Browsing by Author "Kim, Daniel"

This paper examines whether the National Pension Service’s (NPS) November 2018 adoption of Korea’s Stewardship Code narrowed the Korea Discount, the persistent undervaluation of Korean equities relative to international peers. Using a firm-year panel of listed firms across 41 countries from 2012 to 2023, I exploit the NPS’s stewardship adoption as a discrete policy event and estimate a continuous-treatment two-way fixed-effects difference-in-differences model, with treatment intensity measured by each Korean firm’s pre-treatment NPS ownership share. I evaluate effects on raw valuation multiples, a set of governance-relevant outcomes, and a firm-year Korea Discount measure I construct by adapting the "warranted-multiple" approach of Bhojraj and Lee (2002). I find that firms with greater pre-treatment NPS ownership experienced a relative decline in price-to-earnings and price-to-cash-flow multiples after adoption, and that the firm-level Korea Discount widened for NPS-owned firms. Tests of the governance channels produce limited evidence of the behavioral shifts theorized to come from improved stewardship, and a binned robustness specification shows that the elect does not scale uniformly with the size of the NPS’s ownership stake. These results suggest that institutional monitoring by the NPS did not deliver the valuation gains envisioned by Korea’s governance reform agenda, providing insights for both Korean policymakers and investors.

Darwin’s finches are a model for adaptive radiation and niche partitioning, showcasing species that recently diverged to occupy specific niches within the Galapagos archipelago. A previous study using whole genome sequencing of 120 individuals representing Darwin's finch species in Lamichhaney et al. (2015) identified fixed genomic regions between species possessing blunt vs. pointed beaks. Among these, the 240kb ALX1 locus contained the highest fixation of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), including both coding and noncoding SNPs. Though ALX1 is implicated in craniofacial development, the extent to which differences in coding and noncoding genetic variants affect avian beak morphology has yet to be elucidated. We utilized Geospiza magnirostris and Geospiza difficilis as finch models given their beaks pertain to extremes on the morphological spectrum. We evaluated the effect of L110P and I209V mutations in the ALX1 coding region using chicken (Gallus gallus) in ovo RCAS-mediated manipulation. Next, we combined assay for transposase-accessible chromatin sequencing (ATAC-seq) from avian species and differential SNP data to identify candidate cis-regulatory elements (CREs) and tested their effects using luciferase reporter assays. Then, we cloned positive enhancers in a variety of finch species to functionally test them and analyze their sequences. Our experiments indicated no overt phenotypic difference between individuals overexpressing ALX1 variants. However, luciferase assays of candidate CREs revealed differential activity of 2 distinct regions: CRE1 and CRE8. Further dissection revealed a core conserved region within CRE8 to be insufficient in driving full expression. Luciferase assays testing activity of both regions in multiple finch species indicated varied functional activity of enhancers across species. Sequence similarity and tree analyses indicated distinct evolutionary pathways pertaining to each region that were specific to individuals rather than species. Motif enrichment analysis suggested the presence of varying transcription factor binding sites between individuals, possibly differentially modulating enhancer activity. Altogether, our work dissects the contribution of coding and noncoding polymorphisms in the ALX1 locus to the adaptive evolution of Darwin's finches highlighting the role of noncoding genetic variation in trait diversification across closely related species.