Taehee Whang
Biographic Data
| ID | 338292 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Taehee Whang |
| GIVEN NAMES | Taehee |
| FAMILY NAME | Whang |
| SIGNATURE | WHANG T |
| AFFILIATIONS | Yonsei University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2573-3740 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 339 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Social desirability bias and public opinion on nuclear weaponization
How bureaucratic competition shapes foreign aid allocation
What explains aid allocation–donor interests or recipient needs? This research debate has generated a number of studies, which generally conclude that both motivations matter. One limitation of this literature is that donor governments are conceptualized as unitary actors with coherent preferences. In this study, we relax this assumption and focus on the interests and interactions of bureaucratic agencies within a donor government. We argue that …
Shifting determinants of socioeconomic status in North Korea
Economic Sanctions and Informal Economies in North Korea
How do people in authoritarian regimes adapt to external economic pressure? We examine how economic sanctions affect informal economic activity in North Korea. Using county-level data from 167 regions for the years 2016, 2018, and 2022, we find that informal economic activity significantly expanded in areas most affected by sanctions, particularly those reliant on heavy industry such as primary metals, machinery, and transportation. These bottom-…
Social Capital in North Korea
Since the collapse of the command economy in the 1990s, North Korea has experienced profound changes driven by bottom-up marketization. This paper examines the impact of informal marketization on “social capital” (defined as shared norms and social networks) in North Korea. Our study investigates whether and to what extent the shadow economy has influenced social capital in the region. We gathered data through a survey of 1309 defectors, intervie…
Clearing the air
The Shadow Economy and Social Change in North Korea
North Koreans have relied on the shadow economy since the collapse of socialism in the 1990s, but little is known about the degree to which informal markets have influenced the country's everyday politics. Based on a large-scale survey of defectors, as well as interviews with almost 100 defectors, including some who had been high-ranking officials prior to leaving North Korea, this article finds that the shadow economy has elicited many changes. …
The effect of economic coercion on companies’ foreign direct investment decisions
Existing research on the relationship between economic coercion and foreign direct investment suggests that sanctions have no effect on investments in targeted countries or may even encourage investment inflows. A key limitation of this research, however, is its aggregate country-level focus, which fails to capture company-level decision-making processes and factors shaping them. In contrast, this paper evaluates multinational companies’ investme…
Economic Sanctions by Non-Democracies
Do political institutions matter in explaining how economic sanctions are used? The current understanding of sanctions imposed by non-democratic sender countries is limited in the literature, as existing theories predominantly focus on the behaviors and strategies of democratic sender countries, leaving a notable gap in systematic comprehension. Using the existing dataset on sanctions, we theoretically and empirically distinguished characteristic…
When Does Audience Matter? Challengers’ Stability and Audience Costs
In this article, we argue that the degree to which audience costs work depends on the challenger state's leader stability. Unlike in the previous literature, we attempt to depart from a simple categorical comparison among regime types. Instead, we argue that the magnitude of audience costs varies continuously throughout the spectrum of a leader's stability. We employ probit regression with a squared term of stability, utilizing a large-N dataset …
Economic sanctions, repression capacity, and human rights
What is the relationship between economic sanctions and the human rights conditions of target countries? We suggest a two-stage mechanism to explain how sanctions deteriorate the human rights condition in the target country. In the repressive capacity stage, sanctions increase the capacity the target government can use for political repression. We introduce the concepts of political corruption, judicial dependence, and the government's media cens…
Renewable energy policies and household solid fuel dependence
Economic Sanctions and Government Spending Adjustments
Economic sanctions research suggests that sanctioned countries’ overall economic costs tend to be low. This article argues that, despite this, sanction costs can force the governments of these countries to reallocate budget resources from low-priority spending categories to other categories in an effort to minimize their political costs. One such low-priority category is disaster preparedness and mitigation. The authors show that economic sanctio…
Do sanctions spell disaster? Economic sanctions, political institutions, and technological safety
Sanctions restrict or terminate economic relations between two or more countries, directly and negatively influencing sanctioned countries’ companies. We argue that sanctions are similar to recessions—both reduce economic activity in affected countries. Less economic activity results in a lower accident risk as companies use their productive facilities less. Reduced revenues also force companies to adjust by cutting costs, which includes spending…
US foreign aid and economic policy concessions
Why do donors continue to provide foreign aid despite its failure to help poor countries over the past several decades? While some scholars argue that foreign aid is purely for humanitarian purposes, others assert that such aid serves as a tool to pressure recipient countries into accepting policy concessions. In this study, we subject these arguments to empirical testing using a dataset that integrates the amount of US aid and economic policies …
