• Korea journal of population studies
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• v.30 no.3
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• pp.107-135
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• 2007

This paper uses a static Gamma count model, a traditional hurdle model and an endogenous switching Poisson model, respectively for determining married women's completed fertility rates in Korea. This paper analyzes the impact of household income, women's wage and education, and women's job market participation on the number of children of married women above age 40 and on the expected number of children of women aged below 40. The paper shows that a household income significantly increases the number of children for at least women aged above 40, however, this income effect is disappearing for younger generation. The empirical model suggests that women having a job tend to have fewer children for a group 39 years old and below and find that there is an endogeneity problem between child birth and labor force participation, too. The education level of married women gives a positive effect for giving a birth, itself, while it gives a negative impact on the number of children. Based on the empirical results, it concludes that Becker's Quantity-Quality theory works for Korea, too.

• Journal of Environmental Policy
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.69-114
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• 2010

This study investigates the voluntary corporate disclosure of environmental information via stand-alone environmental reports or company web-sites. Quality of disclosure was assessed using the content analysis index proposed by Clarkson et al. (2008) based on GRI guidelines. Descriptive statistics on disclosure scores by category suggest that the level of disclosure is low relative to the expectation implied by the GRI reporting guidelines, and points to the need for improvement in the future. Specific areas where improvement is required include the disclosure of environmental performance indicators. Corporate environmental performance was measured in terms of the percentage of toxic wastes that was treated or processed by each firm and economic performance, by industry-adjusted annual return, which was subject to a series of association tests designed to explore the interrelations among environmental disclosure, environmental performance, and economic performance. The individual equation approach based on OLS procedures suggests a positive association between environmental performance and the level of discretionary environmental disclosures, which is not the case between environmental and economic performance. An integrated analysis using simultaneous equations approach does not indicate any significant relationships among three constructs, suggesting the lack of endogeneity, inconsistent with Al-Tuwaijri et al. (2004). Additional analysis assesses the level of environmental disclosure made in footnotes to the audited annual reports, which suggests that the quality of disclosure is very low and that footnote disclosure does not serve as a meaningful channel for the provision of corporate environmental information.

• Journal of Korea Trade
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.21-42
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• 2023

Purpose - This paper investigates the trade effect of the Korea-China Free Trade Agreement (KCFTA) which coincides with political conflicts between the two countries due to the deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) in Korea. The two events occurred in the same year and both are likely to affect trade between two countries but in opposite directions. Therefore, it is crucial to distinguish between the trade effects from the KCFTA event and those from the THAAD event to evaluate the true FTA effects. However, this would be difficult when using only annual data. Accordingly, ex post studies to examine the trade effects of KCFTA are lacking in trustworthiness while many ex ante studies that conjecture the positive trade effects neglect the THAAD deployment impact. This paper aims to fill that gap. Design/methodology - Given that the KCFTA and THAAD events occurred in the same year but in different months, we use the monthly data from 2000 to 2019 of Korea's exports to bracket this period. We employ the difference-in-difference (DID) method within a gravity equation specification that uses hi-dimensional fixed effects to address various endogeneity issues and seasonal effects. We identify the net impact of KCFTA ratification from these two near-simultaneous events to quantify the effects of trade liberalization between these two countries. Findings - After isolating the THAAD effects on trade, the analysis creates a positive and statistically significant coefficient estimate of the KCFTA impact. In contrast, failing to isolate the THAAD effect produced a negative and statistically significant coefficient estimate of the KCFTA impact. Our results indicate that KCFTA independently increased Korea's exports to China by 10.2%, but that this increase was fully mitigated by the THAAD event. Further, our results verify that unobserved heterogeneity and multilateral resistance are technically difficult to account for in those estimations as that rely solely upon annual data, as this type of data are inadequate to control for the potential for endogeneity. Originality/value - This paper is one of the first studies to carefully evaluate the net trade effects of the KCFTA on Korea's largest trading partner while isolating the impact of simultaneously occurred political events that may influence trade in opposing directions. Our findings indicate that the lack of prior evidence of positive trade effects of the KCFTA when using annual data may be attributed to a failure to identify the impact of each event separately. This analysis supports using the correct modeling specification to avoid misleading conclusions when evaluating any important international trade policy.

• Journal of Labour Economics
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• v.35 no.1
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• pp.111-136
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• 2012

This paper investigates effects of family size on private tutoring expenditures, using a data set drawn from the Korean Longitudinal Survey of Women & Families (KLoWF). To deal with endogeneity of family size, the paper employs an instrumental variable (IV) method in which the sex of the first-born of the family is used as an IV. The results suggest that quantity-quality trade-offs of children within a family function in a way that varies by the sex of the child. While the effect of an increase in family size on private turoring expenditures of a second-born daughter is negative, the effect for a second-born son is indeterminate. The result for daughters implies that high costs of raising a child are likely to explain low birth rates of Korea.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.7 no.6
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• pp.379-385
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• 2020

