• Korean small business review
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.67-93
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• 2009

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relations between financial constraints and dividend smoothing of innovative small and medium sized enterprises(SMEs) listed on Korea Securities Market and Kosdaq Market of Korea Exchange. The innovative SMEs is defined as the firms with high level of R&D intensity which is measured by (R&D investment/total sales) ratio, according to Chauvin and Hirschey (1993). The R&D investment plays an important role as the innovative driver that can increase the future growth opportunity and profitability of the firms. Therefore, the R&D investment have large, positive, and consistent influences on the market value of the firm. In this point of view, we expect that the innovative SMEs can adjust dividend payment faster than the noninnovative SMEs, on the ground of their future growth opportunity and profitability. And also, we expect that the financial unconstrained firms can adjust dividend payment faster than the financial constrained firms, on the ground of their financing ability of investment funds through the market accessibility. Aivazian et al.(2006) exert that the financial unconstrained firms with the high accessibility to capital market can adjust dividend payment faster than the financial constrained firms. We collect the sample firms among the total SMEs listed on Korea Securities Market and Kosdaq Market of Korea Exchange during the periods from January 1999 to December 2007 from the KIS Value Library database. The total number of firm-year observations of the total sample firms throughout the entire period is 5,544, the number of firm-year observations of the dividend firms is 2,919, and the number of firm-year observations of the non-dividend firms is 2,625. About 53%(or 2,919) of these total 5,544 observations involve firms that make a dividend payment. The dividend firms are divided into two groups according to the R&D intensity, such as the innovative SMEs with larger than median of R&D intensity and the noninnovative SMEs with smaller than median of R&D intensity. The number of firm-year observations of the innovative SMEs is 1,506, and the number of firm-year observations of the noninnovative SMEs is 1,413. Furthermore, the innovative SMEs are divided into two groups according to level of financial constraints, such as the financial unconstrained firms and the financial constrained firms. The number of firm-year observations of the former is 894, and the number of firm-year observations of the latter is 612. Although all available firm-year observations of the dividend firms are collected, deletions are made in the case of financial industries such as banks, securities company, insurance company, and other financial services company, because their capital structure and business style are widely different from the general manufacturing firms. The stock repurchase was involved in dividend payment because Grullon and Michaely (2002) examined the substitution hypothesis between dividends and stock repurchases. However, our data structure is an unbalanced panel data since there is no requirement that the firm-year observations data are all available for each firms during the entire periods from January 1999 to December 2007 from the KIS Value Library database. We firstly estimate the classic Lintner(1956) dividend adjustment model, where the decision to smooth dividend or to adopt a residual dividend policy depends on financial constraints measured by market accessibility. Lintner model indicates that firms maintain stable and long run target payout ratio, and that firms adjust partially the gap between current payout rato and target payout ratio each year. In the Lintner model, dependent variable is the current dividend per share(DPS_t), and independent variables are the past dividend per share(DPS_t-1) and the current earnings per share(EPS_t). We hypothesized that firms adjust partially the gap between the current dividend per share(DPS_t) and the target payout ratio(Ω) each year, when the past dividend per share(DPS_t-1) deviate from the target payout ratio(Ω). We secondly estimate the expansion model that extend the Lintner model by including the determinants suggested by the major theories of dividend, namely, residual dividend theory, dividend signaling theory, agency theory, catering theory, and transactions cost theory. In the expansion model, dependent variable is the current dividend per share(DPS_t), explanatory variables are the past dividend per share(DPS_t-1) and the current earnings per share(EPS_t), and control variables are the current capital expenditure ratio(CEA_t), the current leverage ratio(LEV_t), the current operating return on assets(ROA_t), the current business risk(RISK_t), the current trading volume turnover ratio(TURN_t), and the current dividend premium(DPREM_t). In these control variables, CEA_t, LEV_t, and ROA_t