly associated with higher employment, revenue, and firm survival. We also examine complementarity and substitutability among support policies, finding significant interactions for certain combinations.

ABSTRACT Complex trade patterns characterise the present simulations of the constant cost model with three and five regions and products aggregated from the World Input–Output Database. The regions start with America, Asia and Europe trading Resources, Manufactures and Services. The sum of per capita Cobb–Douglas utility with global consumption shares is maximised for each region subject to balanced trade and global material balance. Simulations of autarky and each region trading with the rest of the world lead into full model. The global trade equilibria are characterised by export diversification, import competition and endogenous nontraded goods.

ABSTRACT This study analyzes the optimal income tax and disability benefits for households with disabled agents. In the model, both able and disabled members of households can supply labour and pay income tax. However, they may receive disability benefits if disabled members do not work. Moreover, this model explicitly considers households' activities to help disabled members to work, which is novel in the literature. I show that optimal disability benefits are positive because only severely disabled agents give up labour supply and receive disability benefits. However, optimal disability benefits decline with household income as disabled agents in poorer households need greater government support. As for the optimal net tax burden (i.e. income tax net of disability benefits), heavier tax burden falls on households that have disabled agents work because they are richer. However, marginal net tax rates are higher for households that receive disability benefits to incentivize disabled agents to work.

ABSTRACT This study examines generational differences in welfare perceptions in Korean society amid social change. Using Korean Welfare Panel Study (KOWEPS) data from the Moon Jae-in and Yoon Suk-yeol administrations, we analyse how political ideology influences welfare views across generations. Results indicate that generational cohorts and political ideologies significantly shape perspectives on social class, equality and welfare policies. The administrative transition notably affected welfare perceptions, emphasising the need to consider both generational and ideological factors in policy development. These findings highlight the importance of addressing generational economic concerns while balancing diverse ideological welfare preferences.

ABSTRACT Medicine and pharmacy are the most popular undergraduate majors in South Korea. Unlike in the past, when a degree from a prestigious college was prioritised regardless of the field, many students now opt for lower-selectivity colleges to pursue these majors. This study examines why students are increasingly drawn to medicine and pharmacy by estimating the returns to both college prestige and major choice. The returns to college prestige show a declining trend, discouraging students from enrolling in highly selective institutions. The findings suggest that current hiring regulations based solely on college selectivity may be ineffective in promoting equity.

ABSTRACT This study examines consumer preferences for over-the-top (OTT) services and traditional broadcasting media (TV) to provide a novel way to derive substitutability between the two services. With a nested CES utility function specification, we derive demand functions for OTT and TV in terms of the time spent on the media and quantity used, and estimate the parameters using Korea Media Panel data. The resulting elasticity of substitution between OTT and TV was estimated at approximately 1.174. Next, we show that the two goods are gross substitutes, and provide policy implications from the perspective of two-sidedness and advertising revenue.

ABSTRACT This paper analyses the relationship between ESG performance and its determinants from the data of 658 U.S. firms, 353 Japanese firms, 78 Chinese firms and 68 Korean firms, over the 2011 to 2021 period. An empirical analysis of this study's results is as follows. The policy factors are significantly positively related to the ESG in the firms that have shown a decrease in their grade and the firms with ESG performance grades that have increased. More specifically, firms also show a significant strong positive relationship between the specific fields within the ESG pillars and the policy dimension.

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the impact of geopolitical risk on trade costs across 43 countries from 1995 to 2019. The results show that geopolitical risk enters trade costs regressions positively and significantly. These findings are robust to the consideration of the different sub-periods, the sub-samples ex US and countries with the highest geopolitical risk, more control variables, the alternative estimation method, and the endogeneity issue. Given the importance of trade costs for welfare gains from trade, our results suggest a potential role for policy reforms that aim to reduce the geopolitical risk across the countries.