Browsing by Author "Saade, Ahmed J."

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    Essays on contemporary issues in the South Korean economy
    (Cranfield University, 2023-02) Saade, Ahmed J.; Alexiou, Constantinos; Belghitar, Yacine
    This doctoral thesis sheds light on some issues that are characteristic of the South Korean socioeconomic landscape today. In a series of three papers, I empirically address important questions faced by policy makers of this country, whilst also contributing to major debates currently taking place within the Economics discipline. In the first chapter, I investigate the effects of robotization on Korean workers’ labor supply from the lens of dynamic monopsony. I show that an increase in the density of industrial robots is associated with manufacturing workers becoming more responsive to a change in wages in their decision to quit to non-employment, and that the opposite is true for non-manufacturing workers. The second chapter contributes to the discussion on youth unemployment in South Korea, in tandem with the question of the high turnover rate within the nation’s Nursing profession. I find that the unemployment rate at time of graduation has scarring effects on Nurses’ wages, workhours, and subjective wellbeing. The final chapter of this dissertation tackles the problem of social isolation among Korean elders and contributes to the very small literature on the economic determinants of this phenomenon. I offer the first set of causal evidence linking the social isolation of elders with their adult children’s inheritance expectations.
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    Inheritance expectations and social isolation: evidence from South Korea
    (2024-11-30) Saade, Ahmed J.; Alexiou, Constantinos; Belghitar, Yacine
    Little is known about the economic causes of social isolation among elders in spite of the phenomenon becoming a growing policy concern in many developed countries with ageing populations. This paper fills this gap by assessing the role of inheritance as a novel determinant of social isolation among elders. Drawing on bequest motive theory as well as aspirations theory, we utilize a granular dataset from South Korea spanning the period 2008 – 2020. The nascent evidence suggests that adult children having high inheritance expectations is beneficial to parents. In particular, having higher inheritance expectations is found to increase the frequency of parent-child meetings, thus lowering the risk of parents’ isolation. Additionally, mothers who report a higher likelihood of leaving an inheritance to their children are less isolated and disclose better well-being. Lastly, we find that the split of inheritance following a father’s death has consequences on the subsequent isolation of mothers. To the best of our knowledge this is the first study that investigates the direct role of inheritance in the creation of elderly social isolation, hence providing useful insights to policymakers of countries facing this problem.
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    Insights from a Catholic school’s transition to distance learning during Covid-19
    (Taylor and Francis, 2022-11-28) Wright, Samuel; Park, Yun Soo; Saade, Ahmed J.
    Drawing upon 15 semi-structured interviews with teachers at a Catholic school in the British city of Hull, we offer new qualitative insights on the effects of students’ unequal access to digital tools when switching to distance learning in the context of COVID-19 school closures. During the 2020–2021 academic year, this school serving pupils from highly dissimilar socioeconomic backgrounds distributed 300 laptops to students who did not own any digital learning device. It emerges that students with limited access to devices suffered negative impacts on their academic performance, and that this effect also applied to students who had access to a mobile device and hence did not receive a laptop. Our interviews also suggest that having to share a device with another family member leads to more absenteeism and a fall in academic attainment. Low parental involvement is shown to have negative effects on students’ attainment, particularly for children from deprived backgrounds. Finally, poorer students are seen to become isolated from peers, with diminishing social skills throughout lockdowns due to their lack of access to digital tools.
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    Poverty considerations and income aspiration: a tale of two cities
    (Empirical Economics Letters, 2020-02-01) Saade, Ahmed J.; Alexiou, Constantinos
    The aim of this paper is to explore the role of poverty exposure in affecting income aspirations. In this direction, we collect samples from two relatively adjacent cities in Lebanon each with a different socioeconomic setting. The emerging evidence suggests that higher levels of education positively affects income aspirations, with education abroad being the most impactful across all estimated equations. The female population however consistently was found to have lower aspirations than their male counterparts across all estimated equations.
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    Robotization and labor supply in the context of a dynamic monopsony: novel evidence from South Korea
    (Institute of Economic Research (Korea) et al.,, 2022-08-31) Saade, Ahmed J.; Alexiou, Constantinos; Belghitar, Yacine
    We estimate the effects of robotization on labor supply in Manufacturing, Services and the whole of the South Korean economy using exponential hazard and a random effects logit methodologies over the period 1999-2019. Our findings suggest that a larger operational stock of industrial robots in manufacturing is associated with manufacturing (non-manufacturing) workers becoming more (less) responsive to a change in wages in their decision to quit to non-employment, whilst the ease with which firms can poach workers is found to be unaffected by robotization.
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    The scarring effects of initial labor market conditions on South Korean nurses
    (Seoul National University, 2024-08-31) Saade, Ahmed J.; Alexiou, Constantinos; Belghitar, Yacine
    Using a longitudinal dataset spanning the period 2000-2020, and an identification strategy based on instrumental variables, we examine the existence of scarring in the context of the Korean nursing profession. We find that the prevailing unemployment rate at time of graduation has negative effects on nurses’ wages that remain highly significant up to 6 years after joining the labor market, while working hours are positively scarred for up to 10 years. We also estimate a series of happiness equations to understand nurses’ experiences after joining the labor market, and find that a higher unemployment rate at time of graduation is associated with feelings of worse financial conditions, less happy lives, and lower income satisfaction.