are the determinants suggested by the residual dividend theory and the agency theory, ROA_t and RISK_t are the determinants suggested by the dividend signaling theory, TURN_t is the determinant suggested by the transactions cost theory, and DPREM_t is the determinant suggested by the catering theory. Furthermore, we thirdly estimate the Lintner model and the expansion model by using the panel data of the financial unconstrained firms and the financial constrained firms, that are divided into two groups according to level of financial constraints. We expect that the financial unconstrained firms can adjust dividend payment faster than the financial constrained firms, because the former can finance more easily the investment funds through the market accessibility than the latter. We analyzed descriptive statistics such as mean, standard deviation, and median to delete the outliers from the panel data, conducted one way analysis of variance to check up the industry-specfic effects, and conducted difference test of firms characteristic variables between innovative SMEs and noninnovative SMEs as well as difference test of firms characteristic variables between financial unconstrained firms and financial constrained firms. We also conducted the correlation analysis and the variance inflation factors analysis to detect any multicollinearity among the independent variables. Both of the correlation coefficients and the variance inflation factors are roughly low to the extent that may be ignored the multicollinearity among the independent variables. Furthermore, we estimate both of the Lintner model and the expansion model using the panel regression analysis. We firstly test the time-specific effects and the firm-specific effects may be involved in our panel data through the Lagrange multiplier test that was proposed by Breusch and Pagan(1980), and secondly conduct Hausman test to prove that fixed effect model is fitter with our panel data than the random effect model. The main results of this study can be summarized as follows. The determinants suggested by the major theories of dividend, namely, residual dividend theory, dividend signaling theory, agency theory, catering theory, and transactions cost theory explain significantly the dividend policy of the innovative SMEs. Lintner model indicates that firms maintain stable and long run target payout ratio, and that firms adjust partially the gap between the current payout ratio and the target payout ratio each year. In the core variables of Lintner model, the past dividend per share has more effects to dividend smoothing than the current earnings per share. These results suggest that the innovative SMEs maintain stable and long run dividend policy which sustains the past dividend per share level without corporate special reasons. The main results show that dividend adjustment speed of the innovative SMEs is faster than that of the noninnovative SMEs. This means that the innovative SMEs with high level of R&D intensity can adjust dividend payment faster than the noninnovative SMEs, on the ground of their future growth opportunity and profitability. The other main results show that dividend adjustment speed of the financial unconstrained SMEs is faster than that of the financial constrained SMEs. This means that the financial unconstrained firms with high accessibility to capital market can adjust dividend payment faster than the financial constrained firms, on the ground of their financing ability of investment funds through the market accessibility. Futhermore, the other additional results show that dividend adjustment speed of the innovative SMEs classified by the Small and Medium Business Administration is faster than that of the unclassified SMEs. They are linked with various financial policies and services such as credit guaranteed service, policy fund for SMEs, venture investment fund, insurance program, and so on. In conclusion, the past dividend per share and the current earnings per share suggested by the Lintner model explain mainly dividend adjustment speed of the innovative SMEs, and also the financial constraints explain partially. Therefore, if managers can properly understand of the relations between financial constraints and dividend smoothing of innovative SMEs, they can maintain stable and long run dividend policy of the innovative SMEs through dividend smoothing. These are encouraging results for Korea government, that is, the Small and Medium Business Administration as it has implemented many policies to commit to the innovative SMEs. This paper may have a few limitations because it may be only early study about the relations between financial constraints and dividend smoothing of the innovative SMEs. Specifically, this paper may not adequately capture all of the subtle features of the innovative SMEs and the financial unconstrained SMEs. Therefore, we think that it is necessary to expand sample firms and control variables, and use more elaborate analysis methods in the future studies.

