We are proud to announce that Jaedo Choi, Economics alumnus (PhD 2022) has received the 2025 Philippe Martin Award! The Sciences Po & CEPR Philippe Martin Award rewards a paper written by junior scholars for its high-quality, pushing the frontier in the research themes of international trade, economic geography or international macroeconomics/finance.
Jaedo Choi is an Assistant Professor of Economics at The University of Texas at Austin. He works on international and macroeconomics topics, including international trade, industrial policy and technology transfer. He received a BA from Yonsei University (2014) and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan (2022). Prior to joining UT Austin, he worked at the Federal Reserve Board.
The prize-winning paper, Industrialization and the Big Push: Theory and Evidence from South Korea, examines the "relevance of one-time 'big push' policy intervention as an instrument that could resolve “coordination failures” which can leave an economy stuck at an inefficient equilibrium with a low level of technology adoption. Korea implemented between 1973 and 1979 a large-scale industrial policy that temporarily subsidized the adoption of modern technology in heavy manufacturing sectors to spur rapid economic growth and secure high export performance. Relying on novel historical microdata, Choi and Shim’s work sets out to establish whether (or not) this policy choice was responsible for the rapid industrialization in Korea during this period."
