• Journal of Labour Economics
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• v.41 no.4
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• pp.63-105
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• 2018

This paper analyzes the effects of three factors on the firm-size wage premium which have not been considered in previous studies: the worker compositions within firms, the wage differentials between contractors and subcontractors, and the performance pay and rent-sharing behaviors of firms. The main results are as follows. First, even after controlling for the various worker characteristics, the differences in shares of highly educated workers, managers, and professionals between large and small firms make the size-wage premium larger. Secondly, wage differentials between contractors and subcontractors also affect the size-wage premium in the manufacturing sector. Thirdly, high performance pay and active rent-sharing behaviors of large manufacturing firms make the size-wage premium larger. These results imply that a positive matching effect among skilled workers, a structural problem between contractors and subcontractors, and differences in rent-sharing behaviors between large and small firms have affected the firm-size wage premium in the South Korean labor market.

• Tribology and Lubricants
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• v.37 no.6
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• pp.232-239
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• 2021

Petroleum is the most consumed energy source in Korea with a usage rate of 38.7% among the available primary energy sources. The price of liquid petroleum products in Korea includes taxes such as transportation·environment·energy tax. Thus, illegal production and distribution of liquid petroleum is widespread because of its huge price difference from that of the normal product and its tax-free nature. Generally, the illegal petroleum product is produced by mixing liquid petroleum with other similar petroleum alternatives. The two kinds of gasoline, common gasoline and premium gasoline, are being distributed in Korea. The premium gasoline is often adulterated with cheaper common gasoline that lowers the octane number of gasoline. It is possible to distinguish them with their color difference, green and yellow for different grade gasoline. However, when small volume of common gasoline is added to premium gasoline, it is difficult to determine whether premium gasoline contained common grade or not. In this study, we inspect gasoline, which is illegally produced by mixing common gasoline to premium gasoline. When the ratio of mixing common gasoline is increased, premium gasoline shows decreasing absorbance at 600 nm and 650 nm under UV-Vis spectrometer. Moreover, the detected intensity (mV·s) of green dye in high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) was decreased by common gasoline under 0.99 correlation value. The more the common gasoline is mixed, the more olefin and naphthene are detected by gas chromatography. In addition, trimethyl pentane as octane improver, paraffin and toluene are decreased by common gasoline mixing. The findings of this study suggests that illegal petroleum can be identified by analysis of components and simulated samples.

• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.79-106
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• 1992

This study analyzes the determinants of wage premium, defined as the excess of actual wage rate over opportunity wage, for the average worker in a Korean bargaining unit. Average wage premium of a firm is decomposed into quasi-rent per worker and rent-sharing rule. Per capita quasi-rent, representing a firm's ability to pay, is defined as the difference between sales revenue and the opportunity cost of mobile factors, divided by the number of employees. Rent-sharing rule, a measure of workers' bargaining power, is defined as the average wage premium divided by the per capita quasi-rent. Empirical results show that the differences in wage premium among Korean bargaining units are much better explained by the differences in quasi-rent than by the differences in bargaining power. Also, comparing the results of 1986 with those of 1988 show that the wage settlement mechanism in 1988 was not quite different from that of 1986, in spite of the drastic change in industrial relation system in 1987. It may simply yield higher opportunity wages, by raising the bargaining power of overall workers. The tendency of Korean labor market in 1988 to show a dual structure of high & low wage premium sectors, is not due to the fact that the differences in bargaing powers across firms tend to expand, but to the fact that unions tend to reduce the wage differences among the workers within an enterprise by pursuing more equal distribution of total wage premium. Hence, the policies for reducing the wage differentials across firms should focus on rent-regulating industrial policies, e.g. eliminating monopoly rents by deregulation.

