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JEONG-HO (JOHN) KIM Jk@Princeton.Edu JEONG-HO (JOHN) KIM http://scholar.princeton.edu/jkim [email protected] PRINCETON UNIVERSITY Placement Director: Steve Redding [email protected] 609 258 4016 Graduate Administrator: Laura Hedden [email protected] 609 258 4006 Office Contact Information Department of Economics, Princeton University Fisher Hall Princeton, NJ 08544 Mobile Phone: 609 751 2501 Undergraduate Studies A.B., Economics with Highest Honors Princeton University, Summa Cum Laude, 2010 Graduate Studies Princeton University, 2010 to present Ph.D. Candidate in Economics Thesis Title: “Essays in Financial Economics” Expected Completion Date: May 2016 M.A. Economics, Princeton University, 2012 References Professor Christopher A. Sims (main advisor) Professor Wei Xiong Department of Economics Department of Economics Princeton University Princeton University (609) 258-4033, [email protected] (609) 258-0282, [email protected] Professor Motohiro Yogo Department of Economics Princeton University (609) 258- 4467, [email protected] Teaching and Research Fields Primary Fields Financial Economics, Applied Theory Secondary Fields Applied Econometrics, Industrial Organization, Macroeconomics Research Experience: 2009 – 2010 Research Assistant for Professor Marco Battaglini 2008 – 2009 Research Assistant for Professors Faruk Gul and Wolfgang Pesendorfer 1 Teaching Experience Fall 2015 Econ 468/Finance 568, Undergraduate/Graduate Behavioral Finance and Economics Teaching assistant for Professor Harrison Hong Summer 2015 Econ 500, Graduate Mathematics for Economists Teaching assistant for Professor Juan Pablo Xandri Spring 2015 WoodyWoo 582F, Graduate House of Debt: Understanding Macro & Financial Policy Teaching assistant for Professor Atif R. Mian Fall 2012 Econ 362, Undergraduate Financial Investments Teaching assistant for Professor Harrison Hong Spring 2012 Econ 315, Undergraduate Macroeconomics of Labor Markets Teaching assistant for Professor Theodore Papageorgiou Fall 2011 Econ 342, Undergraduate Money and Banking Teaching assistant for Professor Christopher A. Sims Professional Activities The Yale Summer School in Behavioral Finance, 2011. Honors, Scholarships, and Fellowships 2014 The Dean's Fund for Scholarly Travel 2012 – 2015 Ph.D. research funding from a grant to Prof. Christopher A. Sims as part of the NSF's Center for the Science of Information 2012 Summer RA funds from the Economic Theory Center 2010 – 2011 The Harold Willis Dodds Merit Fellowship in Economics 2010 – 2015 Princeton University Graduate Fellowship 2010 The Halbert White ’72 Prize in Economics Seminar and Conference Presentations 2015 Princeton Finance Research Workshop, Rutgers Mathematical Finance Seminar 2014 Princeton Student Research Workshop, Summer School of the Econometric Society, North American Summer Meeting of the Econometric Society Job Market Paper “Why the Active Management Industry Grew: Learning about Heterogeneity in Skills” Abstract: We argue that active management's growth is not puzzling despite the industry's poor track record. Our explanation features learning about heterogeneity in skills and decreasing returns to scale at both the fund level and the aggregate level. Investors are uncertain about parameters governing fund returns, and they learn about them from realized returns. After observing a fund's negative performance, investors infer that the fund manager's skill is lower than expected rather than that the aggregate-level decreasing returns to scale is higher than expected. Optimism about the industry as a whole comes at the expense of disappointment about existing individual funds. But this disappointment is significantly muted away by the sustained entry of new funds. If this force is strong enough, investors increase their allocation to active management. On the other hand, fund-level decreasing returns to scale will imply that the average unit cost associated with investing in active management is lower as the number of funds increases and, ceteris paribus, make the industry grow even bigger. Quantitatively, our story can keep the whole fund industry growing even if its performance is unimpressive and can reproduce salient features of the time series of industry size. It can also rationalize the empirical fact that this industry growth coincides with net fund entry over time. 2 Research Papers “Discrete Actions in Information-Constrained Decision Problems” (with Junehyuk Jung, Filip Matějka, and Christopher A. Sims) Abstract: Changes in economic behavior often appear to be delayed and discontinuous, even in contexts where rational behavior seems to imply immediate and continuously distributed reactions to market signals. One possible explanation is the presence of information-processing costs. Individuals are constantly processing external information and translating it into actions. This draws on limited resources of attention and requires economizing on attention devoted to signals related to economic behavior. A natural measure of such costs is based on Shannon's measure of "channel capacity". Introducing information costs based on Shannon's measure into a standard framework of decision-making under uncertainty turns out to imply that discretely distributed actions, and thus actions that persist across repetitions of the same decision problem, are very likely to emerge in settings that without information costs would imply continuously distributed behavior. We show how these results apply to the behavior of a risk-averse monopoly price setter and to an investor choosing portfolio allocations, as well as to some mathematically simpler "tracking" problems that illustrate the mechanism. Interpreting the behavior in our examples ignoring information costs and postulating fixed ("menu") costs of adjustment would lead to mistaken conclusions. “Monetary Policy and Mutual Funds: Reaching for Yield in Response to Low Rates” (with Delwin Olivan) Abstract: This paper studies the effect of monetary policy and flow-performance incentives on risk taking for the class of Active Equity Mutual Funds. First, we document that the past decade provided several conditions that encouraged these funds to "reach for yield," with low interest rates encouraging large outflows from Money Market Funds (MMFs). Leveraging previous studies on similar reaching for yield by MMFs, we analyze fund returns and risk taking during and around the recent financial crisis. We observe that low interest rate periods tend to be associated with both higher measures of performance and excessive risk taking. Further, we utilize discrete Fed announcements providing forward guidance about interest rates and asset purchases to inform event studies analyzing these factors. Our results are broadly consistent with these funds reaching for yield, and provide evidence of a strong interaction between unconventional low-rate policy and mutual fund behavior. Research Papers in Progress “The Big Implications of Small Amount of Inattention in Coordination Games” Other Experience Summer 2009 Summer Intern at Quantitative Strategy Team, Samsung Asset Management Seoul, Korea 3 .
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