• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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• v.30 no.2
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• pp.129-155
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• 2008

The rate of antibiotics prescription for an acute airway infection significantly varies depending upon the diagnosis type, specialty, and the location of the hospital along with many other related factors. The objective of this study is to empirically investigate the possible relationship between the antibiotics prescription rates for an acute airway infection and the degree of competition in the hospital market regions of mainly the providers of primary medical care services such as clinics, internal medicines, pediatrics and otorhinolaryngology department. Using the data from Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service (HIRA) regarding the hospitals' antibiotics prescription rates for the acute airway infection and controlling for selected variables of demand and supply sectors, this study tries to figure out that the degree of competition in the hospital market, regardless of what type of competition indexes we employed, has a statistically significant effect on the variations of antibiotics prescription rate of the clinics in local areas. This result implies that as an economic consideration itself, the change in the degree of competition in the hospital market can play a crucial role influencing the treatment behaviors of the medical doctors. More specifically, this study reveals that as the degree of competition increases the antibiotics prescription rate goes up. This result means that if the market becomes more competitive in a specific region so that it might cause a reduction in doctor's income, doctors with rational decision-making process, recognize that the benefit created from inducing patients' seemingly unnecessary demand for medical care (income effect) would be higher than the costs associated with sustaining their targeted income (substitution effect). It is because that the doctors are more likely to prescribe antibiotics which create relatively higher margins than other medical care services in order to sustain their targeted income when the hospital market competition becomes tighter. Even though this study empirically confirms that antibiotics prescription can be affected by the economic incentives, it still raises following issues as limitations of the study: first issue is about the representativeness of the hospital regions segregated for this study, which might be weak in explaining whether these regions are mutually exclusive in reality. Patients actually consider the quality of services, transportation cost, time costs, and any other related factors choosing the doctors or hospitals, and in that sense, this study rules out 'border-crossing' in using the medical care services. Second issue arises in capturing the data of antibiotics prescription rate. Since we use the average rate for each medical institution, we cannot figure out the average rate for each patient so that we are not able to control for the variation of patients' medical conditions. It is because of the unavailability of data regarding each patient's medical condition from HIRA. Thirdly, since this study mainly analyzes the medical institutions providing primary care such as clinics, internal medicines, pediatrics, and otorhinolaryngology department, it is skeptical of whether those institutions can represent the hospital market in respective regions and truly reflect the degree of competition. It needs to extend the study areas and disease types as well as any micro data for future studies.

• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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• v.30 no.2
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• pp.157-183
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• 2008

'New Universities for Regional Innovation(NURI)' is a financial aid program designed to promote the development of universities as a major component of Regional Innovation System (RIS). In particular, this program emphasizes the role of regional universities to provide the qualified graduates for the regional economy. This paper is to evaluate the effect of NURI, focusing on the change of graduates' employment. The effect of the program can be evaluated by the quality of graduates' accumulated human capital, and graduates' employment performance represents the graduates' quality evaluated in the labor market. This is also believed to be a good performance indicator of the NURI program. We utilize the graduate employment survey of Korean Educational Development Institute (KEDI), and calculate the graduates' employment rates of the departments that received the financial support of NURI (treatment group). We also calculate the graduates' employment rates of the departments that applied for the support of the NURI program but were not selected (comparison group). By using difference-in-differences method, we compare the change of graduates' employment rates in treatment and comparison groups before and after the program came in effect. Compared with the employment rates in 2004 before the NURI program started, the graduates employment rates improved in both groups in 2005 and 2006. The improvement of the employment rates in the treatment group is larger than that in the comparison group. Moreover, the difference of improvement gets larger in the year 2006 than in 2005, which means those students who were affected more years by the NURI program are more likely to be employed. However, the difference is not statistically significant, and we cannot definetely conclude that NURI showed the desired effect on the quality of the college graduates. We calculate employment rates in two ways; whether to treat going on to graduate education as an employment or not. The result was qualitatively the same in both cases. We also tracked quality of employment by investigating the firm size where the graduates of the treatment group were employed. By utilizing data from the Employment Insurance Fund, we measure the firm size by the number of employees. We did not find any deterioration of employment quality between 2005 and 2006, though it deteriorates in 2007. Therefore, the improvement of employment rates until 2006, though not statistically significant, does not seem to come at the cost of employment quality. The interpretation of this result cannot help being very limited. First, this evaluation covers such a short time period. It only covers two years after the program started, 2005 and 2006. Second, the extent of the improvement in employment rates is not satisfactory considering the amount of financial support, even though it can be argued that the employment has improved since the inception of the program. Subsequent evaluation of the program is required to certify the NURI programs' longer term effectiveness.

• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.55-75
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• 1992

At the outset of import liberalization, most economists expected a significant drop in the prices of domestic goods that faced foreign competition. However, it is now generally acknowledge that a significant drop in prices of those goods has not occurred. A common claim is that the prices did not drop significantly because the major importers of many imported goods were also the domestic producers of competing goods. The objective of this paper is to analyze the welfare effect of importation by domestic firms that produce competing goods, to identify the factors that facilitate such business practices, and to formulate a policy that could improve the welfare. We proved that importation by competing domestic firms definitely raises the prices of both imported and domestic goods compared to the situation where foreign goods are imported by non-producers, ceteris paribus. The intuition behind this result is that since a producer-importer is essentially a cartel, its overall profit maximization requires reduced competition between the products that it sells. On the other hand, if a producer-importer is more efficient at distrinbution than a simple importer, the comparison between the two cases is a priori indeterminate. We also find that the industries in which domestic producers are actively involved in importing competing goods are the ones in which the distribution channels are tightly controlled by importer-producers. This finding suggests that exclusive dealing contracts, which work as an entry barrier, may be the source of importing by domestic producers. We argue that in a country such as Korea, where financial market is highly incomplete, tight control of the distribution channels by oligopolistic manufacturers is likely to be an effective entry barrier that leads to importing by domestic producers of similar goods. We further argue that seemingly superior distribution costs of importer-producers is likely to be a result of market foreclosure which would disappear once the entry barrier of exclusive dealing contracts is removed. Above findings suggest that market imperfections are the source of importation by domestic competitors, which in turn constitutes a market imperfection in itself and reduces consumer welfare. As potential remedies, we considered three alternatives; direct price control by the government over the imported goods sold by major domestic producers, regulation of trade itself between major producers, and regulation of exclusive dealing contracts. For reasons both theoretical and pratical, we find that the last alternative is the most attrative. Prohibiting exclusive contracts between manufacturers and dealers in industries where exclusive dealing contracts are a significant entry barrier is expected to break up the importer-producer cartel and improve the welfare.

• Management & Information Systems Review
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• v.31 no.3
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• pp.223-248
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• 2012

This study analyses support policy and structural change of textile industry in Daegu Kyungbuk region, and suggests major issues for textile industry's innovation. In Daegu Kyungbuk, it was 1999 that a policy, so called Milano Project, in order to promote a textile industry was devised. In 2004, the Regional Industrial Promotion Plan was devised. The plan was born from a view point of establishing a regional innovation system and of promoting the innovative clusters under a knowledge based economy. After then, the Regional Industry Promotion Project or Regional Strategic Industry Promotion Project became a core of regional textile industrial policy. Research results indicated that the first stage Milano project (1999-2003) showed both positive and negative effects. There were no long-term development plan, clear vision and strategy. But, core industrial infrastructure for differentiated product development, such as New product Development Support Center and Dyeing Design Practical Application Center, was constructed. The second stage Daegu Textile Industry Promotion Plan (2004-2008) displayed a significant technological performance and new product sales with the assistance of Kyungbuk province. Also, textile industry revealed positive fruits such as financial structure, productivity, and profitability as a result of strong restructuring. In industrial structure, there was a important change from clothe textile material to industry textile material. Most of textile companies did not showed high capability in CEO's technology innovation intention, entrepreneurship, R&D and human resource competency in compare with other industry. We suggested that Daegu Kyungbuk has to select and concentrate on the high-tech textile material and living textile for sustainable development and competitiveness. We also proposed a confidence and cooperation based innovation network and company oriented innovation cluster.

