• Economic Analysis
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.56-89
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• 2011

The sensitivity of investment with respect to cash flow is positive in imperfect financial markets. Using a switching regression model, cash flow sensitivity of investments in chaebol firms and large firms appears to be higher. Also, investments are found to be more responsive to cash flow during monetary contraction periods. These findings imply that monetary policy works through a credit channel. Furthermore, it appears that monetary policy exerts distributional effects as well as aggregate effects on that firms are unevenly affected by monetary changes.

• Korea Trade Review
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• v.44 no.3
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• pp.227-252
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• 2019

This study explores the effects of exports on the innovation of Korean firms listed on two Korean stock markets, the Korean Stock Exchange and the Korean Securities Dealers Quotations, between 1999 and 2016. By matching exporting firms to non-exporting ones with propensity score matching, this study accounts for a problem from sample selection bias that may arise from differences in firm-characteristics between the two groups. From the study results, first, both export participation and export volume significantly increase subsequent innovation performance, as measured by the number of patent applications. This result seems to support the "learning by exporting" hypothesis for Korean listed firms. Second, both export participation and export volume narrow innovation scope, proxied as the number of unique International Patent Classification (IPC) codes of the patent applied, the degree to which patents are concentrated in a particular class, and the degree of proximity in the patents. The findings of innovation scope suggest a possible explanation that the learning effect appears in familiar technology fields that firms have previously held, rather than in unfamiliar ones. Third, these results are robust using alternative proxies in the innovation scope, Tobit regressions to consider the non-trivial portion of sample firms with patent applications equal to zeros, and generalized method of moments (GMM) to control for the persistence of innovation measures hearing over years. Finally, the two main results are more pronounced in large firms than in small and medium-sized ones. As for Chaebol firms, however, these results do not appear.

• Asia Pacific Journal of Business Review
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.17-35
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• 2017

This research is a case study that focuses on how conglomerate illegality and corresponding penalty affects corporate performance and strategy. The research aims to provide base information for policy-makers as well as the general public about the corporate environment. The analysis results can be summarized as follows. First, profitability is represented as an M-curve. Profitability falls from indictment to the final pronouncement of the corporate head and increases upon his or her return. The result suggests that the absence of a corporate head could result in low profitability as the firm is exposed to owner risk. Secondly, significant effects on investment were not found. Investment showed a continuous increase from indictment to final judgment. This could have resulted from investment decisions made prior to the indictment, which are generally long-term. Meanwhile, the rate at which investments rose for core subsidiaries were lower, which makes it reasonable to suspect dwindling executive capacity due to the absence of a corporate head. Thirdly, employment showed a slight increase, but the rate was found to be greater during the periods following the final judgment. From a political perspective, this increase can be inferred from a give-and-take tradeoff between corporate employment and the pardon of the corporate head.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.232-241
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• 2019

This study examines one of the conventional and controversial issues in modern finance. Specifically, this study identifies financial determinants of corporate R&D intensity for firms belonging to Korean Chaebols. Empirical estimation procedures are applied to derive more robust results of each hypothesis test. Static panel data, Tobit regression and stepwise regression models are employed to obtain significant financial factors of R&D expenditures, while logit, probit and complementary log-log regression models are used to detect financial differences between Chaebol firms and their counterparts not classified as Chaebols. Study results found the level of R&D intensity in the prior fiscal year, market-value based leverage ratio and firm size empirically showed their significance to account for corporate R&D intensity in the first hypothesis test, whereas the majority of explanatory variables had important power on a relative basis. Assuming that the current circumstances in the domestic capital market may necessitate gradual changes of Korean Chaebols in terms of their socio-economic function, the results of this study are expected to contribute to identifying financial antecedents that can be beneficial to attain optimal level of corporate R&D expenditures for Chaebol firms on a virtuous cycle.

• The Korean Journal of Financial Management
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.33-78
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• 2008

This paper empirically examines whether firms engage in a dynamic adjustment process toward target capital structure and, whether there is a target capital structure or mean reverting using the partial adjustment model while allowing for costly adjustment. Also we investigate the empirical determinants of optimal target capital structure in long term equilibrium. As a result, our empirical model captures at least several important features of capital structure behavior for Korean listed firms. First, Korean firms pursue target capital structure and also there is mean reverting phenomenon. Second, Non-Chaebol and small firm in adjustment speed is faster than Chaebol and large firm. Third, even capital market restricts the adjustment speed interestingly. Fourth, Korean firms have target behavior according to a degree of observed gap. Fifth, Korean firms close about one-fourth of the gap between their actual and target debt ratios within one year and thence targeting behavior explains far more of the observed changes in capital structure than market timing or pecking order considerations. Sixth, capital market is significant in determining optimal capital structure.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.86-98
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• 2014

This study examined a long-standing issue with its perverse results in the Korean capital markets, such as any variant financial profiles over time, affecting capital structure for the firms belonging to the chaebols. It may be of interest to identify these components from the perspectives of international investors and domestic policy makers to implement their contingent strategies on the target leverage, since the U.S. financial turmoils in the late 2000s. Regarding the evidence from the three hypothesis tests on the firms in the chaebols, this research found that the control variabels measuring profitability, business risk, and non-debt tax shields, showed their statistically significant relationships with the different types of a debt ratio. While FCFF(free cash flow to the firm) showed its significant influence to discriminate between the firms in the chaebols and their counterparts, not belonging to the chaebols, BDRELY as the ratio of liabilities to total assets, comprising the enhanced 'Dupont' system, only showed its statistically significant effect on leverage in the context of the parametric and nonparametric tests. In line with the results obtained from the present research, one may expect that a firm in the Korean chaebol, may control or restructure its present level of capital structure to revert to its target optimal capital structure towards maximizing the shareholders' wealth.

