• Health Policy and Management
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.148-169
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• 2008

As the Korean Government began to perceive healthcare as one of foundational industries for national dynamics, there has been mounting advocacy for the introduction of for-profit hospitals with a view to bringing efficiency in healthcare services industries and improvement of their international competitiveness. The Government is now considering the issue from all angles in favor of permitting for-profit hospitals. However, There have been few precedent studies on this subject to provide helpful data for the discussion and in the health policy making. This study used private hospitals - for-profit and nonprofit - in Florida, USA as study subjects to accumulate basic data that may be utilized for those involved in debates and health policy making relating to the introduction of for-profit hospitals in Korea. Among all the private general hospitals in Florida, those surveyed by AHA(American Hospital Association) for four consecutive years from 2001 and 2004 and others reported about to MCR(Medicare Cost Report) included in the collected data for analysis. In total 139 private general hospitals consisting of 73 for-profit hospitals and 66 nonprofit hospitals were included in the collected analysis data. Results of analysis revealed no significant difference between for-profit hospitals and nonprofit hospitals in the usage aspects of healthcare services including the average length of stay and the ratio of Medicare vs Medicaid patients. However, financial performances indicated by such factors. as the pre-tax return on assets and the pre-tax operating margin showed to be significantly higher in for-profit hospitals compared with nonprofit hospitals. And the ratio of personnel expenses and the turn period of total assets showed to be significantly lower in for-profit hospitals. Based on the hypothesis that arguments about the introduction of for-profit hospitals have considerably different viewpoints depending on the size of hospital represented by the number of bed, these two hospital types were compared again using the number of beds as a controlled factor, but the results were similar. We, therefore, could conclude that the for-profit hospitals in Florida included in this study could, in their for-profit operation, improve their financial performance by pursuing cost reduction and effectively utilizing their assets without limiting the amount and the range of their services or avoiding less medically protected groups such as Medicare and Medicaid patients.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.6 no.5
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• pp.11-25
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• 2005

In MIPv6 environment, an important design consideration for public key based binding update protocols is to minimize asymmetric cryptographic operations in mobile nodes with constraint computational power, such as PDAs and cellular phones, For that, public key based protocols such as CAM-DH. SUCV and Deng-Zhou-Bao's approach provides an optimization to offload asymmetric cryptographic operations of a mobile node to its home agent. However, such protocols have some problems in providing the optimization. Especially, CAM-DH with this optimization does not unload all asymmetric cryptographic operations from the mobile node, while resulting in the home agent's vulnerability to denial of service attacks. In this paper, we improve the drawbacks of CAM-DH. Furthermore, we adopt Aura's two hash-based CGA scheme to increase the cost of brute-force attacks searching for hash collisions in the CGA method. The comparison of our protocol with other public key based protocols shows that our protocol can minimize the MN's computation overhead, in addition to providing better manageability and stronger security than other protocols.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2002.11a
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• pp.148-150
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• 2002

In this paper, a 5-coupled BPF with teflon substrate is presented. In general, for less than 1 GHz frequency, the narrow bandwidth as well as the good characteristic in the rejection frequency band could be realized using lumped elements. However, for higher than 1 GHz frequency, the distributed elements such as microstrip lines need to be used for the design of the desired BPF For less than 2 GHz, the FR4 shows good filter characteristic at low cost. However, in the range of 2 GHz ~ 10 GHz, the filters with FR4 show a big difference between simulation and measurement results. Thus, in such a high frequency region, the teflon is more preferred to the FR4. The center frequency (fc) of the proposed filter is 2.3 GHz, the insertin loss (IL) is 1.2 dB, the return loss (RL) is 30 dB, bandwidth (BW) is 100 MHz, and the size is 8.3 cm $\times$ 4.9 cm.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.9 no.6
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• pp.196-206
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• 2009

