WELCOME!
I am a 2024-25 Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Skalny Center for Polish and Central European Studies at University of Rochester. Prior to my doctoral study, I studied Business Administration at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. My research specialization includes international political economy, politics of trade, firm lobbying and quantitative methods (with particular interest in causal inference, broadly construed, and text-as-data).
I'm on academic job market for the 2024-2025 cycle.
If you'd like to know more about me when I'm off-duty, visit my Attic and get a sneak peek of my life as a painter and a LEGO aficionado! And one last thing - Go BILLS! 🏈
At Genesee Riverway Trail, 2022
JOB MARKET PAPER
"Firm-Driven Unilateralism"
Unilateralism is a pervasive tactic deployed in US trade politics especially with emerging economies. This study demonstrates that the United States either ``buys off" or punishes its developing trade partners depending on their ideological proximity, to achieve desired trade concessions. I leverage the Wordfish method (Slapin & Proksch, 2008) to construct a novel measure of US trade-relevant sentiments vis-à-vis its prominent trade partners from 1995 to 2022, utilizing the annual National Trade Estimate (NTE) reports published by the United States Office of the Trade Representative (USTR). This measure is particularly relevant to the USTR demands about investment regulations, and intellectual property rights protection, all of which are prominent trade-related concerns of US elite firms, as batteries of tests exploiting contextual latent semantic scaling confirm. The series of analyses including the USTR demands estimate as the explanatory variable reveals that, especially for emerging economies: 1) having a PTA with the United States reduces the USTR demands and the exposure to Special 301 targeting for a short run; 2) the United States buys off proximate democracies in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) with aid commitments to induce policy changes in the direction more favorable to US elite firms; and 3) distant nations in the UNGA voting space are subject to Special 301 targeting with the rise of the USTR demands.
CONTACT
Email jihye.park at rochester.edu
Postal 101F Harkness Hall, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627
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