Child well-being in Korea

Abstract

This dissertation evaluates the effect of policies for children in South Korea focusing on the case of teenagers. This dissertation consists of three chapters. The first chapter evaluates the impact of a school counseling program called Wee Class by using Difference-in-Differences analysis. The second chapter tries to find the correlation between air pollution and teenager’s subjective well-being within the Two-Stage Least Squares, and discusses policy implication. Lastly, the third chapter measures multicultural children’s subjective well-being affected by Korea’s multicultural policy within the individual fixed effect. These studies found the positive impact of school counseling program on students’ school adaptation, the negative effect of air pollution on teenager’s subjective well-being, and the positive impact of multicultural policy on multicultural children’s subjective well-being in elementary school.