Earticle

The study aims to provide an empirical evidence as to whether environmental conservation costs are sticky. Regression analyses of cost stickiness are employed to compare and evaluate how differently sales change rates explain the cost change rates are affected by the quality of corporate governance, energy-intensive industry and between the pre and post crisis periods. The results of this paper are as follows. First, companies increase their input levels in various environmental cost items and exhibit more stickiness in costs. Second, we find that corporate governance is not effective to mitigate the degree of cost stickiness. Third, the firms which belong to the energy-intensive company group show less sticky or anti-sticky. Finally, we found that environmental conservation costs decreased at higher rate compared to the sales change rate when sales decreases during the period after the global financial crisis(2009-2011) than pre-crisis period(2005-2007). It implies that managers decrease environmental conservation costs when sales decrease, irrespective of business cycle and management characteristics.

Recently foreign direct investments are taking up large portion of economic dynamism in global economy. Recently FDI is considered as multiple functional that affects industries and economy by entailing the movement of many intangible assets. There had been lots of study conducted for economic effects of FDI through such a rapid development and new awareness of the activity. Meanwhile many shortcomings of previous studies and analysis have been picked out. In particular there was limitation for handling interlinkages among industries, the differences inherent to various FDI types, and absorption capacity of domestic industries. We proposed an input-output model that reflects these problems and it is to analyze productivity effects embedded in FDI. Especially we took note about Leontief approach that had been conventionally used and additionally suggested Ghosh specification to model merger and acquisition as a type of FDI. Moreover, we reflected absorption capacity in industries on analysis based on human capital which affects process of technology transfer. As a result, we found that sectors earned different productivity effects depending on forms of investment and deduced main intermediary industries diffusing the impact throughout the industries and economies.

This study investigates the causal relationships among types of service failure, service recovery, customer satisfaction, and loyalty intentions as well as moderating effect of consumer characteristics such as gender using structural equation model in the context of internet shopping. Support is found for a number of hypothesized structural relations. The findings show that most types of service failure negatively on service recovery, and most factors of service recovery influence positively on customer satisfaction as well as customer satisfaction affects positively loyalty intentions. Also, consumer gender mostly moderates the relationship between service recovery and customer satisfaction and the relationship between customer satisfaction and loyalty intentions. Some implications for enhancing the effect of service recovery in internet shopping service are briefly discussed.

Vertical integration is a persistent structural phenomenon in the Korean film industry. Generally, vertical integration can incur both positive and negative effects. Its positive effect which occurs in the individual firm is gains in efficiency in resource management through internalization while the negative effect which occurs in industry level is a distortion of resources management by discriminating the non-affiliates. This paper analyzes the behaviors of two major film companies that achieved vertical integration from investment, production, distribution to screening. This paper is differentiated from the pervious literature by analyzing the discriminating behaviors of the major film firms in allocations of seats and time of screening to films of the non-affiliates. This paper shows that the major film companies treated its affiliates unfairly by allocating more number of seats in golden time to the films distributed by them. Even though the major firms treat its affiliates, its discrimination did not show good box-office performance. Therefore, in the Korean film industry, the vertical integration plays a kind of barriers for the non-affiliates to enter the film market. That leads to loss in efficiency of the Korea film industry.

In this study, we suggested a standardized format for mandatory report required by government from pharmaceutical industries which have problems, such as drug abuse or illegal distribution of medicine through distribution channels. We first analyzed the contents of each required report from pharmaceutical supply chain participants such as manufacturer, distributor and retailer. Next, we developed the standardized government issued report needed by each pharmaceutical supply chain participant under the common standard platform environment. We are expecting to efficiently solve current pharmaceutical industry problems through the cooperation of the common standard platform environment and standardized government issued mandatory report. Additional standardization studies in other industries, such as food and/or consumer electronic, will be needed in the future.

This study aims to examine the effect of firm performance on the CEO turnover in the sample of large business conglomerates, Chaebols in Korea. Using longitudinal data from 108 firms from large business conglomerates during 2001-2008, this study examined the effect of firm performance on the CEO turnover. This study finds that the profitability of firms does not have significant effect on the CEO turnover while the sales growth of firms have a negative effect on the CEO turnover. The results suggest that the performance of individual firms of large business conglomerates are likely to be evaluated on the base of how much the individual firms contribute to the accomplishment of the goal of business conglomerates, the expansion of the size of business conglomerates as a whole in terms of sales volumes. The sensitivity of CEO turnover to individual firms' sales growth is stronger in the cases of intra-group transfer than in the cases of CEO weeding-out. This study also finds that the sensitivity of CEO turnover to individual firms' sales growth is higher in the manager-controlled firms than in the owner-controlled firms.

The purpose of this paper is to estimate minimum short-run average cost (SRAC), capacity utilization (SCU), and the state of SRAC focusing on Korean logistic firms. The average SCUs in overall logistic firms showed very low levels as 0.328-0.344 and most firms (62-63 firms) were in the decreasing state of SRAC. The SCU of dangerous goods warehousing was high but that of refrigerated warehousing was low. The incomplete uses of production facility are high in the Korean logistic firms, which is the main factor to increase their SRAC. In the future, we need to reduce cost through informationalization, management rationalization, and facility sharing in the logistic firms.

