Sungmin Park is a fourth-year graduate student in the Department of Economics at the Ohio State University. He joined the economics PhD program in 2019 after studying math and financial economics at Columbia University and working at the Bank of Korea. His research fields are microeconomic theory and labor economics.
Sungmin’s dissertation is about using the mathematical tools of information economics and game theory to offer new insights about familiar phenomena. In his most recent work with his classmate Changyeop Lee, he studies how investment banks help entrepreneurs raise capital from investors—such as when Morgan Stanley helped Mark Zuckerberg sell Facebook shares to the general public in 2012. Contrary to the predominant academic view that investment banks are reputable experts, Sungmin models them as cheap-talking agents with neither expertise nor reputation. His results show how entrepreneurs can nonetheless contract with investment banks to make their recommendations credible and informative. His model predicts that optimal contracts let investment banks take significant risks of loss and let them earn hefty returns from successful sales, in line with typical deals observed on Wall Street.
As a Distinguished University Fellow and a winner of Larry and Shelia Kantor award for his service to the graduate student community, Sungmin has published in Journal of Banking & Finance and taught classes such as Elementary Econometrics and Intermediate Macroeconomic Theory. His favorite aspect about Ohio State is its school spirit. In his spare time, he has been playing the cello for over twenty years and is a proud member of the Buckeye Philharmonic Orchestra.