• Journal of Distribution Research
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.49-71
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• 2010

Franchise businesses in South Korea have contributed to economic growth and job creation, and its growth potential remains very high. However, despite such virtues, domestic franchise businesses face many problems such as the instability of franchisor's business structure and weak financial conditions. To solve these problems, the government enacted legislation and strengthened franchise related laws. However, the strengthening of laws regulating franchisors had many side effects that interrupted the development of the franchise business. For example, legal regulations regarding franchisors have had the effect of suppressing the franchisor's leadership activities (e.g. activities such as the ability to advocate the franchisor's policies and strategies to the franchisees, in order to facilitate change and innovation). One of the main goals of the franchise business is to build cooperation between the franchisor and the franchisee for their combined success. However, franchisees can refuse to follow the franchisor's strategies because of the current state of franchise-related law and government policy. The purpose of this study to explore the effects of franchisor's leadership style on franchisee's commitment in a franchise system. We classified leadership styles according to the path-goal theory (House & Mitchell, 1974), and it was hypothesized and tested that the four leadership styles proposed by the path-goal theory (i.e. directive, supportive, participative and achievement-oriented leadership) have different effects on franchisee's commitment. Another purpose of this study to explore the how the level of franchisee's self-efficacy influences both the franchisor's leadership style and franchisee's commitment in a franchise system. Results of the present study are expected to provide important theoretical and practical implications as to the role of franchisor's leadership style, as restricted by government regulations and the franchisee's self-efficacy, which could be needed to improve the quality of the long-term relationship between the franchisor and franchisee. Quoted by Northouse(2007), one problem regarding the investigation of leadership is that there are almost as many different definitions of leadership as there are people who have tried to define it. But despite the multitude of ways in which leadership has been conceptualized, the following components can be identified as central to the phenomenon: (a) leadership is a process, (b) leadership involves influence, (c) leadership occurs in a group context, and (d) leadership involves goal attainment. Based on these components, in this study leadership is defined as a process whereby franchisor's influences a group of franchisee' to achieve a common goal. Focusing on this definition, the path-goal theory is about how leaders motivate subordinates to accomplish designated goals. Drawing heavily from research on what motivates employees, path-goal theory first appeared in the leadership literature in the early 1970s in the works of Evans (1970), House (1971), House and Dessler (1974), and House and Mitchell (1974). The stated goal of this leadership theory is to enhance employee performance and employee satisfaction by focusing on employee motivation. In brief, path-goal theory is designed to explain how leaders can help subordinates along the path to their goals by selecting specific behaviors that are best suited to subordinates' needs and to the situation in which subordinates are working (Northouse, 2007). House & Mitchell(1974) predicted that although many different leadership behaviors could have been selected to be a part of path-goal theory, this approach has so far examined directive, supportive, participative, and achievement-oriented leadership behaviors. And they suggested that leaders may exhibit any or all of these four styles with various subordinates and in different situations. However, due to restrictive government regulations, franchisors are not in a position to change their leadership style to suit their circumstances. In addition, quoted by Northouse(2007), ssubordinate characteristics determine how a leader's behavior is interpreted by subordinates in a given work context. Many researchers have focused on subordinates' needs for affiliation, preferences for structure, desires for control, and self-perceived level of task ability. In this study, we have focused on the self-perceived level of task ability, namely, the franchisee's self-efficacy. According to Bandura (1977), self-efficacy is chiefly defined as the personal attitude of one's ability to accomplish concrete tasks. Therefore, it is not an indicator of one's actual abilities, but an opinion of the extent of how one can use that ability. Thus, the judgment of maintain franchisee's commitment depends on the situation (e.g., government regulation and policy and leadership style of franchisor) and how it affects