I am an associate research fellow at the Korea Development Institute
My research interest is in international trade. My research mainly focuses on how production networks and firm-to-firm relationships can change the policy implications of standard international trade models.
You can find my CV here
You can find my job market paper here
Reach me at hyungjinkim@kdi.re.kr
Working paper
The Chip War’s Consequences for the AI-Chip Industry: Export Controls and Endogenous Upstream Price Incidence
Modern semiconductor production is vertical, granular, and concentrated: a few firms dominate each production stage. This paper leverages that structure to explain why export controls can backfire. I develop a dynamic vertical-link model in which a small set of AI-chip buyers negotiate with a small set of HBM sellers while competing oligopolistically downstream and accumulating experience. Exploiting the empirical context of the AI-chip/HBM network, the model shows that restricting market access weakens exposed buyers’ bargaining leverage, lifts upstream input prices, and slows productivity growth via lost scale. The key implication is comparative-statics non-neutrality: outcomes depend on who is large on each tier, not just how large the sector is overall. Ignoring endogenous input prices and learning yields understated policy effects.
Work in progress
Trade, Multinational Production, and Regional Inequality (with Mira Rim)
Globalization often brings openness to trade and multinational production (MP) together, but their combined effects on regional economies are not yet fully understood. We study how China’s openness to trade and MP affected regional inequality in Korea, focusing on population distribution and welfare. To analyze this, we develop a multi-country, multi-sector general equilibrium model that incorporates international trade, MP, and internal migration. Our model captures two opposing effects of Korea’s increasing MP in China. On one hand, MP may reduce labor demand in Korea as firms relocate production. On the other hand, through vertical fragmentation—where Korean firms producing in China source inputs from Korea—it may increase labor demand in Korea. Additionally, welfare effects may vary across worker groups, which are defined by their region of origin. This variation arises because workers have different sector-specific productivity across regions, and migration costs limit their ability to move between regions. A counterfactual analysis of the China Shock shows that while Korea experiences aggregate welfare gains, these are unevenly distributed across worker groups. As a result, some regions attract more migrants than others.
Intermediary Trade of Petrochemical Products (with Yang Shen)
We present new empirical evidence on intermediary trade in petroleum chemical products by examining the triadic relationship among buyers, sellers, and an intermediary. Utilizing a unique, transaction-level dataset obtained from a single intermediary, we outline descriptive patterns of intermediated trade and furnish regression results that highlight the role of triadic geographical distances in shaping trade outcomes. By extending the conventional gravity model to include intermediary effects, our analysis provides a more nuanced understanding of global value chains and offers significant implications for trade policy.