• The Korean Society of Law and Medicine
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.203-242
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• 2019

Since 2006, local governments in Korea have been providing premiums for social insurance, such as the National Health Insurance System, for the health care of local residents. The purpose of this study is to analyze the content of self-governing legislation that defines these policies. The method of conducting the research was based on the articles of the ordinance related to the 'public health insurance premium' of the self-governing statutes published on the website of the National Law Information Center. As of May 2019, 201 municipalities have enacted ordinances to support public health insurance premiums. In the case of state local governments, 8 out of 17 were found, and in the case of basic local governments, 193 out of 226. The constitution of the ordinance consisted of purpose, time of enactment, type of social insurance premium, object of social insurance premium, amount of social insurance premium support, method and process of social insurance premium support, time of social insurance premium support. This study analyzed contents of these articles. Finally, this study presented issues that could be controversial from the policy and legal viewpoints and suggestions for improvement.

• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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• v.33 no.2
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• pp.111-143
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• 2011

As the 'jobless growth' is developing into a worldwide phenomenon, many countries try to recover a virtuous relationship between the growth and employment using various wage subsidy programs. This study focuses on wage subsidy to employers, labor demand-side wage subsidy for which one can think of two types-a tax credit(a flat wage subsidy) and a social insurance premium exemption(a proportional wage subsidy). For job creation, Korean government reintroduced a tax credit to small and medium-sized enterprises(SMEs) which have increased their employment level in 2010. But many experts has continuously insisted that it should be replaced with a social insurance premium exemption arguing only a few SMEs benefit from the tax credit as most of them are actually not paying any corporate or general income tax bills. However, as the insurance premium exemption accompanies an increase in the amount of budget with the coverage widen, one cannot confirm its cost effectiveness over the tax credit. This paper aims to provide a theoretical analysis to derive some formal conditions under which a social insurance premium exemption creates more jobs than a tax credit does given a budget constraint. We show that the former's dominance over the latter depends on whether there exists a dead zone of social insurance or not. If there does not exist a dead zone, a social insurance premium exemption is more desirable in many cases, whereas one cannot guarantees its dominance over a tax credit if there exists a dead zone. Therefore in order to realize its dominance, the government should minimize a dead zone so that most SMEs effectively benefit from the insurance premium exemption. In addition, applying discriminative exemption rates which reflect each firm's job conditions such as wage level and labor demand/supply sensitivity, the government try to enhance job creation effect.

• The Korean Journal of Financial Management
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.165-187
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• 2005

This paper tries to investigate the relationships among stock return volatility, time-varying risk premium and Korea Discount. Using Korean Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI) return from January 4, 1980 to August 31, 2005, this study finds possible links between time-varying risk premium and Korea Discount. First of all, this study classifies Korean stock returns during the sample period by three regime-switching volatility period that is to say, low-volatile period medium-volatile period and highly-volatile period by estimating Markov-Switching ARCH model. During the highly volatile period of Korean stock return (09/01/1997-05/31/2001), the estimated time-varying unit risk premium from the jump-diffusion GARCH model was 0.3625, where as during the low volatile period (01/04/1980-l1/30/1985), the time-varying unit risk premium was estimated 0.0284 from the jump diffusion GARCH model, which was about thirteen times less than that. This study seems to find the evidence that highly volatile Korean stock market may induce large time-varying risk premium from the investors and this may lead to Korea discount.

• Health Policy and Management
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.108-128
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• 2000

The Korean government has implemented the policy for merging 141 health insurers into Korean Unified Health Insurer (KUHI) in July of 2000. The unification of multiple insurers will definitely effect the stability of financial management, equity of premium burdens and efficiency of administrative management. However, it is difficult to predict what forms the far-reaching effects of the unification would take. Thus, pursuing the unification may be express as a huge policy experiment. In order to lead the unification, which lies on a crossroad between success and failure, to the road of success, we need to infer the problems and obstacles predicted in the step-wise processes of merging organizations, finances and the systems of computing premium, and come up with the effective means to maintain the stability of financial management, to improve the equity of premium burdens and to increase the efficiency of administrative management. Thus, I first described the changes of the Korean medical insurance system, and analyzed the performances of self-employed medical insurance 1 year after the integration of societies in October of 1998. At the base of examining the stability of financial management, equity of premium burdens and efficiency of administrative management, I predicted the problems and obstacles that could occur after the unification of the multiple medical insurers, and proposed a few ways of leading the unification of the multiple medical insurers in Korea to success. The most worried factor is that insurance finance would become unstable since the expansion of premium revenues is not easy because raising the premium for all Koreans is to be difficult. In addition, the unification of insurance finance could weaken the insurer's efforts for declaring real incomes of the self-employed and increasing the collection rate of premiums from them. This weakening would be the decisive factor of lowering the equity of premium contributions between the self-employed and employees. And bureaucratization and rigidity that are unavoidable in a gigantic unified organization could lower the efficiency of administrative management. Furthermore, by having 3 labor unions in the unified organization, it is possible to experience frequent difficulties and discords among the unions and between the unions and organization. Thus, when smooth pursuing of the unification of multiple insurers gets difficult, the social expenses derived from the failure would eventually end up on all Koreans. The unification is to be performed after coming up with the ways to eradicate these worries, so that the unification of multiple insurers would step onto the road of success.