• Journal of the Korean association of regional geographers
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.17-34
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• 2001

This paper is to analyze how firms in a large firm-led industrial city have carried out the restructuring in the face of radical shifts, with focus on the strategy and the restructuring of firms in Ulsan, a typical industrial district in Korea that is specialized in heavy & chemical industry. It has been well known that the local economy has been led by a small number of large firms, including affiliates of chaebol, and its industrial structure has also been characterised as a clear dichotomy between large firms as a customer and small and medium-size firms as a supplier, which can be called not horizontal but vertical relations. It can identify some tendencies, however, that local companies have been rather dynamically changing in response to increasingly turbulent environment since the Asian crisis. Some are radical, but some incremental. These can be summarized in four distinctive but interlinked ways. First, more than half of local companies surveyed have attempted to change their production systems, mainly from the fordist mass production towards the flexible mass production, seeking both economies of scale and scope. Second, local firms have vigorously continued to reorganize the boundary of the production and the organization, by specializing products and focusing on the core competence in order to save costs and cope with radically changing customer demands in a flexible way. Third, there have been various strategies for the organizational innovation such as the introduction of team organization, the boundary blurring between the managerial and production workers and the intra-firm spin-offs, so as to improve managerial efficiency and competence in the use of internal labour market. Finally, they have tried to be more sensitive to the market and customers. These tendencies seem to be increasingly critical to sustain their competitiveness. To do so, they tend to focus increasingly not only on the competing via the product quality rather than through price, but also to seek to diversify the market and customer firms beyond national boundary.

• The Korean Journal of Financial Management
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.181-208
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• 2010

In July 2007, Korean government has passed "The Capital Market and Financial Investment Services Act" to further develop the capital markets and the Act was to become effective in February 2009. Using a large sample of Korean firms, we have examined (i) the effect of underwriting activities on the firm value (bond spread) comparing commercial bank and investment bank, and (ii) the determinants of the firm value changes following underwriting activities of bank. To test our goal, we collected a wide range of samples of data for bond issuing activities executed by Korean firms listed on the Korea Stock Exchange (KSE) between 2000 and 2003. Our paper is distinguished from previous studies on this subject in a way that we analyzed the effect of corporate bond underwriting activities with regard to commercial banking and investment banking. Initially, we set up a hypothesis that "Certification View" and "Conflict-of-interest View" are major driving forces behind cross-firm differences in performance following bond issuance. We find that, in general, underwriting by investment bank (securities company) brings a positive effect on the firm value (spread between bench mark rate and bond issuing rate). This result indicates that firm value has been negatively affected by the bank underwriting and provides the evidence for "Conflict-of-interest View" in Korea. Our studies have also revealed that any change in firm value following bond issuance is positively related with the firm size (total asset), operating performance, liquidity (cashflow), and equity ownership by foreign investors. Overall, our results support the view that bank underwriting activities can play an important role in determining firm value and financial strategies under "The Capital Market and Financial Investment Services Act" of 2007.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.14 no.12
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• pp.973-988
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• 2014

This study investigated one of the contemporary issues in the Korean capital market and two hypotheses of concern were tested on the financial determinants of profitability for the firms belonging to the Korean chaebols during the era of the post-global financial turmoil. The first hypothesis applying conditional quantile regression (CQR) estimation provided the evidence that leverage ratio, fixed asset utilization, and foreign ownership among the nine quantitative explanatory variables, had overall statistical significance relative to the book-valued profitability measure, while additional variables such as a firm's size, fixed and a proxy for the type of exchange market showed their strong impacts on the market-valued profitability indicator. Concerning the formulated 'extended' DuPont system, only two components of EBITDAEBIT and EMULTIPLIER revealed their prominent influence on ROE (Return on Equity) over the two tested periods (the years 2008 and 2012).

• International Area Studies Review
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.23-42
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• 2013

This paper examines the effects of corporate governance on internationalization in Korean firms. Using the data from 454 Korean manufacturing firms listed in the Korean Stock ExchanFge (KSE) from 1999-2006, we analyzed the role of corporate governance on internationalization in Korean firms, including Chaebols (Korean business groups) and family firms. In addition, we investigated the moderating effect of concentration of ownership on internationalization. The results of the analysis showed a positive association between corporate governance in Chaebols and family firms and internationalization. Interestingly, the influence of ownership concentration overpowered the ambivalent behaviors of Chaebols, leading to less internationalization. We conclude that corporate governance in Chaebols and family firms is important to internationalization strategy.