The effect of research and development (R&D) expenditure on firm output is an interesting topic, but hardly explored in developing countries due to the unavailability of data. This study investigates this topic in the context of Vietnam by utilizing a novel dataset of 343 firms listed on the Vietnam Stock Exchange in the 2010-2018 period. The effect of R&D expenditure is examined under the production function framework. In order to obtain the robustness of the quantitative results, we estimate the production function with two coherent techniques including the OLS and 2-SLS. An instrumental variable regression technique is adopted to avoid the endogeneity problem between R&D expenditure and other variables. In our empirical analysis, we find that R&D expenditure has a positive and significant impact on output growth. The finding is robust in both OLS and 2-SLS frameworks. Besides, the output elasticity to R&D expenditure of our result is much higher than the estimated elasticity of other countries. The results imply that a 1% increase in R&D expenditure in Vietnam will help to expand the output more than a 1% increase in R&D investment in other countries. The findings from our paper provide important implications for firm managers, investors, and policymakers in Vietnam.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.67-79
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• 2019

This study examines the impact of corporate governance on capital structure decisions based on a large panel of Chinese listed firms. Using the system Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) estimator to control for unobserved heterogeneity, endogeneity, and persistency in capital structure decisions, we document that the ownership structure plays a significant role in determining leverage ratios. More specially, we find that managerial ownership has a positive and significant impact on firms' leverage, consistent with the incentive alignment hypothesis. We also find that managerial ownership only affects the leverage decisions of private firms in the post-2005 split share reform period. State ownership negatively influence leverage decisions implying that SOEs may face fewer restrictions in equity issuance and may receive favourable treatments when applying for seasoned equity ¿nancing, thus use less debt. Furthermore, our results show that while foreign ownership negatively influences leverage decisions, legal person shareholding positively influences firms' leverage decisions only for state controlled firms. We also find that the board structure variables (board size and the proportion of independent directors) do not influence firms' capital structure decisions. Our findings suggest that recent ownership reforms have been successful in terms of providing incentive to managers through managerial shareholdings to take risky financial choices.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.27-40
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• 2019

The study examines the effects of growth opportunities, debt maturity and liquidity risk on leverage, making use of a large panel of Chinese listed firms. Research on capital structure has broadened its scope from a single capital structure decision (the debt/equity choice) to various attributes of the debt in firms' capital structure. We use the system Generalized Method of Moments estimator to control for unobserved heterogeneity and the potential endogeneity of regressors. We find a negative relationship between growth opportunities and leverage. Further, we find that while the proportion of short-term debt attenuates the negative effect of growth opportunities on leverage, it negatively affects leverage as predicted by the liquidity risk hypothesis. When we distinguish between state owned firms and private controlled firms, we find evidence that these effects are only relevant to private controlled firms. However, our analysis indicates that the economic implication of liquidity risk effect is much lower for Chinese firms than that observed in the literature for US firms. Our study suggests that these differences can be explained by differences in the institutional environment in which firms operate. This finding related to Diamond's (1991) liquidity risk hypothesis extends our understanding of the relationship between liquidity risk and the debt maturity choice.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.127-135
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• 2020

The paper aims to examine whether business cycles affect the link between financial development and bank risk, measured by Zscore and non-performing loans to total loans in six Southeast Asian countries, namely Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. This study uses a sample of 95 listed commercial banks over a 15-year period between 2004 and 2018 in the six Southeast Asian countries. This study employs panel OLS regression and modifications to tackle issues such as endogeneity and heteroscedasticity. The results show that the impact of stock market development (the ratio of the market capitalization to GDP) on Zscore is significantly positive, whereas its effect on non-performing loans is significantly negative. The findings suggest that financial development, in terms of stock market capitalization, improves banks' Zscores and reduces their level of non-performing loans, suggesting that financial development on average reduces bank risk. The impact of business cycle is insignificant towards bank risk, thus rejecting both counter- and pro-cyclical hypotheses, except for the case of risk indicator of loan loss provisions. Examining the joint effect of the business cycle and financial development on bank risk, we find that the phase of business cycles generally does not moderate the link between financial development and bank risk.

• Journal of Labour Economics
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• v.36 no.3
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• pp.1-27
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• 2013

This paper estimates the employment and wage effects of the duration of leave of absence for job preparation activities and the duration of leave of absence due to economic difficulties by using the first wave of the Graduates Occupational Mobility Survey of 2009 (2009GOMS1). The employment probability and wage increase by 1.6 percentage points and 4.0 percentage, respectively, with a month of the duration of leave for job preparation activities. The employment probability and wage decrease by 3.6 percentage points and 7.2 percentage, respectively, with a month of the duration of leave due to economic difficulties.

• Journal of Labour Economics
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• v.32 no.2
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• pp.125-150
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• 2009

This article analysed the effect of government intervention on the market failure in firm training in Korean. I used the Employment Insurance DB and the KISLINE DB and joined two data by the firm identification number 2004-2006 year. I estimated the effect of intervention of government by propensity score matching and difference-in-difference method to avoid of participation selection and endogeneity problem. The result is that government intervention on the firm training have made positive effect but it is not significant statistically. We have to investigate the market failure in firm training and to reassess the level of optimal firm training in Korea. After the study, the government intervention on the firm trainig will have to be rearranged.