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In this VUCA world, all types of business enterprises seek for instruments of sustainable competitive advantages to compete for the future(Hamel and Prahalad, 1994). Since 1950s, corporate foresight emerges as one of the most efficient methods, defined as a set of practice of a organization to lay the foundation for future competitive advantage by detecting discontinuous changes early, interpreting the consequences, and formulate effective responses for the long-term survival and success of the company(Jemala, 2010; Rohrbeck et al., 2015). The corporate foresight process and tools are well documented in literatures of strategic management, innovation management and future studies(Becker, 2002; Daheim and Uerz, 2008; Rohrbeck, 2010; Battistella, 2014; Ruff, 2015). Furthermore, the values of corporate foresight are studied to justify the investment for corporate foresight resources from qualitative studies among large companies(Rohrbeck, 2012; Rohrbeck and Gemünden, 2011; Rohrbeck and Schwarz, 2013). Recently, the positive relations of corporate foresight and firm performance are empirically tested with 7-year longitudinal analysis(Rohrbeck and Kum, 2018). The studies on corporate foresight in Small and Medium Enterprises, however, are scare(Jannek and Burmeister, 2007), which calls for the attention of scholars, managers and policy-makers to upscale SMEs with corporate foresight(Poteraska and Sacio-Szymanska, 2014; Bidaurratzaga and Dell, 2012; Paliokaite 2010). This study intends to fill this gap of corporate foresight researches in SMEs. We investigated the relations of corporate foresight and firm performance with the role of innovativeness among Korean SMEs in manufacturing and service industries. Considering limited data available about SME’s corporate foresight and firm performances, we measured 1) corporate foresight with 11-item instrument from Rohrbeck and Gemünden(2011) and Yoon et al.(2018), 2) innovativeness with 5 questions from Hurley and Hunt(1998) and Kim(2013) and 3) firm performance with 8 items from Henri(2006), Widener(2007) and Kim(2013), with online self-reported questionnaire, directed to the managers of SMEs in Korea. From the hierarchical regression analysis of 203 samples, controling the company age and industry type, we found that 1) corporate foresight has the positive effect on the firm performance(β=.581, p<.001), 2) corporate foresight has the positive effect on the innovativeness of the firm(β=.727, p<.001), 3) innovativeness has the positive effect on the firm performance(β=.539, p<.001), and 4) corporate foresight’s effect on the firm performance is mediated by the innovativeness(β=.252, p=.002). The results of this study confirm and expand the previous studies of Jissink et al.(2014) and Yoon et al.(2018). This study contributes to building the empirical evidence of corporate foresight research in SMEs, which is limited, despite the value of SMEs to the economy. The practical implications for managers and policy makers are as follows. First, CEOs and the top management in SMEs should give their attentions to corporate foresight to identify, observe and interpret factors that induce change, to determine possible organization-specific implications, and to trigger appropriate organizational responses. Second, CEOs and the top management in SMEs should engage their managers in corporate foresight practices, starting from corporate foresight training to vision building toward a desired future so that managers scan environments ahead of competition, and drive decision-making under uncertainties as a routine. Third, CEOs and the top management in SMEs should be open to the collaborative foresight with universities, other firms, and the government within regional or industrial clusters to overcome the liabilities of smallness. The last but the most critical call falls on the policy makers to strengthen the foresight initiatives for SMEs and collaborators as a means for the prosperity of the national economy.