• Journal of Korea Technology Innovation Society
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.241-263
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• 2008

Within any income approach, a discount rate is used to convert some projected free cash flow to its presented value. In case of valuing companies, the most frequently used discount rate is the weighted average cost of capital(WACC) at the aggregate level. But technology valuation is different to discounting aggregate corporate cash flow since it is concerned about individual Intellectual property. Therefore, blindly applying standard discount rate such as WACC in technology valuation is unlikely to lead to the right result. The primary focus of this paper is to establish the structure of discount rate for technology valuation and to suggest the method of estimation. To determine an appropriate discount rate for technology valuation, the level of technology risk, market risk and competitive risk should be included in the structure of discount rate. This paper suggests the build-up model which consists of three components as a expansion of the CAPM. It includes (1) a risk-free rate of return, (2) general market risk premium and beta and (3) intellectual property risk premium related to technology risk and specific target market risk. However, there is no specific check list for examining the intellectual property risk until now and no specific method for quantifying its risk into risk premium. This paper developed the 10 element to determine the level of the intellectual property risk and applied estimation function such as linear function, natural log function and exponential function to transform the level of risk into risk premium. The limitation of this paper is that the range of intellectual property risk premium is inferred based on the information of foreign and domestic valuation agency. Finally, this paper explored the development of an intellectual property discount rate for technology valuation and presented the method in order to quantify the intellectual property risk premium.

• Journal of Labour Economics
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• v.31 no.3
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• pp.75-105
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• 2008

This paper examines the changes over lime in union relative wage effects during the period of 1988 and 2007. The union wage premium was 3.4 percent in average during the last 20 years. It has fallen in the boom years up to the mid-1990s, but has rapidly risen since the Asian financial crisis of 1997. Time series evidence suggests that the union wage premium is counter-cyclical, which means that it responds to economic conditions with a reverse direction. There has been also a fast increase in the unadjusted wage gap relative to regression-adjusted wage gap during the last 10 years in particular, implying favorable changes in the selection of workers into unionized companies.

• THE INTERNATIONAL COMMERCE & LAW REVIEW
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• v.17
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• pp.93-125
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• 2002

This paper aims to find a reasonable solvency margin system in non-life insurance industry and also to evaluate the appropriateness of the current solvency margin regulation system in Korea. The current solvency margin system in Korea, based on EU's solvency margin model, was introduced during the 1997 financial crisis. The solvency requirement is not based on non-life insurer's risk, but simply on written premiums. The current solvency margin for general insurance, such as fire, marine, and automobile insurance, is determined by the greater between a premium-based amount and a claim-based amount, where the premium-based solvency margin is calculated by multiplying the net written premium for the preceding year by the premium based solvency margin ratio. Also, the amount of solvency margin for long term insurance is set at 4% of the policy reserve of the long term insurance. Still, there exist many differences between the current solvency margin regulation system in Korea and EU's model. This paper focuses on the rationality of the solvency margin regulation system, and compares the current system in Korea with EU's model and the RBC(Risk Based Capital) system in U.S. and Japan. Finally, this paper suggests a more specific and reasonable solvency margin system to be developed in Korea.