• Journal of Korean Tunnelling and Underground Space Association
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• v.19 no.5
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• pp.761-778
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• 2017

The need of the underground space for the infrastructures in urban area is increasing, and especially the demand for shallow tunnels increased drastically. It is very important that the shallow tunnel in the urban area should fulfill not only its own safety conditions but also the safety condition for the adjacent structures and the surrounding sub-structure. Most of the studies on the behavior of shallow tunnels concentrated only on their behaviors due to the local deformation of the tunnel, such as tunnel crown or tunnel sidewall. However, few studies have been performed for the behavior of the shallow tunnel due to the deformation of the entire tunnel. Therefore, in this study the behavior of the surrounding ground and the stability caused by deformation of the whole tunnel were studied. For that purpose, model tests were performed for the various ground surface slopes and the cover depth of the tunnel. The model tunnel (width 300 mm, height 200 mm) could be simulationally deformed in the vertical and horizontal direction. The model ground was built by using carbon rods of three types (4 mm, 6 mm, 8 mm), in various surface slopes and cover depth of the tunnel. The subsidence of ground surface, the load on the tunnel crown and the sidewall, and the transferred load near tunnel were measured. As results, the ground surface subsided above the tunnel, and its amount decreased as the distance from the tunnel increased. The influence of a tunnel ceased in a certain distance from the tunnel. At the inclined ground surface, the wider subsidence has been occurred. The loads on the crown and the sidewall were clearly visible, but there was no effect of the surface slope at a certain depth. The load transfer on the adjacent ground was larger when the cover depth (on the horizontal surface) was lager. The higher the level (on the inclined surface), the wider and smaller it appeared. On the shallow tunnel under inclined surface, the transfer of the ambient load on the tunnel sidewall (low side) was clearly visible.

• Progress in Medical Physics
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• v.3 no.2
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• pp.1-12
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• 1992

For intraoperative radiation therapy using electron beams, a cone system to deliver a large dose to the tumor during surgical operation and to save the surrounding normal tissue should be developed and dosimetry for the cone system is necessary to find proper X-ray collimator setting as well as to get useful data for clinical use. We developed a docking type of a cone system consisting of two parts made of aluminum: holder and cone. The cones which range from 4cm to 9cm with 1cm step at 100cm SSD of photon beam are 28cm long circular tubular cylinders. The system has two 26cm long holders: one for the cones larger than or equal to 7cm diamter and another for the smaller ones than 7cm. On the side of the holder is an aperture for insertion of a lamp and mirror to observe treatment field. Depth dose curve. dose profile and output factor at dept of dose maximum. and dose distribution in water for each cone size were measured with a p-type silicone detector controlled by a linear scanner for several extra opening of X-ray collimators. For a combination of electron energy and cone size, the opening of the X-ray collimator was caused to the surface dose, depths of dose maximum and 80%, dose profile and output factor. The variation of the output factor was the most remarkable. The output factors of 9MeV electron, as an example, range from 0.637 to 1.549. The opening of X-ray collimators would cause the quantity of scattered electrons coming to the IORT cone system. which in turn would change the dose distribution as well as the output factor. Dosimetry for an IORT cone system is inevitable to minimize uncertainty in the clinical use.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.42 no.6
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• pp.1-8
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• 2005

In this paper, we propose a two-stage head tracking algorithm adequate for real-time active camera system having pan-tilt-zoom functions. In the color convergence stage, we first assume that the shape of a head is an ellipse and its model color histogram is acquired in advance. Then, the min-shift method is applied to roughly estimate a target position by examining the histogram similarity of the model and a candidate ellipse. To reflect the temporal change of object color and enhance the reliability of mean-shift based tracking, the target histogram obtained in the previous frame is considered to update the model histogram. In the updating process, to alleviate error-accumulation due to outliers in the target ellipse of the previous frame, the target histogram in the previous frame is obtained within an ellipse adaptively shrunken on the basis of the model histogram. In addition, to enhance tracking reliability further, we set the initial position closer to the true position by compensating the global motion, which is rapidly estimated on the basis of two 1-D projection datasets. In the subsequent stage, we refine the position and size of the ellipse obtained in the first stage by using shape information. Here, we define a robust shape-similarity function based on the gradient direction. Extensive experimental results proved that the proposed algorithm performs head hacking well, even when a person moves fast, the head size changes drastically, or the background has many clusters and distracting colors. Also, the propose algorithm can perform tracking with the processing speed of about 30 fps on a standard PC.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.11
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• pp.147-163
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• 2003