Diversifying consumer needs based on rapid change in technology, reducing product life cycle and easing trade barriers have strengthened the importance of R&D investment for the competitiveness of Chinese companies. The importance of R&D investment in high-tech industries was recognized not only at the firm level but also at the national level. However, an innovation requires a lot of money and time. Thus, unlike state-owned firms which are invested by state-owned institutions or by ministries, state-owned and private firms have not been active in R&D investments. The Chinese government has implemented various support policies, including tax exemptions, loans and subsidies, to intensify companies' R&D activities for innovation-driven growth. In particular, the government implements many subsidies policies for high-tech companies. In addition, Chinese companies have been transformed into modern firms with separate ownership and management since the government adopted a policy to privatize state-owned enterprises. China's stock market has grown rapidly. Ownership structures of many Chinese companies have been changed. The equity ratio of various internal and external investors has become an important factor affecting the strategic decision-making of firms. However, there are not many researches that analyze the impact of equity ratios of various internal- and external-investors of privatized Chinese companies on the corporate strategic decision-making process. Thus, this study is designed to analyze the effect of government subsidies on R&D concentration (R&D cost/sales) of high-tech companies of China, and the moderating effect of internal and external investors' equity ratios on this relationship. According to the findings, R&D concentration of Chinese high-tech companies increases when the ratio of government subsidies to total assets is low, while it decreases when the ratio of government subsidies to total assets is high. The findings were also shown that the CEO's equity ratio strengthens the positive relationship between government subsidies and R&D concentration when the ratio of government subsidies is not high, while strengthening the negative relationship between government subsidies and R&D concentration if the ratio of government subsidies increases above a certain level. In addition, they reveal that the institutional investor's equity share mitigates the slope of inverse U-shaped relationship between government subsidies and R&D concentration. However, the foreign investor's equity ratio has no statistically significant impact. The findings provide the theoretical implications that research on agent problems that may arise in relations between the government and the companies should be done from various perspectives that have been presented in the agency theory to increase the effectiveness of government subsidies for innovation of companies. In addition, they provide the implication for policy makers for the need to set and manage appropriate levels for subsidies in advance to enhance the innovation capabilities of high-tech companies. Finally, for practitioners the findings imply that the CEO's opportunistic behavior on government subsidies needs to be managed using internal control systems based on the equity rates of the CEO and institutional investors.

While the common belief maintains that seasoned equity offerings (SEO) firms are risky, relatively recent theories propose that risk of SEOs is indeed lower (Zhang, 2005; Carlson et al., 2006). Specifically, Zhang (2005) argues that less risky firms carry significantly higher returns in the phases of the economy when the marginal utility of wealth and the price of risk are high. Therefore, if the risk of SEOs is fundamentally lower, they should carry significantly higher returns in the worst states by stock market performance. It is not clear whether the factor betas in the parameterized models are adequate risk measure. Moreover, the factor models are could not complete in and measuring risk. To overcome the bad-model problem of risk measure, this paper uses a nonparametric method that does not require identifying risk factors. Specifically, we follow Kim and Byun (2010) which examines the relative risk of initial public offerings (IPO) firms to analyze the that of seasoned equity offerings (SEO) firms. By doing so, we compare the result of our relative risk of SEOs with that of IPOs. Our sample consists of 3,421 SEOs issued between 2001 and 2009 in Korea. The non-SEO matching 3,421 firms are the ones that are in the same size decile as the SEO firms and are closest in market-to-book decile to the SEO firms. We measure long-run stock returns of SEO and matching firms using two measures, event-time buy-and-hold returns and calendar-time portfolio returns. The empirical results are as follows. Both the event-time buy-and-hold returns and calendar-time portfolio returns for SEOs are significantly lower than those for matching non-SEO firms, which indicates substantial underperformance of SEO firms. The underperformance of SEOs is consistent with prior findings by many scholars in the United States and South Korea. SEO firms actually perform inferior to matching non-SEO firms in the recession periods of the economy, when the states are classified on the basis of overall stock market performance. This lack of significant outperformance in the recession periods of the economy suggests that SEO firms are not fundamentally less risky. This results is consistent with Kim and Byun (2010) which studies IPO cases. In addition, SEO firms invest more than their matching non-SEO counterparts in all phases of the economy. There is clear evidence that SEOs invest as much relative to non-SEOs in the recession periods of the economy as they do in the expansion periods of the economy. Since SEOs as growth firms do not cut more capital investments in the recession periods, SEOs could not have lower risk than non-SEOs. This results is also consistent with Kim and Byun (2010) which studies IPO case. In a word, this paper finds the empirical results that are not correspondent to the more recent theories which contend SEOs are less risky than non-SEOs. The limitations of this paper and the suggestion of future research are presented as follows. The sample period of between 2001 and 2009 to compare the IPO cases of Kim and Byun (2010) are relatively old. We suggest that future research should update research period and compare the results of SEO cases with those of IPO cases. Recent domestic and foreign studies tend to analyze operating performance in addition stock returns subsequent to SEO. Therefore, we also propose that both stock returns and operating performance of SEO could be analyzed using the nonparametric method of this study.

