Contact Information

Office Hours

• Monday 4:15 pm - 6:00 pm
• Tuesday 9:00 am - 10:45 am
• Note: Office hours also available by appointment.

Hongkil Kim is an applied macroeconomist working in the areas of macroeconomics and money and banking. His theoretical inspirations for empirical models are based on Post-Keynesian and Structuralist Macroeconomics, Modern Money Theory (MMT), Quantity Theory of Disaggregated Credit, Financial Instability Hypothesis, and Money View. He supports the growing movement for pluralism in economics and his research reflects his open-minded engagement with both mainstream and heterodox traditions. His research is primarily focused on sovereign money/bank credit creation and its empirical relevance to key macroeconomic variables such as inflation and interest rates (asset prices). With this approach, he explores the current fiat money system in which most of the money supply is created and allocated by profit-seeking banks. He aspires to research and impart the state-of-the-art knowledge to his students at UNCA that is committed to embracing applied economics and intellectual pluralism. He also sees great potential for involving students in his research.

His primary responsibility as an instructor is to help his students develop into self-directed, self-corrective, life-long economics learners. To this end, He motivates students to form their own critical and flexible thinking by exposing them to alternative paradigms and tools and furthermore to communicate effectively with others. His lectures are not simply content delivery but rather knowledge- and skill-building through interactive argumentation. For instance, He brings up a current economic/policy issue to class and invite students to share their opinions. His job is to listen carefully to students’ reasoning and to encourage them to think from diverse angles, for example, from supply, demand, and accounting perspectives as well as from political, behavioral/psychological, and also racial/social perspectives. Then, He helps them to refine their arguments with formal economic theories, challenge each theory/argument with an alternative viewpoint, and ask students again which theory(ies) seems most empirically and theoretically relevant in a specific historical or institutional setting. He has found that in this way students, come to recognize that each theory captures part of the truth but no theory has it all, so they have to embrace diverse (and sometimes opposing) theories in order to understand the ever-changing world. He also guides students to write a paper based on supplementary materials relevant to the discussion. This interactive lecture style not only leads to a more substantive and lasting understanding of difficult economic concepts and issues, but also to training students in critical listening, reading, speaking, and writing, which the liberal arts education seeks to foster.

Education

• Ph.D. and M.A., Economics, University of Missouri – Kansas City
• B.C. Economics and Finance, University of Newcastle, Australia

Teaching Experience

• Econ 101: Principles of Macroeconomics
• Econ 103: Introductory Economic Analysis
• Econ 301(291): Intermediate Macroeconomics
• Econ 306: Corporate Finance
• Econ 342: Money and Financial System 4
• Econ 365: Econometrics
• Econ 373: Financial Macroeconomics

Publications

Hongkil Kim. (forthcoming March 2022). “Minsky’s Theory of Inflation and its Theoretical and Empirical Relevance to Credit-Driven Economies.” Journal of Economic Issues.

Hongkil Kim. (2021). “Sovereign Currency and Long-term Interest rates.” International Review of Applied Economics. 35 (3-4): 577-596. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02692171.2021.1908237

Hongkil Kim. (2020). “A Missing Element in the Empirical Post Keynesian theory of Inflation  – Total Credits to Households: A first-differenced VAR approach to US Inflation.” Journal of Post Keynesian Economics. 43 (4): 640-656. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01603477.2019.1672559

Hongkil Kim. (2020). “The Relationship between Public Debt Accumulation and Default Risk under the ECB’s Conventional vs. Non-standard Monetary Policy: a Panel data analysis of 9 Eurozone countries (2000-2015).” Journal of Post Keynesian Economics. 43 (1): 112-130. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01603477.2019.1673176

Hongkil Kim. (2019). “Interest rate Causality between the Federal Funds rate and the Long- term Market Interest rates”, Review of Keynesian Economics, 7 (3): 388-401. https://www.elgaronline.com/view/journals/roke/7-3/roke.2019.03.08.xml 

Working Papers

Hongkil Kim and Aaron Kohatsu (undergraduate student). “Sovereign Currency and the Relationship between Public Debt and Growth.” European Journal of Economics and Economic Policies: Intervention. (Revise and Resubmit)

Hongkil Kim. “Minsky’s Theory of Inflation: An Empirical Analysis of OECD countries.” Cambridge Journal of Economics. (Submitted for Initial Review)

Hongkil Kim and Eric Tymoigne. “Monetary Sovereignty and Long-term Interest rates in History.” Cambridge Journal of Economics. (Submitted for Initial Review)

Hongkil Kim and Hunter Griffin (undergraduate student). “Why not Sovereign Money AND Job Guarantee?” Real-World Economics Review. (Submitted for Initial Review)

Hongkil Kim and Hunter Griffin (undergraduate student). “Inflation in OECD countries: An Empirical Assessment of a Structuralist theory of Inflation.” Metroeconomica. (Submitted for Initial Review)