Non-governmental organizations and economic sanctionsi
How do non-governmental organizations (NGOs) affect sanction policies? Using two datasets of sanctions and NGOs, we study whether and how US-based NGOs working in a target state can influence the threat and implementation of sanctions initiated by the USA. At the threat stage, the sender government tends to perceive NGOs as a signaling device such that NGOs increase the probability of sanction threat. At the imposition stage, the presence of NGOs…
Detecting patterns in North Korean military provocations
Talking to Whom? The Changing Audience of North Korean Nuclear Tests
Objectives In this study, we develop a model based on big data analysis to find patterns in North Korean nuclear provocations. Methods Using automated text analysis classification through supervised machine learning techniques, we analyze the North Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) from 1997 to 2013. Results We find an interesting difference between the Kim Jong‐il era and the Kim and Jong‐un period, implying a major shift in the nuclear policy o…
The Internet, Social Capital, and Civic Engagement in Asia
Detecting patterns in North Korean military provocations
For the past two decades, North Korea has made a series of military provocations, destabilizing the regional security of East Asia. In particular, Pyongyang has launched several conventional attacks on South Korea. Although these attacks seem unpredictable and random, we attempt in this article to find some patterns in North Korean provocations. To this end, we employ a machine-learning technique to analyze news articles of the Korean Central New…
International Signaling and Economic Sanctions
Do economic sanctions serve international signaling purposes? A fully structural statistical model that employs a signaling game as a statistical model is used to investigate the existence of signaling effects of sanctions. Estimation results suggest that sanctions fail to work as a costly signal. The cheapness of sanctions prevents a target state from being able to distinguish a resolute sender state from a sender who is bluffing. When sanctions…
Detecting Audience Costs in International Disputes
Selection effects in crisis bargaining make it difficult to directly measure audience costs because state leaders have an incentive to avoid incurring audience costs. We overcome this inferential problem of selection bias by using a structural statistical model. This approach allows us to estimate the size of audience costs, both incurred and not incurred, in international crises. We show that although audience costs exist for state leaders of va…
Knowing one’s future preferences
We generalize two classes of statistical sequential incomplete information games: (1) those resembling typical signaling games, in which a single agent represents each player, allowing for information to be revealed about future play; and (2) those in which each player is represented by a set of independent agents, where moves do not reveal private information. The generalized model we develop, the Correlated Agent Model, relies on a parameter, ρ…
Designing foreign policy
The literature on economic sanctions has long studied sender countries' policymaking as a simple choice between imposing sanctions to extract concessions from the targeted country and doing nothing. We depart from this simplifying assumption and analyze sanctions as a multifaceted foreign policy instrument. We argue that senders design sanction policies in response to policy preferences of two domestic constituencies. Voters expect a response to …
Coercion, Information, and the Success of Sanction Threats
This article explores when and why sanction threats succeed in extracting concessions from the targeted country. We focus on two different, albeit not mutually exclusive, mechanisms that can explain the success of sanction threats. The first mechanism relates to incomplete information regarding the sanctioner's determination to impose sanctions and suggests that threats help to extract concessions by revealing the sanctioner's resolve. The second…
Playing to the Home Crowd? Symbolic Use of Economic Sanctions in the United States1
Why do we observe economic sanctions despite strong doubts regarding their effectiveness? While the symbolic use of sanctions is advanced as an alternative to the instrumental use explanation, no one has assessed this alternative explanation empirically. I investigate the symbolic use of sanctions for domestic political gain in the United States, assessing in particular the effect of sanctions imposition on US presidential approval ratings. Findi…
Friends or Foes? Major Trading Partners and the Success of Economic Sanctions
What is the relationship between international cooperation and the success of economic sanctions? Although it is commonly assumed that international cooperation is an important condition for the effectiveness of sanctions, empirical results have been mixed. We focus on the role of the sanctioned country's major trading partners and develop a theoretical model that shows how their actions can affect the probability of sanctions success by raising …
Coercion, Information, and the Success of Sanction Threats
This article explores when and why sanction threats succeed in extracting concessions from the targeted country. We focus on two different, albeit not mutually exclusive, mechanisms that can explain the success of sanction threats. The first mechanism relates to incomplete information regarding the sanctioner's determination to impose sanctions and suggests that threats help to extract concessions by revealing the sanctioner's resolve. The second…
Detecting Audience Costs in International Disputes