With the prospect of negative growth in the economy due to the prolonged spread of COVID-19 around the world, we are continuing to cut the base interest rate. The cut in interest rates will deteriorate the profitability of financial institutions and have side effects. The main source of income for financial institutions is the loan-to-deposit margin. The credit union's loan-to-deposit margin at the end of 2009 was 3.60%, but at the end of 2019, the loan-to-deposit margin continued to decrease to 2.42%. The global economic recession and a cut in the base interest rate will lead to a decrease in the credit union's loan-to-deposit margin, which will greatly affect the management performance of individual unions. In order for individual unions to survive in such a difficult environment, it is necessary to increase the loan-to-deposit margin, but it is also very important to minimize non-performing loans, which have the greatest impact on management performance. While the loan market has shrunk due to the government's household loan regulation, credit union loans have been concentrated on high-risk loans, resulting in an increase in delinquency rates. In particular, the delinquency rate in Busan and Gyeongnam area continues to rise. The purpose of this study is to measure the meta-efficiency of non-performing loans using a meta-frontier model targeting the three type unions within credit unions in Busan and Gyeongnam areas, and to decompose this internally into technology efficiency and technology gap. Technology efficiency is measured by comparing observations within the same union group, and technology gap is measured by comparing different union groups. In this study, when estimating individual group frontiers, meta frontiers, and pooling frontiers from the point of view of a theoretical model, stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) and the cost function type are used. This is different from previous studies. According to the empirical results, first, the meta-efficiency was lower than that of the technical efficiency, so there are technology gaps among three union groups. The efficiency levels that occur within the three union groups are significantly different from each other, and the technology gap among them are also found to be quite large. Second, in terms of technology efficiency, the organization union was the lowest compared to other unions. However, the organization union was the highest in the technology gap. This means that the group frontier closest to the meta frontier is the organization union. Third, looking at the yearly average change, it suggests that region union and workplace union show a form of deteriorating non-performing loan efficiency over time. The policy implications are as follows. In the current economic downturn, it is necessary to convert loans to safe assets. It is also necessary to switch to small-scale and household loans rather than corporate or large-scale loans, and to organization unions of stable occupations with high trust or stable workplace unions. The digital transformation of the financial sector is progressing rapidly. To keep up with this, training of internal staff is important, but it is necessary to build digital finance faster through outsourcing or collaboration with external institutions that are leading digital finance.

This study is intended to discuss organizational and institutional factors affecting the individual worker’s skill formation by analyzing how the wage effect of the work’s participation in skill formation draws a difference based on firms’ skill formation investment and union participation. To that end, the study is designed to implement a multi-level analysis of firms and their workers based of the Human Capital Corporate Panel(HCCP) survey data from the KRIVET. For the purpose of multi-level analysis, the survey data for firms and individuals in the 7th year of the HCCP are merged and analyzed. The analysis shows that the worker’s skill formation affects wage increases, but if the interaction with the tenure is controlled, independent influence is not significant. In addition, the investment of firm in the skill formation directly affects wage increases, but the moderating effect on the participation of worker’s skill formation is limited when the tenure is controlled. In view of this, it appears that skilled formation, combined with the effect of tenure, leads to a rise in wages, with the main effect being derived from tenure. In the case of the union's participation in the skill formation, it is understood that the more active the union's participation, the higher the wages of the individual worker. However, it has been found that the participation of labor unions does not control the wage effect of worker's participation in the skill formation. Given that the main analysis of the study is workers belonging to manufacturing companies and regular workers, the findings suggest that the skill formation through the internal labor market is at its limit. Accordingly, the study suggests that the manufacturing industry's internal labor market should seek ways to strengthen its character as a skilled formative