one's ability to mobilize resources to deal with the task, so even if people possess the same ability, there may be differences in self-efficacy. Figure 1 illustrates the model investigated in this study. In this model, it was hypothesized that leadership styles would affect the franchisee's commitment, and self-efficacy would moderate the relationship between leadership style and franchisee's commitment. Theoretically, quoted by Northouse(2007), the path-goal approach suggests that leaders need to choose a leadership style that best fits the needs of subordinates and the work they are doing. According to House & Mitchell (1974), the theory predicts that a directive style of leadership is best in situations in which subordinates are dogmatic and authoritarian, the task demands are ambiguous, and the organizational rule and procedures are unclear. In these situations, franchisor's directive leadership complements the work by providing guidance and psychological structure for franchisees. For work that is structured, unsatisfying, or frustrating, path-goal theory suggests that leaders should use a supportive style. Franchisor's Supportive leadership offers a sense of human touch for franchisees engaged in mundane, mechanized activity. Franchisor's participative leadership is considered best when a task is ambiguous because participation gives greater clarity to how certain paths lead to certain goals; it helps subordinates learn what actions leads to what outcome. Furthermore, House & Mitchell(1974) predicts that achievement-oriented leadership is most effective in settings in which subordinates are required to perform ambiguous tasks. Marsh and O'Neill (1984) tested the idea that organizational members' anger and decline in performance is caused by deficiencies in their level of effort and found that self-efficacy promotes accomplishment, decreases stress and negative consequences like depression and emotional instability. Based on the extant empirical findings and theoretical reasoning, we posit positive and strong relationships between the franchisor's leadership styles and the franchisee's commitment. Furthermore, the level of franchisee's self-efficacy was thought to maintain their commitment. The questionnaires sent to participants consisted of the following measures; leadership style was assessed using a 20 item 7-point likert scale developed by Indvik (1985), self-efficacy was assessed using a 24 item 6-point likert scale developed by Bandura (1977), and commitment was assessed using a 6 item 5-point likert scale developed by Morgan & Hunt (1994). Questionnaires were distributed to Korean optical franchisees in Seoul. It took about 20 days to complete the data collection. A total number of 140 questionnaires were returned and complete data were available from 137 respondents. Results of multiple regression analyses testing the relationships between the each of the four styles of leadership shown by the franchisor as independent variables and franchisee's commitment as the dependent variable showed that the relationship between supportive leadership style and commitment ($\beta$=.13, p<.001),and the relationship between participative leadership style and commitment ($\beta$=.07, p<.001)were significant. However, when participants divided into high and low self-efficacy groups, results of multiple regression analyses showed that only the relationship between achievement-oriented leadership style and commitment ($\beta$=.14, p<.001) was significant in the high self-efficacy group. In the low self-efficacy group, the relationship between supportive leadership style and commitment ($\beta$=.17, p<.001),and the relationship between participative leadership style and commitment ($\beta$=.10, p<.001) were significant. The study focused on the franchisee's self-efficacy in order to explore the possibility that regulation, originally intended to protect the franchisee, may not be the most effective method to maintain the relationships in a franchise business. The key results of the data analysis regarding the moderating role of self-efficacy between leadership behavior style as proposed by path-goal and commitment theory were as follows. First, this study proposed that franchisor should apply the appropriate type of leadership behavior to strengthen the franchisees commitment because the results demonstrated that supportive and participative leadership styles by the franchisors have a positive influence on the franchisee's level of commitment. Second, it is desirable for franchisor to validate the franchisee's efforts, since the franchisee's characteristics such as self-efficacy had a substantial, positive effect on the franchisee's commitment as well as being a meaningful moderator between leadership and commitment. Third, the results as a whole imply that the government should provide institutional support, namely to put the franchisor in a position to clearly identify the characteristics of their franchisees and provide reasonable means to administer the franchisees to achieve the company's goal.