The profitability of a hospital refers to business administration results achieved through its medical care and other management activities during applicable fiscal year. This study focused on operating margin as a measurement index of hospital profitability, which is a genuine medical return obtained by subtracting medical expenses from medical profits achieved during business administration of hospital. Based on the index, this study could deduce certain factors on hospital profitability in terms of various indices affecting profitability. And based on those factors, this study sought to provide more useful reference materials which allow us to devise possible ways to improve hospital profitability. As a result, it was found that public hospitals attained lower profitability than private ones. To analyze profitability depending on each index, this study divided hospitals broadly into deficit group and surplus group. As a result, it was found that there were significant differences in hospital profitability between two groups depending upon relevant indices such as labor cost ratio, maintenance expense ratio, number of operations per medical specialist and medical instrument turnover. According to analysis on potential effects of relevant indices upon profitability, it was found that each index had its explanatory power ranging from 25% to 74.5% depending on given model.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartC
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• v.11C no.5
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• pp.605-612
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• 2004

In MIPv6, unauthenticated binding updates expose the involved MN and CN to various security attacks. Thus, protecting the binding update process becomes of paramount importance in the MIPv6, and several secure binding update protocols have been proposed. In this paper, we pro-pose a novel protocol for the secure binding updates in MIPv6, which can resolve the drawbacks of the Deng-Zhou-Bao's protocol ［2］, by adopt-ing Aura's CGA scheme with two hashes ［9］. Aura's scheme enables our protocol to achieve stronger security than other CGA-based protocols without a trusted CA, resulting in less cost of verifying the HA's public key than the Deng-Zhou-Bao's protocol. Through the comparison of our protocol with other protocols such as the Deng-Zhou-Bao's protocol, CAM-DH and SUCV, we show that our protocol can provide better performance and manageability in addition to stronger security than other approaches.

• Journal of Soil and Groundwater Environment
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.18-25
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• 2005

For economic impact analysis on a R&D project of groundwater remediation in the metropolitan areas conducted as a fundamental research programme of KIGAM from 1998 to 2002, benefit/cost ratio(BCR), net present value(NPV), and internal rate of return(IRR) were calculated using a contingent valuation method(CVM). Measurable direct benefit parameters among the major outputs of this project consist of setup of drinking water facilities and groundwater information data valuation. In this study, economic impact of the project in NPV of year 2002, with applying a discount rate of $10.0\%$, was identified and estimated as 5.09 billion won in cost, 67.69 billion won in benefit, 62.60 billion won in NPV, 13.3 points in BCR, and $152\%$ in IRR, respectively.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.53-77
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• 2013

As advertising and promotions are categorized as operating expenses, managers tend to reduce marketing budget to improve their short term profitability. Gauging the value and accountability of marketing spending is therefore considered as a major research priority in marketing. To respond this call, recent studies have documented that financial market reacts positively to a firm's marketing activity or marketing related outcomes such as brand equity and customer satisfaction. However, prior studies focus on the relation of marketing variable and financial market variables. This study suggests a channel about how marketing activity increases firm valuation. Specifically, we propose that a firm's marketing activity increases the level of the firm's product market information and thereby the dispersion in financial analysts' earnings forecasts decreases. With less uncertainty about the firm's future prospect, the firm's managers and shareholders have less information asymmetry, which reduces the firm's cost of capital and thereby increases the valuation of the firm. To our knowledge, this is the first paper to examine how informational benefits can mediate the effect of marketing activity on firm value. To test whether marketing activity contributes to increase in firm value by mitigating information asymmetry, this study employs a longitudinal data which contains 12,824 firm-year observations with 2,337 distinct firms from 1981 to 2006. Firm value is measured by Tobin's Q and one-year-ahead buy-and-hold abnormal return (BHAR). Following prior literature, dispersion in analysts' earnings forecasts is used as a proxy for the information gap between management and shareholders. For model specification, to identify mediating effect, the three-step regression approach is adopted. All models are estimated using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods to test the statistical significance of the mediating effect. The analysis shows that marketing intensity has a significant negative relationship with dispersion in analysts' earnings forecasts. After including the mediator variable about analyst dispersion, the effect of marketing intensity on firm value drops from 1.199 (p < .01) to 1.130 (p < .01) in Tobin's Q model and the same effect drops from .192 (p < .01) to .188 (p < .01) in BHAR model. The results suggest that analysts' forecast dispersion partially accounts for the positive effect of marketing on firm valuation. Additionally, the same analysis was conducted with an alternative dependent variable (forecast accuracy) and a marketing metric (advertising intensity). The analysis supports the robustness of the main results. In sum, the results provide empirical evidence that marketing activity can increase shareholder value by mitigating problem of information asymmetry in the capital market. The findings have important implications for managers. First, managers should be cognizant of the role of marketing activity in providing information to the financial market as well as to the consumer market. Thus, managers should take into account investors' reaction when they design marketing communication messages for reducing the cost of capital. Second, this study shows a channel on how marketing creates shareholder value and highlights the accountability of marketing. In addition to the direct impact of marketing on firm value, an indirect channel by reducing information asymmetry should be considered. Potentially, marketing managers can justify their spending from the perspective of increasing long-term shareholder value.

