• THE INTERNATIONAL COMMERCE & LAW REVIEW
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• v.25
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• pp.3-40
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• 2005

Many Korean construction companies have been performing a variety of overseas construction projects since the 1970s. It is unfortunate that in many cases they have had to suffer big losses caused by errors and defects in the design and construction of the projects. In the author's opinion, however, there were losses that could have been avoided if they had understood better the feature and content of the particular construction contract. Few lawyers and scholars in Korea have been interested in the research and study of international construction contracts. This is mainly because they do not have access to practical sources outside of Korea for them to research and study since the contracts undertaken have been dealt with by law firms in other jurisdictions to which the disputes apply. This article is aiming primarily at the introduction of the issues which the practitioners are likely to confront in the process of reviewing and performing the international construction contract. In some cases solutions are sought about these issues based upon the FIDIC standard terms and conditions, the actual experience of practice, and UNIDROIT Principles, etc. It is reasonable to say that all the issues related to the international construction contract cannot be covered in a short article like this. The author wishes this article could induce subsequent studies on international construction contracts for further research. It has to be noted that from time to time Korean construction practices have been compared to the international ones for better understanding. This article mostly includes cases where the Korean construction companies go overseas for their projects, while there are some cases where foreign developers and financial investors participated in domestic projects in which international construction contracts forms were adopted. A few precedent domestic writings about international construction contracts seems to lack emphasis on the points that there are several standard construction contract forms and that they are different. The differences are mainly in accordance with who bears the design responsibility, how the owner has to make progress payments to the contractor and who the funding source for the project is. This article tries to make it clear that there are significant differences between the standard contract forms, e.g. a simple construction form, a design-build form and an EPC/turnkey form of contract. Again, the author hopes that this article can arouse the interest in the international construction contracts from both academic and practical fields, so that many subsequent advanced articles can help our construction industry become much more competitive in the world through awareness of the methods of procurement and administration of the contracts.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.18 no.11
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• pp.390-398
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• 2017

In this study, we conducted a questionnaire survey for the purpose of finding a method of mobile sector ecosystem activation targeted at small and medium businesses (SMBs). Through the total of 204 responders consisting of business employees from each mobile sector, we analyzed the factors inhibiting the development of the mobile ecosystem and preventing the activation the mobile market, as well as conducting a diagnosis of the digital potential. This paper presented suggestions for searching for a systematic supporting strategy considering the short-term inhibitory factors (market structure improvement, financial support, etc.) and long-term orientation factors (personnel nurturing, strengthening of supporting role by governmental initiative) for the activation of the domestic mobile market. After measuring the digital potential, we found that domestic mobile SMBs have perceived the importance of the digital potential and have considered and readied themselves for the future market. The present survey found that if suitable digitalization can be accomplished for their firms' products and services, they have the ability and willingness to succeed in the market. However, they have a hard task ahead of them from adigital delivery perspective given the potential for digital disruptions.

• Journal of the Korean association of regional geographers
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.23-43
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• 1995

This paper is the first part of a research which looks into the regional development process and the quality of life of Youngnam area, and which suggests a prospect and tasks for the future development of the region. Youngnam region has grown rapidly on the basis of labor-intensive light industries and standardized Fordist lage-scale heavy industries through the industrialization and urbanization of South Korea from the 1960s; but recently it has shown a relatively downward trend. The recent economic stagnation of Youngnam region can be seen as a result of uneven regional development in the national scale, which has brought out the increasing subcontracting relation within the region, the geographically excessive concentration of firms, the lack of growth potentiality of high-tech industries, the weakness of producer service, and the shortage of financial activities for capital flows. In addition, construction of physical and social infrastructures and management of urban central functions could not meet properly the rapid economic and urban growth of the region. Because of these problematics inherent in the economy of Yougnam region, the occupational status of regional dwellers is more or less unstable, and the wage level of employee as a whole in Youngnam region is lower than those of Seoul, although the wage level of labourers in manufacturing is relatively high. Moreover, the quality of life of dwellers in the region has some difficulties in the use of resources and ecological environment as well as the unequal provision of means of living and welfare facilities, even though it has been improved materially.

