• Journal of Korea Technology Innovation Society
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.175-198
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• 2006

Analyzing the effects of information technology(IT) in the life insurance Industry is important in establishing the direction for future information technology investment. In this research, the cost-elasticity of IT capital stock was measured by the SUR technique, using the second-order translog cost function, which was drawn out by a Taylor expansion of the multi-product joint cost function. Analysis was made based on data from 1991 to 2003 collected from 33 life insurance firms. The results show that although the effects of information technology investment vary according to individual life insurance firms, half of the life insurance firms surveyed reduced their costs by investing in information technology. The research also revealed that although large life insurance firms reduced their costs by investing in information technology medium & small life insurance firms and foreign ,life insurance firms increase their costs. Additionally, although both information capital and information labor increase as the information budget increases, the increase in information capital is larger than one in information labor. Because the price of information capital is decreased rapidly more than one of information-related labor.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Costume
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• v.34
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• pp.135-150
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• 1997

The purpose of this study was to inves-tigate the economic performance of the textile industry for the Korean traditional clothes. The content of this paper had two pars; The first part was for the macroeconomic aspects such as location production employments and the produc-tion facilities of the textile industries. The second part was for the microeconomic aspects such as business type branding method fabric type R&D efforts sourc-ing and the distributional channel The major results were as follows: 1.) Most textile firms for the korean traditional clothes were located in Gongju for man-made fibers and in Jinju for silk fabrics. 2) The size of the textile industry in terms of the number of business produc-tion amount the number of employee de-creased during 1994 and 1995 due to the decreasing demand. 3) Over the half of the textile firms produced raw fabric products while only 20% of them were involved in additional dyeing and /or printing finish which re-sulted in low value added production 4) The R&D effort of the textile indus-try for the Korean traditional clothes was very low due to the market uncertainty lack of technological knowledge and most of all small size of the firms 5) Most raw materials for the textile in -dustry were imported with high(25%) tariff rates resulting in price increase and thus low competitiveness in the market. 6) The textile producers sole about the 70% of their products to the wholesalers while selling the rest to the retailers di-rectly. This showed the dual structure of the distribution channel in the textile products. These results suggested some implica-tions for the firms the policy makers and the researchers. The firms should develop new and improved products to increase and create consumer demand by intensive R&D efforts. The government policy ma-kers should give financial supports the firms with R&D investment and legal help such as lowing tariff rate for the raw ma-terials. The researchers from the academy could help the textile industry with the advanced technological knowledge and up-date information for the consumer fashion demand.

• Journal of Korea Society of Digital Industry and Information Management
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.73-86
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• 2016

The purpose of this study is to examine a security investment for firms experienced in confidential information leak. Information security is an apparatus for protection of secret information. The competence of information security is a competitiveness to avoid information leakage in changing business environment. The type of information security is divided into administrative security, technical security and physical security. It is necessary to improve the incident correspondence competence through information security investment of the three types. Therefore, the investment of information security is to enhance information-asset protection of firms. To reinforce accident response competence, an organization discussed an establishment, security technology development, expand investment and legal system of the security system. I have studied empirically targeting the only information leak of firms. This data is a technical security competence and technology leakage situation of firms happened in 2010. During recovery of the DDos virus damage on countries, company and individual, the collected data signify a reality of information security. The data also identify a security competence of firms worrying information security management. According to the study, the continuous investment of information security has a high competence of accident correspondence. In addition, the most of security accidents showed a copy and stealing of paper and computer files. Firm on appropriate security investment is an accident correspondence competence higher than no security investment regardless of a large, small and medium-sized, and venture firm. Furthermore, the rational security investment should choose the three security type consideration for firm size.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.179-190
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• 2019

To alleviate financing difficulties of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), the government and municipal governments are providing a variety of SME policy funding programs. This study introduced the policy funding program of Gangwon-do and quantitatively analyzed the financial performance of companies supported by the Gangwon-do SME policy fund in the year 2014. Specifically, we compared the financial ratios for three years, from 2013 to 2015, between funded firms and non-funded firms. In addition, we applied a regression analysis to see if the policy funding program contributed to profitability (the operating profit growth and return on equity), stability (the interest coverage ratio and debt-to-equity ratio), and growth (the asset growth and sales growth) of the funded firms. The empirical results show that the firms that received the policy funds did not show any improvement compared to non-funded firms in terms of profitability, stability, and growth. This suggests that Gangwon-do should improve the policy funding program, that currently provides only an interest amount of 2-4% of the corporate loan principal, without any strategic selection criteria for the target funded firms, and without any follow-up management system, after support.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.19 no.5
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• pp.48-63
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• 2019

