Woo Kim, a first-year Assistant Professor, has written a piece in VoxChina about his research into the Korean government’s baby bonus program. In the early 2000s, the Korean government began giving cash payments to parents of newborn babies that depended on where a family lived, when they had their baby and how many children they already had.
Woo investigates how this program affected the number of children born and also how it affected newborn health outcomes. Looking at the 2015 female population in Korea, Woo’s results imply these females would have had 450,000 less babies across their lifetime in the absence of the government baby bonus policy. While babies born because of this policy had lower gestational age, the policy really increased fertility rates among working mothers and these working mothers gave birth to babies with higher birth weights.