This study purposed to analyze the spatial characteristics of primary care organizations within a metropolitan city. Study city was one of the six metropolitan cities in Korea and had a population over 1.5 million. For the analysis, 500m x 500m cells were created on the map and then study variables were calculated in each cell. Data was from the 5 ward offices and public health centers. Variables which could not calculated directly from each cell such as the number of total population, number of people over 65 year old, number of business, and number of employee were estimated in each cell. Ordinary Least Square (OLS) based regression analysis model as well as Geographic Weighted Regression (GWR) model were developed with the number of primary care organizations, clinics and oriental medicine clinics, as the dependent variable. Road areas, number of subway gate, and number of hospital variables in each cell showed higher significant coefficients than that of population variable. Road areas and number of subway, and number of hospital variables showed large standardized regression coefficients. GWR-based model showed better model performance than that of OLS model. The study model can be used for analyzing the characteristics of local health clinic market and for preparing the policy decisions for distributing health resources.

This paper investigates the real exchange rate behaviour under potential existence of nonlinearity. In order to conduct the nonlinearity test, both linear and non-linear autoregressive unit root tests are applied to four different real exchange rates from mixture of industrialized and developing countries. We found that all countries, there is strong threshold effect while the unit root tests show the mixed results depending on countries. This finding implies standard linear unit root tests turn out biased in favour of random work when the true process is nonlinear mean reversion. When half-lives deviation from equilibrium is calculated, the result is much smaller in threshold autoregressive (TAR) specification than linear model.

This paper empirically examines the effects of R&D investment and government subsidy on technological innovation activities in the poisson and negative binomial models. In doing that, it employs the count data on patents which are collected from raw data from Korean Innovation Survey 2008 conducted by the STEPI and financial statement data of Korean manufacturing industries over the period from 2005 to 2007. The empirical results are as follows. First, government support, either by financial subsidy or by tax deduction, is found to have statistically significant effects on innovation activities proxied by patents, considering endogeneity of government policy variables. This implies that government policy could play an important role in private innovation activities. Second, the empirical results show R&D intensities proxied by R&D expenditure per employee turns out to have significant effect on patent activities when the endogeneity of government policy variables are considered. Third, estimated coefficients for firm size in the patent model are also found to be statistically significant, which implies that R&D investment in large firms should lead to more patents. Finally, there are substantial spillover effects of other firms' innovation activities on SMEs and venture companies' patents.

This study employs a Contingent Valuation Method(CVM) to estimate the economic value of environmental conflict resolution(ECR) in Seoul metropolitan area. In doing so, a spike model is used to allow zero responses. The willingness to pay(WTP) for the improvement of ECR is approximately 31,164 won per year and the economic value in Seoul metropolitan area is up to about 260,717 million won in a year. The overall results indicate that ECR has a significant influence on the welfare of people and plays an important role in preserving the environmental in Korea. This study provides policy-makers quantitative information on the ECR policy and the spike model results in easily capturing the bimodality feature of the WTP distribution as expected.

As the knowledge-based economy is developed, knowledge of science and technology and technology innovation are the focal factors in the national competitiveness and economic growth. In the knowledge-based economy innovation trends is forming, which are enlarging external innovation source and opening knowledge, through enlargement of R&D and advance of science and technology to national growth and firm growth Creative governance formation through openness, sharing, and participation is processing. Also Creative economy using new creative and open technology innovation system is oriented. Development plan for a long term is needed for Big data formation of fusion and composition research knowledge and Utilization and Diffusion research outputs. Creative economy is defined by the new development paradigm through advances from several aspects: first technology advance and industry fusion and composition innovation; second, open R&D and open R&BD(Research and Business Development), third the knowledge-based economy is transformed from the manufacturing-based industry. In creative economy, R&D and collaborative R&D system based on opennessㆍsharingㆍ participation are important policy tools. Therefore the objective of this paper is proposing a diffusion of research outputs to sustain the national industry development and to invigorate the creative economy.

The policy loan of the Small and Medium Enterprises is differentiated from private financial institutions in that it supports the SMEs in the area of market failure. Despite this differentiation, there is an tendency to find its efficiency and economic feasibility of the policy loan of the SMEs. The purpose of this study is to examine the economic feasibility of the policy loan of SMEs using a cost-benefit analysis of the financial programs for SMEs. The result of the analysis, which is expressed with benefit-cost ratio(BCR), is that the efficiency of the entire industry is 24.94 in 2008 and 19.66 in 2009. In addition to, the benefit-cost ratio(BCR) of manufacturing(13.57 in 2009) and non-manufacturing(22.23 in 2009) are also each high. In summary, the economic feasibility of the financial programs for SMEs is proved.

Social network services(SNSs) have been adopted and diffused by a variety of individuals and organizations across a broad array of society in economy, politics, and culture. Given the increasing importance of SNSs, this study identifies a consumer's hedonic SNSs using motivation as a key factor for the unprecedented intensity and speed of SNSs adoption and diffusion. A structural equation model is developed by including ten constructs and tested their relations among SNSs users. It is expected that the SNS engagement, caused by hedonic motivation of SNS, lead to intensive adoptions and the consequent dispersal of the adoptions by the users, in order to maximize their hedonic experiences, lead to SNS commitment. The authors discuss the implications of the findings for theory and practice.