Recently, big data has become an important foundation in the flow of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In particular, in the financial sector, such as credit card companies, financial companies, and FinTech, high quality data are accumulated, so it is highly utilized, and job creation with related industries is expected. Against this background, the study aims to analyze how the readjustment of laws and systems for the construction and utilization of big data in the financial sector affects employment. The analysis uses annual big data-related costs and financial information for the financial insurance sector from 2013 to 2018. The Pooled OLS estimates of the employment function, which consists of investments related to financial big data, utilization of big data and sales, shows that investment and sales related to financial big data increase the number of employees. In addition, it is analyzed that companies that utilize financial big data have higher employment effects. As a result of including interaction terms after classifying each enterprise into three sectors: financial, insurance and pension industries, and financial and insurance-related services, the employment effects of big data-related investments are significant in financial and insurance-related services. Based on the results of estimating the expected employment growth rate of companies through CVM(Contingent Valuation Method) and DBDC(Double-Bound Dichotomous Choice) using the survey data, the more cumulative the investment involved, the more willing the investment in big data, and the more employees expected to increase the number of employees when big data use is activated, the more positive the employment growth is caused by the revision of the Financial Big Data Act. Using this estimate results, the average expected employment growth rate of a representative company is identified as 2.09%. Also, through CVM(Contingent Valuation Method) and DBDC(Double-Bound Dichotomous Choice), the growth rate of employment under the scenario of financial big data investments and sales growth is 2.09-3.23%. If this is applied to 769,000 employees as of 2018, the increase in employment can be seen to be 16,072~24,839 employees. There are limits to the fact that this study estimated employment effects through counterfactual approaches before the implementation of the Big Data Act. Since the employment effects of real big data-related companies may be different from the results, it is necessary to estimate the employment effects by utilizing more samples and variables. Currently, the employment effects may not be accurate due to the influence of COVID-19, but it is expected that more precise analysis will be possible after the data accumulates in the next year or two. In addition, a survey of 130 companies in the financial sector is not enough to be used as a population. If we analyze the employment effects of the revision of the Big Data Act on more companies in the next year or two, we think we can produce practical effects on the revision. Nevertheless, we think it is meaningful that this study has verified the preliminary feasibility of the amendment by analyzing its effects in advance before the actual bill is passed.

The advancement in information and communication technology has contributed to convenience in our daily lives. In recent years, there has been a rapid increase in availability of delivery application as smart phone has become popular in every area of our activities. As increased competition in the delivery application service market it is necessary to provide application services satisfying customers’ various requirements. Previous studies on delivery application or delivery services have focused the causal relationship between selection factors and satisfaction or loyalty. Thus, this study examines the priority of selection factors considered as the consumers select the delivery application using the analytic hierarchy process. Specifically, this study first extracts selection factors based on literature review, and calculates the weight of each factor by employing the analytical hierarchy process method. The results of the study showed that factors in the first stage consisted of diversity, informativity, convenience, responsiveness, additional service and the convenience of the factors revealed the most important factor. Factors in the second stage were composed of payment method, the number of restaurants, menu selection, seller information, consumer reviews, screen composition, order process, payment option, inquiry function, delivery speed, push alarm, discount event and coupons, and point saving. Synthetic calculations of the first stage factor and the second stage factor showed that order process factor was the most important factor. The findings of the study are expected to help to improve the delivery application firms’ services as well as to provide the implications of service development for practitioners.