We tried new analysis including social network analysis(SNA) on the transaction network centered on electronic companies using more than 50 thousand company transaction data obtained from Korean enterprise data (KED) for the year of 2015. We found 97 clusters having more than 10 firms and remarkable 13 clusters having more than 90% sales of the electronic industry in Korea. Clusters are the groups of companies having most of their transactions in the clusters they belong to. We found 5 clusters have 83% of sales in the electronic industry. Most of clusters have main single firms having most of the sales in each clusters except a few clusters. However, we found a few firms to have high rear production linkage effect and found the firms with high linkage effect specially for the small and medium size enterprise (SME). The companies with high production linkage (specially on SMEs) should be managed in terms of (SME) growth policy. The last firm group consisting of the small clusters with less than 10 firms has high employment coefficients. The clusters or company having high production linkage effect on this last firm group should be noted in the terms of employment policy. We also note that there exist the firms with the high value of betweenness coefficients meaning high potential of technology development. They should be managed carefully in terms of technology development policy.

• Korea Trade Review
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• v.41 no.1
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• pp.67-90
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• 2016

This study examines whether there is any significant relation between executive compensation and future firm performance for the Korean export manufacturing small and medium-sized firms. We sorted the whole sample firms into the sub-groups of 10 deciles by firm size and the KSIC standard. We found the following empirical results. First, Korean export manufacturing small and medium-sized firms typically showed lower or even negative profitability in terms of return on equity and operating profit ratio to sales. Foreign equity ownership is very low with an average of 3.77%. Second, for the firms with higher ratio of excess executive compensation to asset had lower future firm performance. It implies that the typical owner-manager in Korean export manufacturing SMEs earns excess pay, but do not contribute much to firm performance. Third, as for future cumulative abnormal returns for future one- and three-year periods, firms with higher owner-executive pay had lower returns compared with firms with lower pay. So the stock market investors set a lower value on them. Fourth, there is a positive relation between excess executive pay and executive overconfidence, and it implies that owner-CEOs with higher pay may become overconfident, thereby lowering future firm performance somehow.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.28-36
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• 2009

While existing literature has focused extensively on the strengths and weaknesses of the Chaebol and their ownership and governance, there have been few studies of Korean non-Chaebol firms. However, Lee, Lee and Pennings (2001) did not specifically investigate the competitive strategies that non-Chaebol firms use to survive against the Chaebol in the domestic Korean market. The motivation of this paper is to document, through four exploratory case studies, the successful competitive strategies of non-Chaebol Korean companies against the Chaebol and then offer some propositions that may be useful to other entrepreneurial firms as well as public policy makers. Competition and cooperation as conceptualized by product similarity and cooperative inter.firm relationship respectively, are major dimensions of firm.level marketing strategy. From these two dimensions, we develop the following $2{\times}2$ matrix, with 4 types of competitive strategies for non-Chaebol companies against the Chaebol (Fig. 1.). The non-Chaebol firm in Cell 1 has a "me-too" product for the low-end market while conceding the high-end market to a Chaebol. In Cell 2, the non-Chaebol firm partners with a Chaebol company, either as a supplier or complementor. In Cell 3, the non-Chaebol firm engages in direct competition with a Chaebol. In Cell 4, the non-Chaebol firm targets an unserved part of the market with an innovative product or service. The four selected cases such as E.Rae Electronics Industry Company (Co-exister), Intops (Supplier), Pantech (Competitor) and Humax (Niche Player) are analyzed to provide each strategy with richer insights. Following propositions are generated based upon our conceptual framework: Proposition 1: Non-Chaebol firms that have a cooperative relationship with a Chaebol will perform better than firms that do not. Proposition 1a; Co-existers will perform better than Competitors. Proposition 1b: Partners (suppliers or complementors) will perform better than Niche players. Proposition 2: Firms that have no product similarity with a Chaebol will perform better than firms that have product similarity. Proposition 2a: Partners (suppliers or complementors) will perform better than Co.existers. Proposition 2b: Niche players will perform better than Competitors. Proposition 3: Niche players should perform better than Co-existers. Proposition 4: Performance can be rank.ordered in descending order as Partners, Niche Players, Co.existers, Competitors. A team of experts was constituted to categorize each of these 216 non-Chaebol companies into one of the 4 cells in our typology. Simple Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) in SPSS statistical software was used to test our propositions. Overall findings are that it is better to have a cooperative relationship with a Chaebol and to offer products or services differentiated from a Chaebol. It is clear that the only profitable strategy, on average, to compete against the Chaebol is to be a partner (supplier or complementor). Competing head on with a Chaebol company is a costly strategy not likely to pay off for a non-Chaebol firm. Strategies to avoid head on competition with the Chaebol by serving niche markets with differentiated products or by serving the low-end of the market ignored by the Chaebol are better survival strategies. This paper illustrates that there are ways in which small and medium Korean non-Chaebol firms can thrive in a Chaebol environment, though not without risks. Using different combinations of competition and cooperation firms may choose particular positions along the product similarity and cooperative relationship dimensions to develop their competitive strategies-co-exister, competitor, partner, niche player. Based on our exploratory case-study analysis, partner seems to be the best strategy for non-Chaebol firms while competitor appears to be the most risky one. Niche players and co-existers have intermediate performance, though the former do better than the latter. It is often the case with managers of small and medium size companies that they tend to view market leaders, typically the Chaebol, with rather simplistic assumptions of either competition or collaboration. Consequently, many non-Chaebol firms turn out to be either passive collaborators or overwhelmed competitors of the Chaebol. In fact, competition and collaboration are not mutually exclusive, and can be pursued at the same time. As suggested in this paper, non-Chaebol firms can actively choose to compete and collaborate, depending on their environment, internal resources and capabilities.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.15 no.7
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• pp.477-488
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• 2015

