Research

Peer-Reviewed Articles
  1. Ted Hsuan Yun Chen, and Boyoon Lee. 2022. “Income-based inequality in post-disaster migration is lower in high resilience areas: Evidence from U.S. internal migration” Environmental Research Letters 17: 034043.
  2. Dong Hun Kim, and Boyoon Lee. 2015. “Sovereign Wealth Funds and the Political Economy of Global Financial Order” (in Korean). OUGHTOPIA: The Journal of Social Paradigm Studies 30(1): 35-59.
  3. Boyoon Lee, and Dong Hun Kim. 2015. “Sovereign Wealth Funds and the Political Economy of Global Financial Order” (in Korean.) Korea and World Politics 31(2): 149-176.
Under Review

“The Impact of Educational Content on Anti-Immigrant Attitudes” (Revise & Resubmit at Journal of Politics) How does education affect attitudes towards immigrants? Shifting the scholarly focus from levels of education to educational content, I argue that the effect of education depends on the type of national identification that educational content promotes. Content that promotes a narrower form of national belonging fosters more negative attitudes towards immigrants because it emphasizes a more exclusive notion of national membership. To test the implications of my theory, I leverage a textbook reform in Taiwan that introduced a new narrative promoting Taiwanese identity based on a common ancestral and historical background. Using a difference-in-differences design that compares academic and vocational paths affected differently by the reform, I find that the consumption of educational content emphasizing a narrower form of national identification induces exclusionary attitudes towards immigrants. The evidence suggests that higher levels of education do not necessarily increase positive attitudes towards outsiders — it depends on what is taught.

Working Papers

“The Effect of Country-of-Origin Stereotypes on Attitudes towards Immigrants” How do country-of-origin stereotypes influence native attitudes towards immigrants? Drawing on dual processing models of stereotypes from social psychology, I argue that country-of-origin stereotypes moderate how natives respond to new information about immigrants. Using a novel conjoint experiment in Japan, I examine how country-of-origin stereotypes related to competence and warmth (Fiske et al. 2002) condition the way that natives evaluate information about individual-level immigrant attributes when deciding whether to support immigrant acceptance. Some individual-level immigrant attributes such as higher education and language skills are generally seen as more valuable for immigrant acceptance than others. While negative stereotypes related to competence and warmth always reduce the value of these attributes, there is little evidence that positive stereotypes, especially as they relate to competence, have any moderating effect. My analysis suggests that negative country-of-origin stereotypes weigh more heavily than positive ones when natives process new information that might affect their preferences for immigrant acceptance. 

“Immobile Capital: The Impact of High Skill Intensive Firms on Immigration Policy” What causes variations for high-skill intensive (HSI) firms in demanding for high-skilled immigrants? I argue that the degree to which an HSI firm possesses key resources that need to be protected through domestic government determines its preferences for high-skilled immigrants. To prevent a spillover of their critical resources, firms take advantage of intellectual property rights regulations which in turn chain them in the domestic market because the rights are territorial in nature. The immobility stemming from the safeguard leads firms to demand high-skilled immigrants to fill a labor shortage. The demand is stronger for firms operating in a state where one party controls both the House and Senate because the presence of a dominant party makes legislators more responsive to the special interests. Using a novel firm-level lobbying data for S&P 500 companies from 1998 to 2015, I find that HSI firms lobby for high-skill targeted policies as the number of intangible assets increases. The result suggests that HSI firms’ high-skill immigration policy demand is a strategic response to the immobility originating from characteristics of the firms’ essential resources under a favorable political environment. 

“Who Fits in Better? The Public View of Immigrant Assimilation” [Pre-analysis Plan] What factors do natives think are important for immigrant assimilation? Although a sizable literature addresses the factors affecting successful assimilation from the perspective of immigrants themselves, few studies look into what factors natives have in mind when they conceive of immigrant assimilation. I use a nationally representative conjoint survey experiment in the context of South Korea to explore what immigrant attributes affect natives’ evaluation of successful assimilation. I find that natives have a multidimensional view of assimilation that goes beyond pragmatic outcomes such as language fluency and educational and economic success. Natives also care that immigrants share a subjective sense of group membership. My findings suggest that, regardless of their pragmatic skills, immigrants can be fully embraced by natives only when symbolic boundaries disappear.

Works In Progress

“Relational Asians? Conjoint Analysis of Attitudes Towards Immigrants in Three Asian Countries”

“Historical Narratives and Anti-Immigrant Attitudes”

“Measuring Elite Anti-Immigration Discourse in Japan’s National Congress”