Sam (Hongkil) Kim

Ph.D., University of Missouri – Kansas City

Money and Banking, Financial Macroeconomics, Applied Macroeconomics

Sam (Hongkil) Kim is an applied macroeconomist working in the areas of macroeconomics and money and banking. 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 primarily focuses 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 has published articles in the International Review of Applied Economics, Journal of Economic Issues, Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, Review of Keynesian Economics, and Real-World Economics Review.

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 invites students to share their opinions. He listens 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 has taught Principles of Macroeconomics, Intermediate Macroeconomics, Money and Credit, Econometrics, and Financial Macroeconomics.

Prior to joining the Department of Economics, he worked as an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Asheville for 4 years.