• Health Policy and Management
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.91-114
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• 1996

In this research, the Data Envelopment Analysis(DEA) was applied to measure production efficiency of Public Corporation Medical Centers(PCMCs) operating in Korea. The focus of this research is triple. First, identifing convenience and usefulness of DEA to measure the relative efficiency among PCMCs. Second, assessing magnitudes of the relative efficiency for each PCMC. Third, adding insights into some factors resulting inefficiency in PCMCs. Then, in this paper technical efficiency and scale efficiency measured by DEA[introduced by Charnes, Cooper, and Rhoides(1978) and Banker, Charnes, and Cooper(1984)] were analyzed and a new separate variable was introduced which makes it possible to determine whether operations were conducted in regions of increasing, constant or decresing returns to scale(in multiple input and output situations). And a multi-factor Tobit analysis was conducted to see which variables are associated with PCMC's efficiency.

• Journal of Environmental Policy
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.143-160
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• 2010

This paper estimate the $CO_2$ reduction potential that can be achieved by improving the technical efficiency of input factors in the manufacturing sector. Technical efficiency in each manufacturing firm was estimated using the DEA technique. Depending on the returns-to-scale assumption selected, average technical efficiency was estimated to be between 0.467 and 0.643. These estimates suggest that, when the efficiency of electricity consumption in the manufacturing sector is improved, the overall $CO_2$ emissions can be reduced by 17.1-25.5%. Recently, the Korean government has adopted a low-carbon-green-growth policy with the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 30% below the BAU level by year 2020. The analysis of the paper suggests that this goal can be achieved through improved efficiency of electricity consumption.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.227-230
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• 2002

An important preprocessing for fingerprint recognition is the binarization operation, which takes as an input gray-scale image and returns a binary image as the output. The difficult in performing binarization is to find an appropriate threshold value. This paper presents a new adaptive binarization method, which determines the threshold value according to the brightness of local ridges and valleys. We experimentally show that the presented method results in better performance than a traditional method.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.13 no.11
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• pp.176-186
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• 2013

The purpose of this study is to investigate the economies of scale and scope in the medical service industry of Korea using the multiple output translog cost function. The results show that the single-product scale economy (SSE) estimated is highly significant and less than one, implying that Korean medical service institutes are on average enjoying the product-specific scale economy in providing their services. In addition, the ray scale economies (RSE) reflects the overall economy of the scale in individual firm, showing less than one. Thus, the medical service industry in Korea is generally operating in the region of increasing returns to scale. The findings provide evidence of the economy of scope, in particular, with the joint production of inpatient and outpatient services as well as inpatient and administrative services.

• International Journal of Contents
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• v.4 no.3
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• pp.1-9
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• 2008

The Korean life insurance industry has undergone profound changes, such as the beginning of the variable insurance in July 2001 and the bancassurance enforcement in August 2003. However, little empirical research has analyzed data that includes the bancassurance of life insurance companies operating in Korea. In response to this lack of research, this paper applies DEA (data envelopment analysis) models to measure and decompose their efficiency. We discovered that life insurance companies operating in Korea are a little different in their composition ratio of inputs and outputs, due to the increased variety of distribution channels and new products. We provided efficiency scores, return to scale, and reference frequencies. We also decomposed CCR, BCC, and SBM efficiency into scale efficiency and MIX efficiency. So, we try to investigate whether the sources of inefficiency were caused by the inefficient operation of DMU, disadvantageous conditions, the difference of the composition ratio in inputs and outputs with reference sets, or any combination of the above. Most companies in the sample display had either constant or decreasing returns to scale. The efficiency rankings were less consistent among models and efficient DMUs. In response to this problem, we used the super-efficiency model to rank them and then compared the rankings of the DMUs among the various models. It was also concluded that the availability of panel data, rather than cross-sectional data, would greatly improve the validity of the efficiency estimates.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.21 no.8
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• pp.512-520
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• 2020

This study analyzed the relative operational efficiency and impact factors of regional public hospitals to present benchmarking points for enhancing the efficiency of inefficient regional public hospitals. The survey targets collected and utilized the internal resources and management performance data from 34 regional public hospitals in Korea over the past five years, from 2014 to 2018. The final 33 regional public hospitals were surveyed, excluding Jinan Regional Public Hospital, which opened in 2015, the middle of the survey period. The general characteristics and input/output variables were analyzed by frequency analysis and technical statistics analysis, and Data Envelopment Analysis was performed to measure the operational efficiency index and relative comparison. According to the study, there were 11 efficient hospitals (33.3%) and 22 inefficient hospitals (66.7%). Of the 22 inefficient hospitals, 13 (IRS: Increasing Returns to Scale) required scale expansion, and nine (DRS: Decreasing Returns to Scale) required scale reduction or rebalancing. The significance of this study was that an analysis of the relative efficiency and influencing factors presented specific alternatives or directions that could help enhance the efficiency of the growth of regional public hospitals, sustainable management, and expansion of publicness.

