This dissertation is a collection of three unrelated essays, and all of them are in the field of public economics. Chapter 1 presents evidence that high-ranked public officials of the Ministry of Strategy and Finance in South Korea affect local budget allocation. Applying a regression on uniquely constructed panel dataset, I find that a growth rate of per capita National Subsidy, which is the sub-part of national budget susceptible to discretionary behaviors, increases about 6.5% in the hometown of high-ranked bureaucrats. To validate concerns about causal relations, I examine a battery of auxiliary robustness checks with reassuring results. Relative to existing literature, I do not find evidence of pork barrel caused by electoral politicians. My results suggest that South Korea’s specific institutional characteristics affect the budget allocation, where the authority and initiative of budget formulation belong to the administration rather than the parliament. I also provide empirical evidence that enhancing transparency in the budget allocation system can alleviate concerns of the bureaucrat’s hometown favoritism. Chapter 2 examines the effect of school choice on student and public education by exploiting an application-based random assignment system via lottery in South Korea. I find little evidence that winning the lottery improves student’s academic performances, class attitudes, and overall manners, which are considered to be quality-related indexes of public education. Student’s school satisfaction increases significantly when the pupil is assigned to his preferred school, but this positive effect is not persistent over periods. The result is contrary to advocators’ argument that school choice program can normalize public education through competition among schools. One possible reason for this result is that students may abuse school choice chance to achieve another purpose such as attending the nearby school, which is not related to the government goal of improving public education. My paper suggests that school choice policy has not transformed into improving the overall quality of public education. Policymakers around the world search for an optimal school schedule to enhance student’s academic achievement. Under this environment, Chapter 3 investigates the effect of the 9 o’clock attendance policy on student’s academic performance in South Korea. I find little evidence that delaying the school schedule positively affects pupil’s performance when I control for an extensive list of characteristics or an individual fixed effect. My result implies that individual’s omitted heterogeneities might confound results of previous literature which supports positive effects. I show that the effect of delaying the school starting time is likely to come from “a good bird” (self-selection effect) rather than “a late bird” (policy treatment effect). Therefore, we need to be cautious when interpreting the effect of postponing the school starting time, and more analysis and discussion are necessary on the education front.