This study investigates the association between non-audit services and audit quality, using a sample of firms in which audit services and non-audit services are provided by a same audit firm. This study extends previous studies by separating auditors into Big4 and Non-Big4 audit firms as each group may have different incentives to impair their independence. According to the empirical results, audit quality, proxied by absolute value of discretionary accruals has significant negative association with non-audit service fee for Non-Big4 audit firms, but not for Big4 audit firms, suggesting that Non-Big4 audit firms may impair their independence with increased non-audit service fees. Non-Big4 audit firms are known to be relatively small and local firms that might be highly economically dependent upon a specific client firm whereas Big4 audit firms are not. This results may be of interest to regulators and capital market investors and standard setters who concern a recent trend of increasing non-audit services that are provided by an audit firm which also provides audit service at the same time.

• Management & Information Systems Review
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• v.30 no.2
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• pp.133-159
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• 2011

This study was conducted about the various forms of downsizing in small manufacturing firms such as lay-offs, honorary retirement, wage cuts, reduction of assets, merging of organizations with similar functions. Specially the study was conducted among small manufacturing companies to investigate which factors play a role in deciding which method to use. As result, the study found out the form of downsizing varies according to the characteristics of the small manufacturing companies. In other words, it is the size and the growth form of the company which influences the form of downsizing, rather than the management experience of the company. Based on the result of the study, small firms tend to prefer form of downsizing which will have short term or immediate effect, depending on the condition of their organization. Also, this kind of slim down on workforce has positive effect on the management achievement. However, there is also a negative effect on the moral of the members of the organization and the level of concentration in the work field. Therefore, it is better for small manufacturing companies to seek other long term means to increase its' productivity and renovation in management, and avoid method which will have direct effect on the moral of the members.

• Journal of the Economic Geographical Society of Korea
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.16-33
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• 2017

This study analyzed the actual condition of the purchasing and selling network structures of manufacturing firms related the shipbuilding and offshore plant industry in Jeollanam-do using the social network analysis. The analysis results are as follows. The networks are often traded by subcontracting relationship with large firms because the industry is configured in most small and medium-sized firms. In particular, it was found to actual situation that selling transactions are being concentrated in the manufacturing firms of Yeongnam where large firms have located. Structural adjustment of the large firms located in the Yeongnam is expected to strike a blow to the manufacturing firms related the shipbuilding and offshore plant industry in Jeollanam-do due to the recently crisis in the shipbuilding industry. Therefore, it is necessary to secure a diversity of networks for selling transactions, and to discover and promote that selling firms related the shipbuilding and offshore plant industry in Jeollanam-do, in order to cope with such a crisis.