• Journal of Korean Society of Water and Wastewater
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.103-114
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• 2017

A membrane bioreactor by sequentially alternating the inflow and by applying a two-stage coagulation control based on pre-coagulation was evaluated in terms of phosphorus removal efficiency and cost-savings. The MBR consisted of two identical alternative reaction tanks, followed by aerobic, anoxic and membrane tanks, where the wastewater and the internal return sludge alternatively flowed into each alternative reaction tank at every 2 hours. In the batch-operated alternative reaction tank, the initial concentration of nitrate rapidly decreased from 2.3 to 0.4 mg/L for only 20 minutes after stopping the inflow, followed by substantial release of phosphorus up to 4 mg/L under anaerobic condition. Jar test showed that the minimum alum doses to reduce the initial $PO_4$-P below 0.2 mg/L were 2 and 9 mol-Al/mol-P in the wastewater and the activated sludge from the membrane tank, respectively. It implies that a pre-coagulation in influent is more cost-efficient for phosphorus removal than the coagulation in the bioreactor. On the result of NUR test, there were little difference in terms of denitrification rate and contents of readily biodegradable COD between raw wastewater and pre-coagulated wastewater. When adding alum into the aerobic tank, alum doses above 26 mg/L as $Al_2O_3$ caused inhibitory effects on ammonia oxidation. Using the two-stage coagulation control based on pre-coagulation, the P concentration in the MBR effluent was kept below 0.2 mg/L with the alum of 2.7 mg/L as $Al_2O_3$, which was much lower than 5.1~7.4 mg/L as $Al_2O_3$ required for typical wastewater treatment plants. During the long-term operation of MBR, there was no change of the TMP increase rate before and after alum addition.

• Journal of Sericultural and Entomological Science
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• no.12
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• pp.47-50
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• 1970

