Projects
Research projects and groups I lead or help run.
Sogang Spatial Economics & AI Lab
A small lab at Sogang University
The lab works at the intersection of geospatial data, economics and machine learning. We build new data from historical maps, archival records and satellite images, and use them to study Korea's development.
- Lab head
- Hyunjoo Yang
- Research associate
- Sangjin Lee (PhD)
- Lab coordinator
- Inhwan Park (PhD student)
- PhD students
- Jeongim Han
- Master's students
- Jaihoon Chung; Seohee Jang; Hyeonyeong Kim; Yoorim Son
- Undergraduate students
- Dahye Kim
- Partner institutions
- Bank of Korea; S&E Company
Research Center for Big Data on Korean Economy
College of Economics, Sogang University
The center was founded in March 2025 under a memorandum of understanding between the College of Economics at Sogang University and the Department of Economics at Yale University. It hosts restricted-access Korean microdata on secure servers and supports research that uses these data, including joint work with researchers at Yale and Brown on household debt and on fertility. Access to the data is by application, reviewed for confidentiality and research relevance.
- Director
- Jungsoo Park (Sogang University)
- Deputy center directors
- Costas Arkolakis (Yale University); Hyunjoo Yang (Sogang University)
- Head of research
- Jun Hee Kwak (Sogang University)
- Affiliated faculty
- Spencer Y. Kwon (Brown University)
- Affiliated students
- Jaemin Woo (Brown University); Seung Yong Yoo (Yale University)
Institutional Design for an Inclusive Energy Transition
Social Science Korea (SSK) Global Agenda Project, National Research Foundation of Korea, 2026–2030
Renewable energy spreads its benefits across a whole country, but its costs often fall on the places where plants and power lines are built. This project asks which institutions make the energy transition work for those places: resident participation, benefit sharing, community ownership, support for low-income households, and the role of local governments. We compare policies in the United States, Germany, Australia, Brazil, India and South Africa with those in Korea, and we measure their long-run effects on local jobs, public finances and population using regional panel data, GIS and satellite data.
- Principal investigator
- Hyunjoo Yang (Sogang University)
- Co-investigators
- Michael Anderson (UC Berkeley); Marco Gonzalez-Navarro (UC Berkeley); Solomon Hsiang (Stanford University); Jeasurk Yang (Chonnam National University)
- Affiliated researcher
- Jaecheol Lee (Sogang University)