Research

Peer-Reviewed Articles

  1. Ted Hsuan Yun Chen, and Boyoon Lee. Accepted. “Income-based inequality in post-disaster migration is lower in high resilience areas: Evidence from U.S. internal migration” Environmental Research Letters.
  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” [Slides (Presented at APSA Annual Meeting 2021)] 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. 

“The Perceived Fit-in and Acceptance of Immigrants: Evidence from Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan”” [Pre-analysis Plan] Previous studies have typically assumed that immigrants who are similar to natives are more welcomed than those who are distinct because distinctiveness signals threats to native culture and identity. Despite this prevalent assumption among many scholarly literature, the association between immigrant fit-in and acceptance has not been directly examined so far. In this paper, I investigate whether immigrant preferences are closely related to particular immigrant characteristics that imply cultural differences and a potential failure to fit into the host society. To isolate views on how natives understand successful fit-in and whom they prefer to accept, I use a survey-embedded conjoint experiment in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan that simultaneously tests the influence of eight immigrant attributes that represent different dimensions of assimilation. My results show that, while natives indeed welcome immigrants who are more likely to fit-in, they have a nuanced view of the association between fit-in and acceptance. Specifically, I find that the prospects for fit-in in economic, cultural, and social dimensions are generally good indicators of acceptance, but not in the dimension that represents dissimilarity in identity. While shared group membership is not an important factor in judging fit-in, it is still influential in deciding whom to accept. These findings suggest that immigrant fit-in without decreasing identity-based discrimination or prejudice has limitations in enhancing immigrant acceptance. 

Works In Progress

“Historical Narratives and Anti-Immigrant Attitudes”

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