• The Sea:JOURNAL OF THE KOREAN SOCIETY OF OCEANOGRAPHY
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.223-237
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• 2011

The intermittent freshwater discharge has an critical influence upon the biophysical environments and the ecosystems of the Yeongsan Estuary where the estuary dam altered the continuous mixing of saltwater and freshwater. Though freshwater discharge is controlled by human, the extreme events are mainly driven by the heavy rainfall in the river basin, and provide various impacts, depending on its magnitude and frequency. This research aims to evaluate the magnitude and frequency of extreme freshwater discharges, and to establish the magnitude-frequency relationships between basin-wide rainfall and freshwater inflow. Daily discharge and daily basin-averaged rainfall from Jan 1, 1997 to Aug 31, 2010 were used to determine the relations between discharge and rainfall. Consecutive daily discharges were grouped into independent events using well-defined event-separation algorithm. Partial duration series were extracted to obtain the proper probability distribution function for extreme discharges and corresponding rainfall events. Extreme discharge events over the threshold 133,656,000 $m^3$ count up to 46 for 13.7y years, following the Weibull distribution with k=1.4. The 3-day accumulated rain-falls which occurred one day before peak discharges (1day-before-3day -sum rainfall), are determined as a control variable for discharge, because their magnitude is best correlated with that of the extreme discharge events. The minimum value of the corresponding 1day-before-3day-sum rainfall, 50.98mm is initially set to a threshold for the selection of discharge-inducing rainfall cases. The number of 1day-before-3day-sum rainfall groups after selection, however, exceeds that of the extreme discharge events. The canonical discriminant analysis indicates that water level over target level (-1.35 m EL.) can be useful to divide the 1day-before-3day-sum rainfall groups into discharge-induced and non-discharge ones. It also shows that the newly-set threshold, 104mm, can just separate these two cases without errors. The magnitude-frequency relationships between rainfall and discharge are established with the newly-selected lday-before-3day-sum rainfalls: $D=1.111{\times}10^8+1.677{\times}10^6{\overline{r_{3day}}$, (${\overline{r_{3day}}{\geqq}104$, $R^2=0.459$), $T_d=1.326T^{0.683}_{r3}$, $T_d=0.117{\exp}[0.0155{\overline{r_{3day}}]$, where D is the quantity of discharge, ${\overline{r_{3day}}$ the 1day-before-3day-sum rainfall, $T_{r3}$ and $T_d$, are respectively return periods of 1day-before-3day-sum rainfall and freshwater discharge. These relations provide the framework to evaluate the effect of freshwater discharge on estuarine flow structure, water quality, responses of ecosystems from the perspective of magnitude and frequency.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems Conference
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• 1993.06a
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• pp.1041-1043
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• 1993

Fuzzy logic based Control Theory has gained much interest in the industrial world, thanks to its ability to formalize and solve in a very natural way many problems that are very difficult to quantify at an analytical level. This paper shows a solution for treating membership function inside hardware circuits. The proposed hardware structure optimizes the memoried size by using particular form of the vectorial representation. The process of memorizing fuzzy sets, i.e. their membership function, has always been one of the more problematic issues for the hardware implementation, due to the quite large memory space that is needed. To simplify such an implementation, it is commonly [1,2,8,9,10,11] used to limit the membership functions either to those having triangular or trapezoidal shape, or pre-definite shape. These kinds of functions are able to cover a large spectrum of applications with a limited usage of memory, since they can be memorized by specifying very few parameters ( ight, base, critical points, etc.). This however results in a loss of computational power due to computation on the medium points. A solution to this problem is obtained by discretizing the universe of discourse U, i.e. by fixing a finite number of points and memorizing the value of the membership functions on such points [3,10,14,15]. Such a solution provides a satisfying computational speed, a very high precision of definitions and gives the users the opportunity to choose membership functions of any shape. However, a significant memory waste can as well be registered. It is indeed possible that for each of the given fuzzy sets many elements of the universe of discourse have a membership value equal to zero. It has also been noticed that almost in all cases common points among fuzzy sets, i.e. points with non null membership values are very few. More specifically, in many applications, for each element u of U, there exists at most three fuzzy sets for which the membership value is ot null [3,5,6,7,12,13]. Our proposal is based on such hypotheses. Moreover, we use a technique that even though it does not restrict the shapes of membership functions, it reduces strongly the computational