2019 Dissertation Award Honorable Mention: Terry (Seok Min) Moon

Terry (Seok Min) Moon is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of British Columbia. His research interests lie at the intersection of public economics and corporate finance. Broadly, the main goal of his current research is to understand how market frictions affect real investment and resource allocations in the economy. In particular, he is interested in how taxation of business income affects corporate outcomes, such as investment and capital structure.

Terry received his Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University in June 2019. In the first chapter of his dissertation, “Essays on Capital Taxation, CEO Networks, and Real Investment,” he studies the effects of capital gains taxes on firms’ investment by exploiting a unique institutional feature in Korea, where capital gains tax rates vary by firm size, and a policy reform that reduced the tax rates for firms affected by the changes in regulations. In the second chapter, he and his co-author (Sungki Hong) quantify the long-run effects of reducing capital gains taxes on aggregate investment by developing a dynamic general equilibrium model with heterogenous firms, and by calibrating the model based on the reduced-form estimates from his first chapter. In the third chapter, joint with David Schoenherr, he investigates the role of CEO networks and political patronage on the allocation of bank credits in private markets using hand-collected data on private bank loans and CEOs’ alumni networks.