Hi, I'm Kristy Kim.
I'm a PhD Candidate in Economics at UC Berkeley.

I am on the 2024-2025 job market! 
Find research projects, notes from school, and tid bits about me by scrolling below ↓









RESEARCH PROJECTS


From Pensions to Personnel: The Incentive Effects of Retirement Reform on Retention [JMP]

with Caleb Wroblewski

Private retirement plans are a crucial part of worker’s compensation in the U.S. and have long been thought to influence labor supply. This study uses a cohort-based regression discontinuity design to examine how a change in the retirement plan at the largest U.S. employer, the Federal Government, impacted the retention of employees over the entire life cycle. We find that workers with less valuable employer pensions but more portable retirement benefits were more likely to separate from the government around 15 and 30 years after beginning federal service. We find smaller, statistically insignificant effects in the first few years of employment. We also find evidence that the effects are driven by highly productive workers, identified through supplemental compensation or early promotions. Our results suggest that employees respond to changes in the value of retirement benefits by leaving employers for better outside options, but that employees may be inattentive or job-locked early in their careers. These findings demonstrate that non-wage compensation impacts labor supply decisions across a worker's lifecycle and the distribution of human capital over time, particularly in labor markets where employers compete through diverse compensation structures.

Welfare and the Act of Choosing 

with B. Douglas Bernheim and Dmitry Taubinsky
R&R at the Journal of Political Economy

The standard revealed-preference approach to welfare economics encounters fundamental difficulties when the act of choosing directly affects welfare through emotions such as guilt, pride, and anxiety. We address this problem by developing an approach that redefines consumption bundles in terms of the sensations they produce, and measures welfare by blending choice-based methods with self-reported well-being techniques. In applications to classic social preferences paradigms, our approach shows that standard revealed-preference methods, including those that exploit choices over menus, mismeasure welfare because preferences depend on choice sets, while self-reported happiness and satisfaction are not sufficient statistics for welfare.

Behavioral Responses to Taxation of Inherited Property

with Sarah Baker

This paper investigates the intertemporal elasticity of inherited property in California. Using San Francisco and Los Angeles counties, we find that households accelerated inter-vivos property transfers to their children by about 13 to 18 months in response to a future tax increase. Properties in the top income decile neighborhoods were more responsive than other groups. As a consequence of wealthy households retiming their transfers to avoid taxes, our results imply a significant reduction in government revenue and an exacerbation of inequality in tax liabilities.


NOTES FROM THE PHD AND UNDERGRAD (UC BERKELEY + SOME)

Links below lead to Dropbox. If you cannot access them, you can contact me, and I will send you the file.


public economics
(econ 230b, 2021)
uc berkeley
e.saez & g.zucman

industrial organization
(econ 220a, 2021)
uc berkeley
b.handel

behavioral macro
(econ 236d, 2021)
uc berkeley
c.lian

public economics
(econ 230a, 2020)
uc berkeley
a.auerbach & d.yagan

industrial organization
(econ 220b, 2020)
uc berkeley
k.kawai

psych & econ
(econ 219b, 2020)
uc berkeley
s.dellavigna

macro labor
(econ 202b, 2020)
uc berkeley
b.schoefer

information econ
(econ 201b, 2020)
uc berkeley
h.ergin

metrics glm
(econ 240b, 2020)
uc berkeley
j.powell

macro rbc
(econ 202b, 2020)
uc berkeley
y.gorodnichenko

game theory
(econ 201b, 2020)
uc berkeley
s.kariv

macro consumption
(econ 202a, 2019)
uc berkeley
j.steinsson

macro growth
(econ 202a, 2019)
uc berkeley
d.romer

math camp
(econ 204, 2019)
uc berkeley
c.shannon

(math 203, 2018)
uchicago
s.hurtado-salazar

(math, 2018)
harvey mudd (yt)
f.su

(econ 174, 2016)
uc berkeley
f.finan

(econ c125, 2015)
uc berkeley
h.ollivier

(math w53, 2017)
uc berkeley
m.hutchings

(econ 140, 2015)
uc berkeley
e.duzhak

(econ 119, 2015)
uc berkeley
d.acland

(econ 100b, 2015)
uc berkeley
s.wood


A LITTLE BIT ABOUT ME


I am a sixth year PhD candidate in Economics at the University of California, Berkeley (go bears). ✨

My research interests lie in Public and Behavioral Economics. My job market paper studies how changes in non-wage compensation (retirement benefits) affect firm-specific labor supply across the lifecycle and firm-specific workforce composition. My other research focuses on the distributional impacts on tax-preferred property inheritances and behavioral welfare measures.

Outside of research, I like to doodle.

Contact me at kristykim [at] berkeley [dot] edu.