Recently it is necessary that Hotel business introduce Information Technology to enhance competitive advantage and cope with changeable business promptly in management. Thus in an effort of using Information Technology strategically, Many Hotel business tries to install CRM system (Customer Relationship Management). This study tries to analyze the effects on customer performance by installing CRM system if it is in charge of major strategic system, it can get successful customer performance. I hypothesize to resolve the problem, and search preceding study results concerning the elements of CRM Installment and Customer performance. The survey was taken to emplyees in the field of CRM installment in Luxury hotel to test the hypothesis. To summarize the results, first, CRM intallment affects CRM customer performance. in short, systematic feature, management environment, information intention, and technologic element affect it. Through this study, facing the limitation and future study are below. first, additional parameter should be considered though I reviewed the elements affecting CRM customer performance by searching and abstracting preceding studies. Second, There are lack of preceding studies because it has passed only a couple of years since Korean businesses deal with CRM system and there is the limitation to compare this result with others due to few empirical analysisses. Especilly, I can hardly find the preceding study concerning hotel industry but tries to search preceding parameter as to the customer performance of CRM system. Until now, It is needed to continual study its measurement later. I believe that more specific study and precise theoretical test be performed and they deal with current CRM system installment and facing problems in all of the korean hotels.

• Korean Journal of Ichthyology
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.132-159
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• 1994

The taxonomic revision of the family Congridae was made based on the specimens collected from the south-western coasts of the Korea from June 1988 to Oct. 1993. The family Congridae was classified into 8 species belonging to 6 genera. based on the external and internal morphological characters : Anago anago, Ariosoma anagodies, Ariosoma shiroanago shiroanago, Conger myriaster, Conger japonicus, Gnathophis nystromi nystromi, Rhechias retrotincta and Uroconger lepturus. Among the species reported as the congrid eels from Korea until now, four species were transferred into different generic or specific name Conger flavirostris into Ariosoma anagoides ; Astroconger myriaster into Conger myriaster ; Congrina retrotincta into Rhechias retrotincta and Rhynchocymba nystromi into Gnathophis nystromi nystromi. A Korean congrid eel, Ariosoma shiroanago shiroanago, was reported for first time in Korea. Intergeneric characters of the family Congridae were the form of the lateralline scales, the state of the tip of tail, the segmented state of the dorsal and anal fin rays, the existance of the supraoccipital bone and of lateral ethmoid process of the skull, the origin of dorsal fin and the forms of upper labial flange. The interspecific classification was made according to the characters such as the numbers of sensory pores of head part and in front of vent, teeth rows and numbers of upper and lower jaw, the numbers of vertebrae, the body color, the shapes of the head part, the color of intestine, the size of eye, the structure of air bladder and the number of branchiostegal rays. A new key on the taxonomical characteristics to the genera and species of the family Congridae has been estabilished and their distribution in Korea is described.

• Journal of agricultural medicine and community health
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.1-17
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• 2001

This study was conducted to investigate the role of drinking pattern in the relationship of alcohol consumption by face-to-face interview in rural elderly(n=994) aged 60~64 in Dalsung County, April to September in 1996. Pattern of alcohol drinking included drinking status, alcohol drinking at the morning without breakfast, average drinks per day, frequency of drinks per month, quantity of alcohol drinking, kind of preferred alcoholic beverage and duration of alcohol drinking. Blood pressure was measured once in each subject using a portable automatic sphygmomanometer. Difference in means of systolic blood pressure, alcohol drinking status, alcohol drinking at the morning without breakfast, and kind of alcoholic beverage were statistically significant before adjusting covariates, but alcohol drinking status and alcohol drinking at the morning without breakfast were statistically significant after adjusting covariates. And difference in means of diastolic blood pressure, kinds of alcoholic beverage was statistically significant before adjusting covariates, but no variables was significant after adjusting covariates. Model I multiple regression for systolic blood pressure that included average drinks per day as the variable of drink pattern, age, educational attainment and, previous history of cardiovascular disease were statistically significant, and multiple regression for diastolic blood pressure, educational attainment, BMI, and previous history of cardiovascular disease were statistically significant. Model II multiple regression for systolic blood pressure that included drinking patterns variables except average drinks per day, previous history of cardiovascular disease were statistically significant. However, multiple regression for diastolic blood pressure, no variables were significant. So, inconsistent with prior research, a positive relationship was not found between average drinks per day and diastolic and systolic blood pressure. The effect of alcohol drinking patterns on blood pressure has public health as well as clinical relevance. The study should be replicated to determine the reliability of our findings.