• Agribusiness and Information Management
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.1-8
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• 2016

The present study has aimed at analyzing the technical and scale efficiencies of credit utilization by the farmer-borrowers in Chittoor district of Andhra Pradesh, India. DEA approach was followed to analyze the credit utilization efficiency and to analyze the factors influencing the credit utilization efficiency, log-linear regression analysis was attempted. DEA analysis revealed that, the number of farmers operating at CRS are more in number in marginal farms (40%) followed by other (35%) and small (17.5%) farms. Regarding the number of farmers operating at VRS, small farmers dominate the scenario with 72.5 per cent followed by other (67.5%) and marginal (42.5%) farmers. With reference to scale efficiency, marginal farmers are in majority (52.5%) followed by other (47.5%) and small (25%) farmers. At the pooled level, 26.7 per cent of the farmers are being operated at CRS, 63 per cent at VRS and 32.5 per cent of the farmers are either performed at the optimum scale or were close to the optimum scale (farms having scale efficiency values equal to or more than 0.90). Nearly 58, 15 and 28 percents of the farmers in the marginal farms category were found operating in the region of increasing, decreasing and constant returns respectively. Compared to marginal farmers category, there are less number of farmers operating at CRS both in small farmers category (15%) and other farmers category (22.5%). At the pooled level, only 5 per cent of the farmers are operating at DRS, majority of the farmers (73%) are operating at IRS and only 22 per cent of the farmers are operating at CRS indicating efficient utilization of credit. The log-linear regression model fitted to analyze the major determinants of credit utilization (technical) efficiency of farmer-borrowers revealed that, the three variables viz., cost of cultivation and family expenditure (both negatively influencing at 1% significant level) and family income (positively influencing at 1% significant level) are the major determinants of credit utilization efficiency across all the selected farmers categories and at pooled level. The analysis further indicate that, escalation in the cost of cultivation of crop enterprises in the region, rise in family expenditure and prior indebtedness of the farmers are showing adverse influence on the credit utilization efficiency of the farmer-borrowers.

• Journal of Korean Society of Forest Science
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• v.95 no.3
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• pp.268-273
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• 2006

This study analyzed the technological change of Korean sawmill industry affected by change of factor price. An aggregate cost function has been estimated to analyze the technological change in Korean sawmill industry between 1970 and 2003 to the technical bias and scale effect. There was substitution among labour, capital, and material, especially in more elastic relation between labour and capital. In addition, domestic sawmill industry was progressed into structure which is biased to labour saving, and capital and material using because of increase of labour price. Since Korean sawmill industry's technology still exhibits an increasing returns to the scale, the large amount of investment has contributed to productivity growth, and the future productivity growth continually depend on the scale effect for some time.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.7 no.12
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• pp.853-861
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• 2020

The study aims to measure the productivity of the Saudi banking sector at the retail level using secondary data for 11 local banks from the period 2015-2019. The study uses an extended version of the Cobb-Douglas production function to account for the fact that as banks openup more retail branches, they will need to employ more labor. The extended Cobb-Douglas production function was estimated using the two-way fixed effect model to account for unobserved heterogeneity across Saudi banks resulting from differences in labor competencies and leadership style. Besides, the model accounts for unobserved heterogeneity among Saudi banks due to the advancement in electronic services over time. The results showed that labor, branches, customers' deposits, and fixed deposits have a positive effect on the total value of generated loans. Conversely, ATM has an insignificant effect on generated loans. The average scale elasticity shows that the Saudi banks at the retail level are operating under decreasing returns to scale. The average marginal rate of technical substitution shows that Saudi banks need at least one ATM to replace one unit of labor at the retail level while keeping the same level of output.

• The Korean Journal of Franchise Management
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.1-20
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• 2015

Home Meal Replacement (HMR) products are ready-to-eat or pre-cooked food products that are consumed at daily home. HMR market has grown rapidly due to societal changes: increases in female social activities, silver population, and one-person households. Consumption channels of HMR can be classified into take-out, delivery, and retail. In Korean HMR market, retail sector is largely growing, but companies are focusing their business on the home delivery sector. Moreover, franchise companies are expanding their areal coverage in the HMR market based on their multi-unit strategy. However, more research on the HMR market is needed as existing studies are limited in conceptualization, classification, and processed food from malls or home-shopping channels. Therefore, we conducted the efficiency analysis on Gukseonsaeng, one of franchises that applied the take-out channel, using DEA method. According to the research on 29 franchisees of Gukseonsaeng, 77.9% of input appeared inefficient for technical efficiency, while 53.3% of input appeared inefficient for scale efficiency. Thus, we found that franchises of Gukseonsaeng are structured in increasing returns to scale (IRS), so enhancing efficiency by expanding scales need to be implemented.