• Information Systems Review
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.45-66
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• 2009

A number of companies are considering for merger and acquisition (M&A) as one of business strategies for their growth and survival. However, many of them do not create the synergy they had sought, and failed M&A, often result in negative outcomes in terms of productivity, market share, profitability and turnover of qualified employees. There have been numerous research studies conducted to analyze the factors that determine the success and failure of M&A, and it has been found that with the increasing dependence of many companies on information systems, post-M&A IS (information systems) integration success has a critical effect on the success of M&A. However, there have been very few studies on post-M&A IS integration success, and most have been restricted to integration of IS organizations or physical information systems. In order to conduct a comprehensive research on the factors that affect the success of post-M&A IS integration, this study surveyed preceding researches on not only information systems but also strategic management, economics, finance, HRM (human resource management) and organization management. Based on the findings, a comprehensive and integrated model of the influential factors on post-M&A IS integration has been proposed. The proposed model categorizes the factors into perspectives of M&A, strategy, organization, HRM and IS, and provides an empirical evaluation of each factor on the success of IS integration based on comparative case studies.

• The Journal of the Institute of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.1-11
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• 2020

As an important basic building block of the smart grid environment, smart meter provides real-time electricity consumption information to the utility. However, ensuring information security and privacy in the smart meter data aggregation process is a non-trivial task. Even though the secure data aggregation for the smart meter has been a lot of attention from both academic and industry researchers in recent years, most of these studies are not secure against internal attackers or cannot provide data integrity. Besides, their computation costs are not satisfactory because the bilinear pairing operation or the hash-to-point operation is performed at the smart meter system. Recently, blockchains or distributed ledgers are an emerging technology that has drawn considerable interest from energy supply firms, startups, technology developers, financial institutions, national governments and the academic community. In particular, blockchains are identified as having the potential to bring significant benefits and innovation for the electricity consumption network. This study suggests a distributed, privacy-preserving, and simple secure smart meter data aggregation system, backed up by Blockchain technology. Smart meter data are aggregated and verified by a hierarchical Merkle tree, in which the consensus protocol is supported by the practical Byzantine fault tolerance algorithm.

• Korean Journal of Social Welfare
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• v.66 no.2
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• pp.287-317
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• 2014

The study conducts a comparative study of the supporting systems and methods of social enterprises in Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong to propose a policy on sustainable growth of social enterprises and their long-term activation. By investigating previous studies, this researcher drew the frame of a comparative analysis and conducted the comparative analysis. First, regarding the supporting system for social enterprises, it was found that Korea had better institutional foundation and system, whereas Japan had better activation, cooperation and network of intermediary support organizations. In Korea there is the law related to social enterprises, and the government takes control of all of the organization in charge of the policy, intermediary support organizations, cooperation and network, and authentication system. However, Hong Kong has yet to establish a basic institutional system to grow and activate social enterprises, and foreign intermediary supporting organizations increase the network and cooperation level to support social enterprises. Thirdly, for supporting methods for social enterprises, there were direct financial support, indirect business support and other kinds of support in Korea, whereas indirect support was activated in Japan. Although The Hong Kong government barely supports social enterprises, it comes up with a plan to support the firms serving as social enterprises under its the 12th 5-year development plan. For sustainable growth of Korean social enterprises, this study suggested the change of the government policy to the direction of creating social enterprise ecosystem through cooperation and network activation, indirect support in the middle of process, and activation of intermediary support organizations.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.12 no.6
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• pp.65-77
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• 2017

The syndicated investment strategy of venture capital has merits such as reductionof investment risk, efficient management of investment resources, and information asymmetry mitigation. This study analyzes the investment strategy and network of venture capital by collecting and analyzing investment information of Korean venture capital on Korean start-ups for three years from 2014 to 2016. We could not find statistically significant association with the choice of syndicated investment of the stage of start-ups, the venture capital expertise (investment concentration), internal competence (number of workforce and professional manpower), and the breadth of investment network. As a result of this study, the factors that determine venture capital 's syndicated investment in Korea are only the financial factors such as the size of the investment amount and the size of the fund besides the business field of the invested company. The results suggest that the majority of venture capital firms in Korea may not customize their investment strategies in terms of their expertise or inherent business risks of invested companies.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.61-67
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• 2015

