Dukgon (Billy) Kang

I have spent my early 20s as an enthusiastic student who dreamed of becoming a researcher with the capability to contribute to the world with good research. Over the past few years, I have read more than 400 books. My reading list was prioritized by the frequency of works cited in books or research, and materials recommended in cold emails. By this, I tried to build a sort of academic tree of thought. Through reading many books and academic journals, I developed a keen insight on recognizing the main idea and purpose of various works. Since attending high school with classical education, my reading continued from Homer and Socrates to renowned scholars including Amartya Sen, professor Raj Chetty, and professor Melissa Dell. I always had a genuine curiosity for questions such as "How economic development is made in different countries, finding externalities around us, the role and history of democracy, historical change of cost of information, relation between causation and correlation and what is good society."

Among many great books, the book 'Trust' by Francis Fukuyama drew my attention for its completeness in explaining different economic outcomes using the matter of culture. To me, the narration of culture and history had more integrity in explaining economic development than on math and numbers alone.

Also, after reading the works of leading scholars in the field, I realized that the ability to use programming tools to handle the data is a huge asset in research. Thus, I am currently taking private lessons from my former colleagues to learn Python and R.

I am interested in development economics, political economics, and cultural economics. In particular, I want to investigate research topics such as historical change of cost of political information using large data sets, the persistence effects of the Silk Road in East Asia, and validity of data used in research. I am also currently conducting my own research on the role and cultural effects of Afghan traders who were former government officials of the Soviet Union in the economic rise of Yiwu, China, which is one of the biggest commodity markets in the world.

Participated as a guest member through cold email.