In March 2018, the Korean government introduced the revised Labor Standards Act, with a 52-hour per week cap (hereafter, 52-hour workweek policy) that reduces the maximum working hours per week by 52 hours from the previous 68 hours. Using this event, this study analyzed impacts of work hour reduction on employment and labor productivity with the Difference-in-differences (DiD) method. As the policy was in advance implemented to the sub-group of the firms with employees more than 300, we can divide our sample into the treatment group and the control group and then apply the DiD method. In particular, to increase comparability, we restrict our sample into the firms with employees greater than 100 and less than 500. We also test robustness of our results with various restriction ranges for the number of employees. Results show that after introduction of the 52-hour workweek policy, the treatment group increased their employees by 5.36% more than the control group. Moreover, this increment was driven not by non-regular workers but by regular workers. It suggests that there was a job sharing effect, which is one of the objectives of the policy. The evidence is consistent with the result of Il-Ho Song(2004), which showed that reduction of working hours increases employment in a short-term period. On the other hand, however, no evidence was found for positive or negative impacts on labor productivity. It is contrast to the concern raised by employers, which is that work hour reduction damages firm performance as labor productivity would be diminished. Overall, our finding shows that the 52-hour workweek policy was successful in terms of employment and labor productivity. It increased job opportunities without loss of labor productivity. As this policy will be applied to the firms with smaller sizes in the upcoming years, this study contributes to the government by providing a foundation to predict the impacts of this policy. However, the evidence reported in this paper should be carefully used for the prediction, because smaller firms may have difficulties to reduce labor force due to decreased work hours and then experience diminishing labor productivity. When the policy is implemented to all national firms in Korea regardless of firm size, future study will be requested to understand a whole picture of the impacts of the 52-house workweek policy.

Both customer response to emotional factors and subsequent measurement of performance have been investigated in various realms of research by many researchers thus far. The emotional factors in service sector have attracted attention for a long time for the reason that they would lead to improvement in customer satisfaction and have a positive influence on the continuance of relationship. The positive customer emotion, induced by emotional factors in service sector, would eventually increase customer satisfaction, and furthermore, improve corporate performance. As those emotional factors for customer satisfaction have been turned into essential conditions, it has become increasingly necessary to develop and verify the factors leading to more sustained relationship of corporations with customers. Under those reasons, there has been a growing circumstance that customer satisfaction is manifested differently depending on emotional factors which customers come to experience. The purpose of this study, thus, is to provide the data for constant growth and development of AI industry through improvement of AI speaker user's satisfaction. and analyzing the effect of user's perceived usefulness and perceived ease on customer satisfaction, user trust, and emotional attachment, experienced by customers using the AI speaker. For that, a survey was performed of the artificial intelligence users. The collected data was analyzed using the SPSS 21.0 and AMOS 21.0 statistical program to analyze the relationship among respective factors based on mediated regression analysis and structural equation model. The results of this study can be summarized as below: First, it was confirmed that perceived usefulness and ease were rejected as they did not have any influence on user satisfaction in AI Speaker. Second, user trust and emotional attachment, which are the parameters focused in this study, was adopted as it was confirmed to have a positive influence and Partial mediating effects on the perceived usefulness. Third, with regard to perceived ease, user trust and emotional attachment were rejected as they did not have any influence and mediating effect. Based on these results, it was verified that user satisfaction can be increased through continuous improvement and reinforcement in terms of user trust and emotional attachment. Eventually, much effort would have to be made by AI speaker company administrators to improve the user perceived quality based on differentiation from rival company, along with overall management of emotional factors that users come to experience directly, as to improve both user satisfaction and re-purchase, and furthermore, build up competitiveness of company and promote constant growth and development of AI industry.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the impact of sanctions on capital costs on companies designated as unfaithful disclosure corporations. An unfaithful disclosure corporation targeted in this study can be judged as a company that has failed to faithfully fulfill its disclosure obligations under the disclosure regulations of the KOSPI market and the KOSDAQ market, and is suspected of disclosure and financial transparency. In addition, if designated as an unfaithful disclosure company, penalty points will be applied at the deliberation of the exchange, and the penalty points imposed are accumulated over a period of time. The high number of cumulative penalty points means that the penalty points imposed during the period in which the penalty points are accumulated are large or repeatedly unfaithful disclosures have been made. In other words, it can be inferred that higher cumulative penalty points could lead to a greater reduction in transparency in disclosure. As a result of the analysis, the