Colloquium in Early October 2026 Eunjoo Cho (Jeonbuk National University) Belonging to the World follows ordinary young people into adulthood, drawing on years of interviews and fieldwork with teenagers and young adults, as well as teachers and parents. It asks how and why Korean society so systematically fails to give Read more…
Colloquium in August 2026 Jiseon Baek (Reproductive Ageing Group, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research) A defining feature of marriage migration in South Korea is agency-arranged “commodified marriage.” Despite expectations, these migrant women exhibit fertility levels similar to or lower than Korean native women. This study investigates this trend by Read more…
Colloquium in May 2026 Sungkyun Lee (University of Ulsan) It is generally known that depression is higher among the poor than among the non-poor, but there is not much empirical research on the specific socio-psychological pathways through which poverty influences depression. This study thus identifies the direct effects of poverty Read more…
Colloquium in April 2026 Soo-yong Byun (Penn State University) Using data from the Korean Education Longitudinal Study of 2013, this stud examined how the “elite educational pathway” in South Korea—linking English kindergartens, private elementary schools, international middle schools (more precisely, private middle schools), specialized and autonomous private high schools, and Read more…
Colloquium in February 2026 Sang-soo Chang (Sunchon University) Meritocracy is not a concept that explains the inequality, but an ideology that justifies it. Industrial society is not as meritocratic as we might think, a fact that can be proven logically and empirically. Empirical data show that meritocracies in Western Europe, Read more…
Colloquium in January 2026 Bongoh Kye(Kookmin University) This study presents findings on the relationship between household income and fertility using administrative data. Although the relationship between income and fertility is of great importance in fertility research, data limitations have made it difficult to produce reliable findings on this topic. To Read more…
Colloquium in December 2025 Young-Mi (Yonsei University) This study analyzes changes in the sorting structure between occupations and firms in the Korean labor market. While the importance of firm effects in wage inequality trends has been confirmed in previous studies (Lee Byung-hee, 2023), the structure in which occupation and firm Read more…
Colloquium in November 2025 Sinn Won Han (Yonsei University) Japan and South Korea both experienced rapid declines in total fertility rates (TFR) through the early 2000s, but their trajectories have since diverged, with Korea’s TFR remaining far below Japan’s. This presentation examines how youth labor market conditions help explain this Read more…
Colloquium in October 2025 Han Il Chang (Kookmin University) This study develops a theory that the effect of economic hardship on anti-democratic attitudes—channeled through feelings of gender deprivation—varies across gender and generations. According to the theory, as democracy advances gender equality, it increases young women’s entry to the labor market Read more…
Colloquium in September 2025 Dohoon Lee (Seoul National University) How does intergenerational social mobility matter for family formation and childbearing? To address this question, this study (1) distinguishes between relative and absolute mobility; (2) conceptualizes intergenerational mobility as a central social contextual factor shaping demographic behaviors; and (3) empirically evaluates Read more…