Center for the Study of Economic Liberty at ASU welcomes new associate center director

H. Christian Kim has joined the Center for the Study of Economic Liberty at Arizona State University as the associate director. In addition, Kim has been appointed associate professor in the Department of Marketing at the W. P. Carey School of Business.

“We are thrilled to have Christian join the Center,” said Ross Emmett, director of the Center for the Study of Economic Liberty. “He will launch a research program on the connection between economic liberty and people's appreciation for economic and social mobility. He is also interested in enlarging the center's Doing Business North America profile among business and economics researchers.”

Kim will assist the center director with developing other projects that strengthen the relationship between the center's programs and business and economics education and scholarship.

Kim’s research interests include issues surrounding self-control, materialism, branding, social perception and behavioral pricing self-control. He examines issues in these areas using lab and field experiments as well as survey instruments. Among his research topics, economic mobility and materialism are pertinent to the center.

“Increased economic mobility is assumed to be a consequence of economic freedom, but there is little evidence to support the causal relationship,” Kim said. “Having been trained in behavioral science, I am interested in investigating how issues surrounding economic mobility and materialism affect human behavior and well-being in order to provide theoretical and managerial implications. This will help further the impact of the CSEL's research enterprise.”

Kim holds a PhD in marketing from the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan and an MBA from the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University. Prior to joining ASU, he was an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University.

His work has been published at top journals such as the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing Research, the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, and the Journal of Consumer Psychology, among others. His research has been widely covered by the media including Time, New York Times Magazine, and The Independent, to name a few.

Outside the university, Kim enjoys playing various musical instruments, reading books on the world wars and physics, and hiking, with the Bernese Alps and the Mont Blanc Massif being his favorite hiking destinations.