معرفی
Younghwan Byun is a Research Fellow (Assistant Professor) at the Social Policy Unit of the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI), Stockholm University. He joined SOFI as a postdoc researcher in October 2015 and has been working as a research fellow since 2020.
His research focuses on comparative social policy and welfare states, labor market institutions, income inequality, and poverty. His overarching research theme examines under what conditions social policies and labor market institutions can more effectively mediate inequality and poverty in response to structural changes like technological change, pandemics, immigration, and demographic aging. His methodological approach primarily relies on statistical analysis but also incorporates qualitative methods.
Byun's research portfolio includes four major projects: 1) A comparative study among OECD countries examining how tax and transfer policy affects government capacity to reduce income inequality (funded by FORTE); 2) Comparative research on welfare development in East Asia, where he constructed the East Asian Social Policy Dataset (SPEAD) (funded by Korea Foundation); 3) Research on non-state social welfare during the COVID-19 pandemic (funded by FORMAS); and 4) Research on trade unions and wage inequality in the knowledge economy (funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond).
His teaching activities include courses on Globalization, Economy, and Politics in Asia for the MA program in Asian Studies, Labor relations and employment policy in Asia for SOFI's Labor Market Studies with Management course, and Master thesis supervision. He has also delivered invited lectures on the Swedish welfare state to government delegations from multiple countries including Malaysia, Vietnam, Uzbekistan, Korea, and Taiwan.
Byun earned his BA at Yonsei University, Korea, and completed his MA and PhD in political science (with comparative politics major and public policy minor) at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA in 2016. His doctoral thesis, supervised by Janet Gornick, examined cross-national and longitudinal variation in the size of middle-income strata in 22 OECD countries from 1980 to 2010, highlighting the positive effects of trade unions on middle-income strata formation.
