Recently, economic sanctions have not been effective in changing the behavior of a sanctioned country. Dr. Yong Lee examines how an autocratic regime domestically counters the impact of economic sanctions, specifically, how the easing and tightening of sanctions impact the urban areas relative to the hinterlands in North Korea. Using the satellite luminosity data, he argues sanctions that fail to change the autocrat's behavior increase inequality at a cost to the already marginalized hinterlands.

Dr. Lee's research intersects the fields of economic development, urban economics and international economics, with a regional focus on Korea and East Asia. His recent work examines the impact of economic sanctions on North Korea's urban elites, and the impact of education policy on migration and intergenerational mobility in South Korea.

Dr. Lee joined the Korea Program as the SK Center Fellow at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) in the fall 2014. Prior to joining Stanford, Lee was an assistant professor of economics at Williams College in Massachusetts. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees in architecture from Seoul National University, a master of public policy from Duke University, and a master's degree and doctorate in economics from Brown University. He also worked as a real estate development consultant and architecture designer as he transitioned from architecture to economics.

Conference Agenda for Day 1, October 8, 2014:

9:00 AM

• Welcome Remarks – Eric T. Wakin, Robert H. Malott Director of Hoover Institution Library & Archives

• Opening Remarks – Amir Weiner, Stanford University

9:15-10:45 AM – Chair: Amir Weiner

• Toomas Hiio, Estonian War Museum. Multi-ethnic (or Multi-national) Student Body of the University of Tartu and the WW I: Choices, Political Movements, Volunteers, Mobilizations, and Postwar Consequences

• Darius Staliunas, Lithuanian Institute of History. Anti-Jewish Violence in Lithuania at the Turn of the 20th Century

11:00 AM – 12:30 PM Chair: Aivars Stranga, The University of Latvia

• Ēriks Jēkabsons, University of Latvia. The War for Independence of Latvia and the United States

• Tomas Balkelis, Vilnius University. Paramilitarism in Lithuania: Violence, Civic Activism and Nation-making, 1918–1920

• Bert Patenaude, Stanford University. “Yankee Doodle: American Attitudes toward Baltic Independence, 1918–1921”

Conference organizers:  Professors Lazar Fleishman (Slavic Department) and Amir Weiner (History Department)

Sponsored by: Hoover Institution Library and Archives, Office of the Provost, Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford Global Studies Division, The Europe Center, Stanford University Libraries, Division of Literatures, Cultures, & Languages, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Department of History, Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, and the Stanford Humanities Center.

Abstract: It is often said that economists in general, and CIA analysts in particular, failed to understand until very late in the game just how serious the USSR's economic problems were.  That failure, it was widely claimed, was the root cause of a more general failure on the part of the U.S. policy community to understand what was going on in the Soviet Union during the later Cold War period.  It turns out, however, that the Soviet economic problem was understood from the mid-1960s on;  in intellectual terms, the analysis was quite impressive.  The Soviets themselves, moreover, understood the problem in much the same way as Western economists did.   All this provides us with a key--perhaps the key--to understanding great power politics during the latter part of the Cold War.

About the Speaker: Marc Trachtenberg is Professor of Political Science at the University of California - Los Angeles. He studies national security strategy, diplomatic history, and international relations. He has been Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the German Marshall Fund, and the SSRC/MacArthur Foundation. His award-winning book, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945-1963 (Princeton University Press, 1999), explores the profound impact of nuclear weapons on the conduct of international relations during the Cold War, making extensive use of newly opened documentary archives in Europe and the United States. History and Strategy (Princeton University Press, 1991) studies seminal events like the onset of World War I and the Cuban Missile Crisis to shed light on the role of force in international affairs. Professor Trachtenberg teaches courses on the history of international relations, international security, and historical research methods.