Selection effects in crisis bargaining make it difficult to directly measure audience costs because state leaders have an incentive to avoid incurring audience costs. We overcome this inferential problem of selection bias by using a structural statistical model. This approach allows us to estimate the size of audience costs, both incurred and not incurred, in international crises. We show that although audience costs exist for state leaders of va…
Economic Sanctions and Government Spending Adjustments
Economic sanctions research suggests that sanctioned countries’ overall economic costs tend to be low. This article argues that, despite this, sanction costs can force the governments of these countries to reallocate budget resources from low-priority spending categories to other categories in an effort to minimize their political costs. One such low-priority category is disaster preparedness and mitigation. The authors show that economic sanctio…
Designing foreign policy
The literature on economic sanctions has long studied sender countries' policymaking as a simple choice between imposing sanctions to extract concessions from the targeted country and doing nothing. We depart from this simplifying assumption and analyze sanctions as a multifaceted foreign policy instrument. We argue that senders design sanction policies in response to policy preferences of two domestic constituencies. Voters expect a response to …
Empirical Implications of Signaling Models
Signaling models are ubiquitous in political science. An essential characteristic of these models is that actors can update their beliefs about their opponents. An actor observes the behavior of his opponent, and this behavior functions as a signal that allows the actor to learn more about his opponent's true “type.” As a result, the actor is able to adapt his own behavior. Current statistical models of strategic choice based on perfect Bayesian …
International Signaling and Economic Sanctions
Do economic sanctions serve international signaling purposes? A fully structural statistical model that employs a signaling game as a statistical model is used to investigate the existence of signaling effects of sanctions. Estimation results suggest that sanctions fail to work as a costly signal. The cheapness of sanctions prevents a target state from being able to distinguish a resolute sender state from a sender who is bluffing. When sanctions…
Structural estimation of economic sanctions
When are economic sanctions expected to succeed? Previous studies predict that sanctions will be more effective when the issue at stake is important, when the sender and target are allied, when the target's domestic institutions are more democratic, and when the target's economy is dependent on the sender's. This article subjects these explanations to an empirical test using a new fully structural estimation that employs a game theoretic model as…
The Internet, Social Capital, and Civic Engagement in Asia
The Shadow Economy and Social Change in North Korea
North Koreans have relied on the shadow economy since the collapse of socialism in the 1990s, but little is known about the degree to which informal markets have influenced the country's everyday politics. Based on a large-scale survey of defectors, as well as interviews with almost 100 defectors, including some who had been high-ranking officials prior to leaving North Korea, this article finds that the shadow economy has elicited many changes. …
Economic Sanctions by Non-Democracies
Do political institutions matter in explaining how economic sanctions are used? The current understanding of sanctions imposed by non-democratic sender countries is limited in the literature, as existing theories predominantly focus on the behaviors and strategies of democratic sender countries, leaving a notable gap in systematic comprehension. Using the existing dataset on sanctions, we theoretically and empirically distinguished characteristic…
Knowing one’s future preferences
We generalize two classes of statistical sequential incomplete information games: (1) those resembling typical signaling games, in which a single agent represents each player, allowing for information to be revealed about future play; and (2) those in which each player is represented by a set of independent agents, where moves do not reveal private information. The generalized model we develop, the Correlated Agent Model, relies on a parameter, ρ…
Do sanctions spell disaster? Economic sanctions, political institutions, and technological safety
Sanctions restrict or terminate economic relations between two or more countries, directly and negatively influencing sanctioned countries’ companies. We argue that sanctions are similar to recessions—both reduce economic activity in affected countries. Less economic activity results in a lower accident risk as companies use their productive facilities less. Reduced revenues also force companies to adjust by cutting costs, which includes spending…
Clearing the air
The effect of economic coercion on companies’ foreign direct investment decisions
Existing research on the relationship between economic coercion and foreign direct investment suggests that sanctions have no effect on investments in targeted countries or may even encourage investment inflows. A key limitation of this research, however, is its aggregate country-level focus, which fails to capture company-level decision-making processes and factors shaping them. In contrast, this paper evaluates multinational companies’ investme…
When Does Audience Matter? Challengers’ Stability and Audience Costs
In this article, we argue that the degree to which audience costs work depends on the challenger state's leader stability. Unlike in the previous literature, we attempt to depart from a simple categorical comparison among regime types. Instead, we argue that the magnitude of audience costs varies continuously throughout the spectrum of a leader's stability. We employ probit regression with a squared term of stability, utilizing a large-N dataset …
Economic sanctions, repression capacity, and human rights