dependent variable's weighted average cost of capital (WACC) and the FD(coefficient indicating whether or not the unfaithful disclosure company was designated) was 0.651 (t=5.18), showing a statistically significant positive (+) value at the 1% significance level. We found that as a result of supporting hypothesis 1, the weighted average cost of capital for a company designated as an unfaithful disclosure company is higher than those of a non-designated company. Additionally we test the control variables. The signs of control variables were also found to be consistent with the results of most previous studies. The coefficients of return on assets (ROA), weight ratio of tangible assets (PPE), and dummy variable of Big 4 auditors (BIG4) showed , negative results, statistically significant at the 1% significance level. It can be shown that the higher the total return on assets, the higher the proportion of tangible assets, and when Big 4 auditors perform assurance services, the risk of default is likely to be reduced and the collateral power is likely to be increased, resulting in the lower weighted average cost of capital. Therefore, from 2008 to 2019, the weighted average capital cost (WACC) was used to analyze how designation of an unfaithful disclosure corporation and cumulative penalty points affect capital costs. The empirical analysis showed that the weighted average capital cost of a company designated as an unfaithful disclosure corporation showed a significant amount of value compared to that of an unassigned company. That means that the capital cost of a company designated as an unfaithful disclosure corporation was relatively higher than that of a non-designated company. In addition, the greater the cumulative penalty points of an entity designated as an unfaithful disclosure, the greater the degree of increase in capital costs. These results suggest that the regulatory effect of unfaithful disclosure exists. This study has a contribution in that it is the first paper to analyze the effect of unfaithful disclosure and cumulative penalty points on total capital costs. In addition, it is meaningful to verify the effectiveness of the unfaithful disclosure system, and the results of this study may help to evaluate the regulatory effect of unfaithful disclosure.

Although almost a year has passed since a new virus called COVID-19 hit the world, the number of confirmed cases and death toll is still exploding in many countries. Due to COVID-19, major changes have occurred in the work and life of organizations and individuals. As a result, efforts to overcome crises and adjust to new changes have become important tasks for maintaining productivity of individuals and organizations. The spread of COVID-19 continues to be a pandemic situation. even in advanced countries in the United States and Europe. Among many other countries, Korea has received international attention for its exemplary case in dealing with COVID-19, and the role of “citizens” has been regarded as an important factor in Korea's quarantine performance. If the role of citizens is important, what specifically enables individuals to actively participate in efforts to overcome the COVID-19 crisis and productively continue their daily life even in changed situations? How and in what circumstances can people's efforts be further promoted? In order to answer this question, based on identity theories, this study attempted to clarify the role of civic identity in the COVID-19 crisis situation. Civic identity refers to the degree to which an individual perceives himself as a member of a social community, an actor contributing to the welfare of the community, and a participant with rights and responsibilities. Many organizations faced major changes due to COVID-19, but one of the areas of organization that was greatly affected was the education area, and universities across the country had a major disruption in the academic calendar and education methods at the time of the initial spread of COVID-19. For college students, particularly, maintaining productivity by continuing one's work and daily life in a changed situation is a big challenge. Moreover, participation in community activities to overcome the COVID-19 is desirable but difficult task. Therefore, this study explored the factors that influence college students' efforts to overcome the COVID-19 crisis. Specifically, it focused on two aspects: 1) participation in COVID-19 prevention, such as following government guidance, and 2) adaptivity, which represents the degree to which individuals have adapted to the changes that have occurred in their tasks. In addition, it was expected that the effect of students' civic identity and collective efficacy in the COVID-19 situation will depend on the support of the organization to which students belong. Thus, the effect of perceived organizational support(i.e., how appropriately the university provided support to students in the coronavirus situation) was also investigated. The data in this study were collected from college students taking classes during the COVID-19 period. In order to reduce the possibility of common method bias, the survey was conducted twice at different times. Multiple regression analyses were conducted. Result showed that, first, higher the civic identity of individuals, the greater the collective efficacy over coronavirus, which in turn increases students’ participation in quarantine. This is meaningful in expanding the existing research by revealing that civic identity plays a role in facilitating efforts to overcome not only citizen participation in general situations, but also community crisis situations. Second, students' perceived organizational support has been shown to strengthen both the positive effects of collective efficacy on participation in quarantine and adaptivity. The findings show the important and positive roles of civic identity and organizational support for college students in efforts to overcome COVID-19, suggesting that efforts to develop civic identity are needed not only for the development of the community but also for the overcoming and resilience of the new crisis.