There are many factors affecting the development of sericultural industry in Korea. The setting of a rational pricing system for sericultural products is one of important activities of the Korean Government to improve the incentives to producers. The determination o： the prices for many years were based on the production costs including a certain level of profits. Some of cost items are in conflict both in cocoon producers and silk-reeling industries. Government officials have to evaluate these conflicting problems and estimate the consequences of their decisions. In this situation the final decision often became political decisions. This analysis is aimed at providing an alternative method of setting the prices of sericultural products. The criteria of the equilibrium employed in this analysis are based on economic principle which equilibrium condition is determined by the relationships between the marginal productivity of input factors and factor prices. In order to obtain the related information Cobb-Douglas'functions were fitted using KIST computer and data were obtained mostly from the Bank of Korea and the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestru, An important assumption is that "Opportunity Costs" of factors input in both cocoon production and silk-Peeling industries are same, The major finding s obtained are as followings. 1) The sum of coefficient of production elastisity in silk-reeling industries is greater than one. Silk-reeling industries are operating under the situation of increasing return to scale and it is, therefore, expected to develop the industries as the capital-intensive large scale. 2) The cocoon producing farmers are under the situations of the decreasing return to scale and it is expected to continue their cocoon farming as the labor-intensive small scale, assuming the present level of production technology. As the development of commercial farming, the resources input in cocoon production will be shifted to the production for higher profitable crops, 3) The price elastisity of production is higher in cocoon production than in silk-reeling industries. It is expected that the price changing effects on domestic production will be resulted from cocoon producers. 4) Based on analysis results of marginal productivities and the opportunity costs of resources, cocoon price for meeting equilibrium price condition is to be increased by 8-16 percent or standard price level of silk increased by 6-8 percent. There were the possibilities of over evaluation on opportunity cost of resources input in silk-reeling industries, or income transfered from the farmers to the industries. It is recommended that the prices for meeting equilibrium price conditions are to be determined by 72 percent for cocoon and 28 percent for silk-reeling costs, based on standard level of the exporting prices.

• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.95-120
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• 1990

The underpricing of new shares of a firm that are offered to the public for the first time (initial offerings) is well known and has puzzled financial economists for a long time since it seems at odds with the optimal behavior of the owners of issuing firms. Past attempts by financial economists to explain this phenomenon have not been successful in the sense that the explanations given by them are either inconsistent with the equilibrium theory or implausible. Approaches by such authors as Welch or Allen and Faulhaber are no exceptions. In this paper, we develop a signalling model of capital investment to explain the underpricing phenomenon and also analyze the efficiency of investment. The model focuses on the information asymmetry between the owners of issuing firms and general investors. We consider a firm that has been owned and operated by a single owner and that has a profitable project but has no capital to develop it. The profit from the project depends on the capital invested in the project as well as a profitability parameter. The model also assumes that the financial market is represented by a single investor who maximizes the expected wealth. The owner has superior information as to the value of the firm to investors in the sense that it knows the true value of the parameter while investors have only a probability distribution about the parameter. The owner offers the representative investor a fraction of the ownership of the firm in return for a certain amount of investment in the firm. This offer condition is equivalent to the usual offer condition consisting of the number of issues to sell and the unit price of a share. Thus, the model is a signalling game. Using Kreps' criterion as the solution concept, we obtained an essentially unique separating equilibrium offer condition. Analysis of this separating equilibrium shows that the owner of the firm with high profitability chooses an offer condition that raises an amount of capital that is short of the amount that maximizes the potential profit from the project. It also reveals that the fraction of the ownership of the firm that the representative investor receives from the owner of the highly profitable firm in return for its investment has a value that exceeds the investment. In other words, the initial offering in the model is underpriced when the profitability of the firm is high. The source of underpricing and underinvestment is the signalling activity by the owner of the highly profitable firm who attempts to convince investors that his firm has a highly profitable project by choosing an offer condition that cannot be imitated by the owner of a firm with low profitability. Thus, we obtained two main results. First, underpricing is a result of a signalling activity by the owner of a firm with high profitability when there exists information asymmetry between the owner of the issuing firm and investors. Second, such information asymmetry also leads to underinvestment in a highly profitable project. Those results clearly show the underpricing entails underinvestment and that information asymmetry leads to a social cost as well as a private cost. The above results are quite general in the sense that they are based upon a neoclassical profit function and full rationality of economic agents. We believe that the results of this paper can be used as a basis for further research on the capital investment process. For instance, one can view the results of this paper as a subgame equilibrium in a larger game in which a firm chooses among diverse ways to raise capital. In addition, the method used in this paper can be used in analyzing a wide range of problems arising from information asymmetry that the Korean financial market faces.