UEA Recognizes Yale Graduate Student 

Ryungha Oh, a PhD student in Yale’s Department of Economics, has won the Urban Economics Association’s (UEA) Prize for Best Student Paper. The winning paper, titled “What Causes Agglomeration of Services? Theory and Evidence from Seoul '' was co-authored with Jaeeun Seo of MIT.  

The paper explores trip chaining and demand spillover. When consumers take a trip to buy goods, they are likely to visit multiple stores in the area, resulting in an agglomeration of services and local demand increases. Through micro household travel survey data and commercial area data from Seoul, Oh and Seo developed a quantitative urban model for tracing this mechanism. The paper goes on to show that inequality in access to these service markets can worsen income inequality.


Oh says she is “greatly pleased to receive this award, because this was the first opportunity to present our work in public that we have been working on for a few years,” and plans to continue surveying this summer to provide further proof for the model and work on a final draft of the award-winning paper.

Ryungha Oh Awarded ECG Sylff Fellowship

The Annual Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund (Sylff) fellowship awards recognize outstanding economics PhD students in development economics and trade at Yale.