Purpose - Exports have long been regarded as significant drivers of sustainable competitive advantage and growth among small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The export activities of SMEs are particularly important in the context of export-oriented economies such as Korea. Although many studies have examined the determinants of exports, it is difficult to find empirical studies about the determinants of the export performance of regional SMEs. This study investigates the determinants of export performance in the regional SME context based on an integrated approach that combines the environment factor of industrial organization theory, competitive strategy theory, and the competences of the resource-based view. Research design, data, and methodology - To empirically analyze the determinants of export performance in the regional SMEs, data were collected from firms in the Daegu metropolitan area. Data were collected directly through questionnaire surveys; in addition, secondary financial data were also taken from the KIS-VALUE database. Out of the 175 responses that were received, 143 were considered to be worth examining. After testing the reliability and validity of the variables through multiple items such as environmental turbulence and competitive strategy, hypotheses were verified by using five multi-regression models. These models were: a control model with organizational size and age, an environmental model with technology and market turbulence, a competency model with R&D and foreign distribution channels, a strategy model with product and market differentiation, and an integrated model including all of these variables. Results - First, as a control variable, the organization size has significant positive effects on export performance. Second, technology turbulence based on industrial organization theory has significant positive effects on export performance, but market turbulence does not affect export performance. Third, the foreign market distribution competency of the resource-based view has strong positive effects on export performance, but the R&D competency does not affect export performance. Fourth, the product differentiation strategy from competitive strategy theory positively impacts export performance, but market differentiation does not affect export performance. Finally, in the integrated model, only the foreign distribution competency of the resource-based view has a significant effect on export performance. Conclusions - The empirical results of this study verified the usefulness of the rationales behind the three theories to explain the export performance of the regional SMEs, especially the importance of the foreign market distribution competency from the resource-based view. With regard to practical considerations, this study's implications suggest that the use of technological environmental changes by industries is better than the use of market changes. Further, the use of the product differentiation strategy is more effective than the use of the market-driving strategy, and the distribution channel competency plays a stronger role than the technology-oriented competency with regard to the export performance position of regional SMEs. Future studies should examine relational perspectives, such as trust among channel partners. Therefore, the configuration approach is more useful in enhancing pragmatism by comparing high- and low-export companies.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.81-90
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• 2016

This study aims to investigate the association between stock performance and credit ratings, and credit rating changes using a sample of 1,691 KRX firm-years that acquire equity in the form of long-term bonds from 2002 to 2013. Previous U.S. literature is mixed with regard to the relation between credit ratings and stock price. On one hand, there is evidence of a positive relation between credit ratings and stock prices, an anomaly established in U.S. studies. On the other hand, the CAPM model suggests a negative relation between stock prices and credit ratings, implying that investors expect financial rewards for bearing additional risk. To our knowledge, we are the first to examine the relationship between stock price and default risk proxied by credit ratings in period t+1. We find a negative (positive) relation between credit ratings (risk) in period t+1 and stock returns in period t, suggesting that credit rating agencies do not consider stock returns as a metric with the potential to influence default risk. Our results suggest that market participants may prefer firms with higher credit risk because of expected higher returns.

• Journal of Navigation and Port Research
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• v.39 no.1
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• pp.69-75
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• 2015

The concrete purpose of this study is to suggest actually a debt ratio to optimize the capital structure providing a kind of approach to estimate the proper debt ratio with an analytical model and empirical data in Korean shipping industry. The mathematical and analytical model is started from the first equation about ROE, return of net operating income on equity, with an independent variable, debt ratio. It is constructed with several parameters, ROS(return of operating income on sales), TAT(total assets turnover), and NFCL(net finance cost to liabilities). There could not be a certain relationship between debt ratio and ROS or TAT, while some correlation or causality between debt ratio and NFCL. In other words, most of firms with high debt ratio is likely to burden higher finance cost than others with low one. In this case, there is a linearity relationship between debt ratio and NFCL, so then the second equation considering this relation could be included within the analytical approach of this paper. To be short, if the criteria of adequate debt ratio has to be defined as some level of debt ratio to optimize ROE, the ROE could be illustrated as a quadratic equation to debt ratio from two equations. Next, this research estimated those parameters' numbers through the single regression method with data over 12 years of Korean shipping industry, and identified empirically the fact that optimal debt ratio would be approximately 400%. To conclude, if that industry's sales and operating incomes are stable, the debt ratio could be accepted until twice of 200% had forced in order to guarantee its financial safety in past time.