Dr. Jung Won Sonn awarded Marie Curie Outgoing Fellowship

Dr. Jung Won Sonn, Lecturer in Urban Economic Development at The Bartlett School of Planning, has been awarded the prestigious Marie Curie Outgoing Fellowship for his research proposal titled “Regional Absorptive Capacity and the Contribution of Multinational Corporations to Knowledge Production in the Local Economy within a Developing Economy Context: The Case of China.”

The Marie Curie Fellowship, handed out by the European Commission’s Research Executive Agency, is awarded to promising young academics for further development of their research careers. Dr. Sonn will spend the first year of his two-year fellowship at the Institute of Policy and Management, Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing beginning in September 2013. In his second year, he will return to Bartlett School of Planning, still under the auspices of the Marie Curie Fellowship. He will resume his normal post as a full-time member of the school’s academic staff in September 2015. 

In the proposed research, Dr. Sonn will analyze U.S patent data and global stock market data: 1) to measure foreign firms’ contribution to technological innovations in Chinese cities and regions and 2) to build an econometric model that explains the difference among cities’ and regions’ ability to learn from foreign firms. This research will contribute to understanding whether foreign firms actually contribute to knowledge-based development of hosting cities and regions.