Competition for limited seats in prestigious colleges generates a "rat-race" equilibrium effect, driving demand for parental investment. I develop and estimate a dynamic tournament model where each household chooses tutoring quality, tutoring hours, and student self-study hours. The model explains persistently high educational investment despite modest effects on test score, as students maintain investment to avoid dropping to lower tiers. Using the estimated model, I find that substantial portion of tutoring is driven by the competition channel rather than the human capital channel directly affecting individual wage conditional on college quality. While parental investment reinforces earnings persistence across generations, self-study acts as a moderating force. Counterfactual analysis shows expanding elite college seats reduces tutoring expenditure.

• Presented at: Hitotsubashi University, Stone Center at U Chicago, GRIPS, Toulouse Economics of Education workshop, University of Southampton, SOLE, SEHO, Kansai Labor, Yokohama National University, Korea University, Mannheim Family Economics Workshop, UNSW, ANU, Kyoto U, IAAE, University of Gothenburg, Missouri University S&T,  KDI, KIEP, KLI, SEA, DSE Summer School, AASLE, SBU Game Theory, WEAI

• This paper was previously presented as "Parental Investment, Child's Efforts, and Intergenerational Mobility"

• Recognition: KAEA Best Job Market Paper Award (2022) (news article), Award for Excellence in Research (Dissertation Award) at Stony Brook University (2023) 

We propose easy econometric methods to test for positive assortative mating. Compared to existing methods such as by Siow (2015), our procedure avoids the cost associated with imposing positive assortative mating restrictions, and it allows for more general tests. The test does not require numerical optimization, and the test statistics can be calculated easily. We compare the power of the tests using simulation. The empirical application suggests that the null hypothesis of no assortative mating is rejected for selected years of CPS data that range from 1962 to 2019.

We investigate how reduced in-person school days affect educational inequality through parental responses. Exploiting quasi-experimental variation in school-level in-person days and a linked administrative–survey panel, we find that each ten-day loss increases household tutoring expenditure by 4 percent and within-school test-score dispersion by 25 percent. We build and estimate a household choice model where formal schooling and tutoring jointly generate test scores. Estimates suggest tutoring substitutes for in-person days and that closures burden low-income households disproportionately. Counterfactual simulations show that a means-tested tutoring-voucher program matches the overall inequality reduction of a universal scheme while cutting costs by 20 percent.

• Media Coverage: The Kyunghyang Shinmun

The allocation of resources within the household has been extensively theorized, but empirical evidence on this topic has been very scarce. Endogeneity concerns hinder this type of analysis due to the lack of identifying variation within the household. In this paper, we overcome these difficulties by exploiting a unique setting that introduced random variation in resource allocation within households. We evaluate the effects of a program that provided alternative delivery methods of conditional cash transfers in Bogotá, Colombia, and allocated resources at the child level. The individual randomization implied that some households had treated and untreated siblings, allowing us to extend the analysis to estimate spillover effects of the program on beneficiaries and their siblings. We find that cash transfers increase short-run attendance for treated children but decrease the likelihood of graduating college for untreated siblings of treated students. We rationalize these results by estimating and validating a dynamic model of household schooling decisions for siblings. The estimated model is consistent with low parental inequality aversion, suggesting parents tend to reinforce educational disparities among their children. Counterfactual analyses demonstrate that shutting down this inequality aversion channel leads to understating the effects of cash transfers on household educational outcomes.

• I present this paper at Australian National University, University of Technology Sydney, Korea University, Kyoto University, ISER at Osaka University, Labor economics workshop at University of Tokyo, AASLE 2023, SOLE/AASLE/EALE 2025, Sejong Applied Micro Workshop, and Econometric Society World Congress.  Coauthors' presentations are not included in this list.