What is the relationship between economic sanctions and the human rights conditions of target countries? We suggest a two-stage mechanism to explain how sanctions deteriorate the human rights condition in the target country. In the repressive capacity stage, sanctions increase the capacity the target government can use for political repression. We introduce the concepts of political corruption, judicial dependence, and the government's media cens…
Detecting patterns in North Korean military provocations
For the past two decades, North Korea has made a series of military provocations, destabilizing the regional security of East Asia. In particular, Pyongyang has launched several conventional attacks on South Korea. Although these attacks seem unpredictable and random, we attempt in this article to find some patterns in North Korean provocations. To this end, we employ a machine-learning technique to analyze news articles of the Korean Central New…
Empirical Implications of Signaling Models
Signaling models are ubiquitous in political science. An essential characteristic of these models is that actors can update their beliefs about their opponents. An actor observes the behavior of his opponent, and this behavior functions as a signal that allows the actor to learn more about his opponent's true “type.” As a result, the actor is able to adapt his own behavior. Current statistical models of strategic choice based on perfect Bayesian …
Friends or Foes? Major Trading Partners and the Success of Economic Sanctions
What is the relationship between international cooperation and the success of economic sanctions? Although it is commonly assumed that international cooperation is an important condition for the effectiveness of sanctions, empirical results have been mixed. We focus on the role of the sanctioned country's major trading partners and develop a theoretical model that shows how their actions can affect the probability of sanctions success by raising …
Structural estimation of economic sanctions
When are economic sanctions expected to succeed? Previous studies predict that sanctions will be more effective when the issue at stake is important, when the sender and target are allied, when the target's domestic institutions are more democratic, and when the target's economy is dependent on the sender's. This article subjects these explanations to an empirical test using a new fully structural estimation that employs a game theoretic model as…
Playing to the Home Crowd? Symbolic Use of Economic Sanctions in the United States1
Why do we observe economic sanctions despite strong doubts regarding their effectiveness? While the symbolic use of sanctions is advanced as an alternative to the instrumental use explanation, no one has assessed this alternative explanation empirically. I investigate the symbolic use of sanctions for domestic political gain in the United States, assessing in particular the effect of sanctions imposition on US presidential approval ratings. Findi…
Coercion, Information, and the Success of Sanction Threats
This article explores when and why sanction threats succeed in extracting concessions from the targeted country. We focus on two different, albeit not mutually exclusive, mechanisms that can explain the success of sanction threats. The first mechanism relates to incomplete information regarding the sanctioner's determination to impose sanctions and suggests that threats help to extract concessions by revealing the sanctioner's resolve. The second…
Explaining Government Turnover inAsian Democracies
What explains the Japanese experience of one‐party‐dominated democracy over the past five decades? More generally, and looking acrossAsian democracies, what explains variations in the degree of political volatility? We propose a theory of government turnover rate that not only explains political rigidity inJapan and the experience of precarious democracy inThailand and thePhilippines, but also explains changes of government in otherAsian democrac…
Knowing one’s future preferences
We generalize two classes of statistical sequential incomplete information games: (1) those resembling typical signaling games, in which a single agent represents each player, allowing for information to be revealed about future play; and (2) those in which each player is represented by a set of independent agents, where moves do not reveal private information. The generalized model we develop, the Correlated Agent Model, relies on a parameter, ρ…
Designing foreign policy
The literature on economic sanctions has long studied sender countries' policymaking as a simple choice between imposing sanctions to extract concessions from the targeted country and doing nothing. We depart from this simplifying assumption and analyze sanctions as a multifaceted foreign policy instrument. We argue that senders design sanction policies in response to policy preferences of two domestic constituencies. Voters expect a response to …
International Signaling and Economic Sanctions
Do economic sanctions serve international signaling purposes? A fully structural statistical model that employs a signaling game as a statistical model is used to investigate the existence of signaling effects of sanctions. Estimation results suggest that sanctions fail to work as a costly signal. The cheapness of sanctions prevents a target state from being able to distinguish a resolute sender state from a sender who is bluffing. When sanctions…
Detecting Audience Costs in International Disputes
Selection effects in crisis bargaining make it difficult to directly measure audience costs because state leaders have an incentive to avoid incurring audience costs. We overcome this inferential problem of selection bias by using a structural statistical model. This approach allows us to estimate the size of audience costs, both incurred and not incurred, in international crises. We show that although audience costs exist for state leaders of va…
Detecting patterns in North Korean military provocations