time for the membership values and optimizes the function memorization. In figure 1 it is represented a term set whose characteristics are common for fuzzy controllers and to which we will refer in the following. The above term set has a universe of discourse with 128 elements (so to have a good resolution), 8 fuzzy sets that describe the term set, 32 levels of discretization for the membership values. Clearly, the number of bits necessary for the given specifications are 5 for 32 truth levels, 3 for 8 membership functions and 7 for 128 levels of resolution. The memory depth is given by the dimension of the universe of the discourse (128 in our case) and it will be represented by the memory rows. The length of a world of memory is defined by: Length = nem (dm(m)＋dm(fm) Where: fm is the maximum number of non null values in every element of the universe of the discourse, dm(m) is the dimension of the values of the membership function m, dm(fm) is the dimension of the word to represent the index of the highest membership function. In our case then Length=24. The memory dimension is therefore 128*24 bits. If we had chosen to memorize all values of the membership functions we would have needed to memorize on each memory row the membership value of each element. Fuzzy sets word dimension is 8*5 bits. Therefore, the dimension of the memory would have been 128*40 bits. Coherently with our hypothesis, in fig. 1 each element of universe of the discourse has a non null membership value on at most three fuzzy sets. Focusing on the elements 32,64,96 of the universe of discourse, they will be memorized as follows: The computation of the rule weights is done by comparing those bits that represent the index of the membership function, with the word of the program memor . The output bus of the Program Memory (μCOD), is given as input a comparator (Combinatory Net). If the index is equal to the bus value then one of the non null weight derives from the rule and it is produced as output, otherwise the output is zero (fig. 2). It is clear, that the memory dimension of the antecedent is in this way reduced since only non null values are memorized. Moreover, the time performance of the system is equivalent to the performance of a system using vectorial memorization of all weights. The dimensioning of the word is influenced by some parameters of the input variable. The most important parameter is the maximum number membership functions (nfm) having a non null value in each element of the universe of discourse. From our study in the field of fuzzy system, we see that typically nfm 3 and there are at most 16 membership function. At any rate, such a value can be increased up to the physical dimensional limit of the antecedent memory. A less important role n the optimization process of the word dimension is played by the number of membership functions defined for each linguistic term. The table below shows the request word dimension as a function of such parameters and compares our proposed method with the method of vectorial memorization[10]. Summing up, the characteristics of our method are: Users are not restricted to membership functions with specific shapes. The number of the fuzzy sets and the resolution of the vertical axis have a very small influence in increasing memory space. Weight computations are done by combinatorial network and therefore the time performance of the system is equivalent to the one of the vectorial method. The number of non null membership values on any element of the universe of discourse is limited. Such a constraint is usually non very restrictive since many controllers obtain a good precision with only three non null weights. The method here briefly described has been adopted by our group in the design of an optimized version of the coprocessor described in [10].

• Journal of Korean Society of Forest Science
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• v.66 no.1
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• pp.16-36
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• 1984

It is very important in forestry to study the shear strength of weathered granitic soil, because the soil covers 66% of our country, and because the majority of land slides have been occured in the soil. In general, the causes of land slide can be classified both the external and internal factors. The external factors are known as vegetations, geography and climate, but internal factors are known as engineering properties originated from parent rocks and weathering. Soil engineering properties are controlled by the skeleton structure, texture, consistency, cohesion, permeability, water content, mineral components, porosity and density etc. of soils. And the effects of these internal factors on sliding down summarize as resistance, shear strength, against silding of soil mass. Shear strength basically depends upon effective stress, kinds of soils, density (void ratio), water content, the structure and arrangement of soil particles, among the properties. But these elements of shear strength work not all alone, but together. The purpose of this thesis is to clarify the characteristics of shear strength and the related elements, such as water content ($w_o$), void ratio($e_o$), dry density (${\gamma}_d$) and specific gravity ($G_s$), and the interrelationship among related elements in order to decide the