For the past two decades, North Korea has made a series of military provocations, destabilizing the regional security of East Asia. In particular, Pyongyang has launched several conventional attacks on South Korea. Although these attacks seem unpredictable and random, we attempt in this article to find some patterns in North Korean provocations. To this end, we employ a machine-learning technique to analyze news articles of the Korean Central New…
Detecting patterns in North Korean military provocations
Talking to Whom? The Changing Audience of North Korean Nuclear Tests
Objectives In this study, we develop a model based on big data analysis to find patterns in North Korean nuclear provocations. Methods Using automated text analysis classification through supervised machine learning techniques, we analyze the North Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) from 1997 to 2013. Results We find an interesting difference between the Kim Jong‐il era and the Kim and Jong‐un period, implying a major shift in the nuclear policy o…
The Internet, Social Capital, and Civic Engagement in Asia
Non-governmental organizations and economic sanctionsi
How do non-governmental organizations (NGOs) affect sanction policies? Using two datasets of sanctions and NGOs, we study whether and how US-based NGOs working in a target state can influence the threat and implementation of sanctions initiated by the USA. At the threat stage, the sender government tends to perceive NGOs as a signaling device such that NGOs increase the probability of sanction threat. At the imposition stage, the presence of NGOs…
US foreign aid and economic policy concessions
Why do donors continue to provide foreign aid despite its failure to help poor countries over the past several decades? While some scholars argue that foreign aid is purely for humanitarian purposes, others assert that such aid serves as a tool to pressure recipient countries into accepting policy concessions. In this study, we subject these arguments to empirical testing using a dataset that integrates the amount of US aid and economic policies …
Do sanctions spell disaster? Economic sanctions, political institutions, and technological safety
Sanctions restrict or terminate economic relations between two or more countries, directly and negatively influencing sanctioned countries’ companies. We argue that sanctions are similar to recessions—both reduce economic activity in affected countries. Less economic activity results in a lower accident risk as companies use their productive facilities less. Reduced revenues also force companies to adjust by cutting costs, which includes spending…
Renewable energy policies and household solid fuel dependence
Economic Sanctions and Government Spending Adjustments
Economic sanctions research suggests that sanctioned countries’ overall economic costs tend to be low. This article argues that, despite this, sanction costs can force the governments of these countries to reallocate budget resources from low-priority spending categories to other categories in an effort to minimize their political costs. One such low-priority category is disaster preparedness and mitigation. The authors show that economic sanctio…
When Does Audience Matter? Challengers’ Stability and Audience Costs
In this article, we argue that the degree to which audience costs work depends on the challenger state's leader stability. Unlike in the previous literature, we attempt to depart from a simple categorical comparison among regime types. Instead, we argue that the magnitude of audience costs varies continuously throughout the spectrum of a leader's stability. We employ probit regression with a squared term of stability, utilizing a large-N dataset …
Economic sanctions, repression capacity, and human rights
What is the relationship between economic sanctions and the human rights conditions of target countries? We suggest a two-stage mechanism to explain how sanctions deteriorate the human rights condition in the target country. In the repressive capacity stage, sanctions increase the capacity the target government can use for political repression. We introduce the concepts of political corruption, judicial dependence, and the government's media cens…
Clearing the air
The Shadow Economy and Social Change in North Korea
North Koreans have relied on the shadow economy since the collapse of socialism in the 1990s, but little is known about the degree to which informal markets have influenced the country's everyday politics. Based on a large-scale survey of defectors, as well as interviews with almost 100 defectors, including some who had been high-ranking officials prior to leaving North Korea, this article finds that the shadow economy has elicited many changes. …
The effect of economic coercion on companies’ foreign direct investment decisions
Existing research on the relationship between economic coercion and foreign direct investment suggests that sanctions have no effect on investments in targeted countries or may even encourage investment inflows. A key limitation of this research, however, is its aggregate country-level focus, which fails to capture company-level decision-making processes and factors shaping them. In contrast, this paper evaluates multinational companies’ investme…
Economic Sanctions by Non-Democracies
Do political institutions matter in explaining how economic sanctions are used? The current understanding of sanctions imposed by non-democratic sender countries is limited in the literature, as existing theories predominantly focus on the behaviors and strategies of democratic sender countries, leaving a notable gap in systematic comprehension. Using the existing dataset on sanctions, we theoretically and empirically distinguished characteristic…
Economics (25 works) · Political science (25 works) · Law (18 works) · Law (15 works) · Politics (15 works) · Sanctions (13 works) · Business (12 works) · Economic sanctions (12 works) · Economic Sanctions and International Relations (12 works) · Computer Science (10 works)