dominant element chiefly influencing on shear strength in natural/undisturbed state of weathered granitic soil, in addition to the characteristics of soil hardness of weathered granitic soil and root distribution of Pinus rigida Mill and Pinus rigida ${\times}$ taeda planted in erosion-controlled lands. For the characteristics of shear strength of weathered granitic soil and the related elements of shear strength, three sites were selected from Kwangju district. The outlines of sampling sites in the district were: average specific gravity, 2.63 ~ 2.79; average natural water content, 24.3 ~ 28.3%; average dry density, $1.31{\sim}1.43g/cm^3$, average void ratio, 0.93 ~ 1.001 ; cohesion, $ 0.2{\sim}0.75kg/cm^2$ ; angle of internal friction, $29^{\circ}{\sim}45^{\circ}$ ; soil texture, SL. The shear strength of the soil in different sites was measured by a direct shear apparatus (type B; shear box size, $62.5{\times}20mm$; ${\sigma}$, $1.434kg/cm^2$; speed, 1/100mm/min.). For the related element analyses, water content was moderated through a series of drainage experiments with 4 levels of drainage period, specific gravity was measured by KS F 308, analysis of particle size distribution, by KS F 2302 and soil samples were dried at $110{\pm}5^{\circ}C$ for more than 12 hours in dry oven. Soil hardness represents physical properties, such as particle size distribution, porosity, bulk density and water content of soil, and test of the hardness by soil hardness tester is the simplest approach and totally indicative method to grasp the mechanical properties of soil. It is important to understand the mechanical properties of soil as well as the chemical in order to realize the fundamental phenomena in the growth and the distribution of tree roots. The writer intended to study the correlation between the soil hardness and the distribution of tree roots of Pinus rigida Mill. planted in 1966 and Pinus rigida ${\times}$ taeda in 199 to 1960 in the denuded forest lands with and after several erosion control works. The soil texture of the sites investigated was SL originated from weathered granitic soil. The former is situated at Py$\ddot{o}$ngchangri, Ky$\ddot{o}$m-my$\ddot{o}$n, Kogs$\ddot{o}$ng-gun, Ch$\ddot{o}$llanam-do (3.63 ha; slope, $17^{\circ}{\sim}41^{\circ}$ soil depth, thin or medium; humidity, dry or optimum; height, 5.66/3.73 ~ 7.63 m; D.B.H., 9.7/8.00 ~ 12.00 cm) and the Latter at changun-long Kwangju-shi (3.50 ha; slope, $12^{\circ}{\sim}23^{\circ}$; soil depth, thin; humidity, dry; height, 10.47/7.3 ~ 12.79 m; D.B.H., 16.94/14.3 ~ 19.4 cm).The sampling areas were 24quadrats ($10m{\times}10m$) in the former area and 12 in the latter expanding from summit to foot. Each sampling trees for hardness test and investigation of root distribution were selected by purposive selection and soil profiles of these trees were made at the downward distance of 50 cm from the trees, at each quadrat. Soil layers of the profile were separated by the distance of 10 cm from the surface (layer I, II, ... ...). Soil hardness was measured with Yamanaka soil hardness tester and indicated as indicated soil hardness at the different soil layers. The distribution of tree root number per unit area in different soil depth was investigated, and the relationship between the soil hardness and the number of tree roots was discussed. The results obtained from the experiments are summarized as follows. 1. Analyses of simple relationship between shear strength and elements of shear strength, water content ($w_o$), void ratio ($e_o$), dry density (${\gamma}_d$) and specific gravity ($G_s$). 1) Negative correlation coefficients were recognized between shear strength and water content. and shear strength and void ratio. 2) Positive correlation coefficients were recognized between shear strength and dry density. 3) The correlation coefficients between shear strength and specific gravity were not significant. 2. Analyses of partial and multiple correlation coefficients between shear strength and the related elements: 1) From the analyses of the partial correlation coefficients among water content ($x_1$), void ratio ($x_2$), and dry density ($x_3$), the direct effect of the water content on shear strength was the highest, and effect on shear strength was in order of void ratio and dry density. Similar trend was recognized from the results of multiple correlation coefficient analyses. 2) Multiple linear regression equations derived from two independent variables, water content ($x_1$ and dry density ($x_2$) were found to be ineffective in estimating shear strength ($\hat{Y}$). However, the simple linear regression equations with an independent variable, water content (x) were highly efficient to estimate shear strength ($\hat{Y}$) with relatively high fitness. 3. A relationship between soil hardness and the distribution of root number: 1) The soil hardness increased proportionally to the soil depth. Negative correlation coefficients were recognized between indicated soil hardness and the number of tree roots in both plantations. 2) The majority of tree roots of Pinus rigida Mill and Pinus rigida ${\times}$ taeda planted in erosion-controlled lands distributed at 20 cm deep from the surface. 3) Simple linear regression equations were derived from indicated hardness (x) and the number of tree roots (Y) to estimate root numbers in both plantations.