Herding by foreign investors and emerging market equity returns: Evidence from Korea

This paper studies the effect of herding by foreign investors on stock returns in the Korean market. We conduct both pre and post-liberalization analyses and utilize a three-stage least squares analysis in order to control for the simultaneous relationship. We find evidence of a significant impact of foreign investor herding on stock returns in addition to intra-year positive feedback trading by foreign investors. However, changes in domestic institutional ownership do not have any significant effect on stock returns. In addition, foreign investors tend to buy/sell shares that domestic institutions sell/buy in the herding year.     

Hospitality and tourism marketing: recent developments in research and future directions

This study reviews marketing research published in selected hospitality and tourism journals for the period of 2002–2003. The review includes summaries of research topics, industry applications, and methods of study design and data analyses. Significant topical research trends are identified and discussed to raise issues for future research. Included also are the industry-specific current trends and issues that dictate immediate research attention. The gaps between hospitality and tourism marketing research and industry's research needs are addressed to encourage additional research on neglected topics. The study concludes with general suggestions for future hospitality and tourism marketing research.     

Asymmetric relationship between attribute performance and customer satisfaction: A new perspective

The objectives of this study were two-fold. First, this inquiry attempted to provide additional support to the studies conceptualizing the relationship between attribute-level performance and overall satisfaction as non-linear or asymmetric. Second, the study aimed to provide an explanation to the observed asymmetry, thus addressing the gap in the previous research in the area. Asymmetric response of customer satisfaction to different types of attribute performance was tested and interactions between attributes were examined as an explanation for the observed asymmetry. Results of the study confirmed the non-linear nature of the customer satisfaction function. Moderating effects of attribute type explained the asymmetrical relationships between attribute performance and customer satisfaction, thereby providing theoretical rationalization to the observed, but often ignored, phenomenon.     

The time difference effect of a measurement unit in the lead-lag relationship analysis of Korean financial market

This paper investigates Korean financial markets for the study of market microstructure of price discovery in the KOSPI 200 stock index and its related derivatives markets using different time-interval price data. The Granger causality test and vector error correction model are used to analyze the empirical relationship between markets. The lead-lag relationship between the KOSPI 200 stock index and its derivatives markets can be supported by the trading cost hypothesis and leverage effect hypothesis. This paper also shows the congruent lead-lag results in various time-intervals, but as the time-interval becomes large, more information loss and spurious results are induced. The correlations among 1-minute data, 5-minute data, and 10-minute data are significant under a 1% significance level, however, in the case of 60-minute data, the correlations with any other time-interval data are not significant. The 60-minute data even have negative correlations with others. These results are consistent regardless of the raw data or the innovation data. Therefore, we can conclude that the previous research using the 60-minute data due to an insufficiency of trading volume can be biased considerably.     

Revisiting importance–performance analysis

As a tool to develop marketing strategies, importance–performance analysis has gained popularity among hospitality and tourism researchers for its simplicity and ease of application. This article revisited several conceptual and methodological issues inherent, but often overlooked, in using the importance–performance analysis framework. The author conducts a critical review of past studies, reanalyzes published data to raise questions, and develops suggestions for future hospitality and tourism research applying importance–performance analysis. The primary goal of this article was to stimulate further discussion and research on the validity and reliability of widely adopted importance–performance analysis.     

A global Malmquist-Luenberger productivity index

This paper introduces an alternative environmentally sensitive productivity growth index, which is circular and free from the infeasibility problem. In doing so, we integrated the concept of the global production possibility set and the directional distance function. Like the conventional Malmquist-Luenberger productivity index, it can also be decomposed into sources of productivity growth. The suggested index is employed in analyzing 26 OECD countries for the period 1990–2003. We also employed the conventional Malmquist-Luenberger productivity index, the global Malmquist productivity index and the conventional Malmquist productivity index for comparative purposes in this empirical investigation.     

Korean Television Dramas and the Political Economy of City Promotion

This article examines the ways in which urban processes are associated with the production of culture. It does so by exploring how Korean cities sponsor drama. The historically conditioned and economically neglected status of regional cities, combined with elected local leaders' desire to promote their own areas, has led to a strategy to publicize them by leveraging the popularity of Korean television dramas in Asia. Two distinct types of drama sponsorship by cities — the construction of outdoor settings for drama and ‘city placement’ — manifest the interactions between story‐making and place‐making. The affective process that blends city sites with the characters, storylines and emotional flows of TV drama imbues those sites with a dramatic quality that stimulates the audience's empathy and persuasively motivates them to actually visit the places they have seen televised. Thanks to the broad penetration of television drama, sponsorship by cities has strikingly boosted drama‐driven tourism. Nevertheless, reflecting the speculative nature of TV drama, city promotion through this medium has had limited stability and sustainability. In sum, this article demonstrates that the production of Korean television dramas is deeply associated with the material and spatial conditions in Korean cities.     

Does venture capital investment enhance corporate innovation? Evidence from Korea

We examine whether venture capital (VC) investment enhances corporate innovation in Korea. Using a matched sample of 802 firms from 1998 to 2012, we find that after the first round of VC investment, VC-backed firms are more innovative than non-VC-backed firms. Our results suggest that the positive influence of VC investment largely comes from the ability of VC firms to reduce information asymmetry between investors and ventures: VC funds managed by independent venture capitalists significantly enhance corporate innovation, whereas those managed by governmental venture capitalists do not. Furthermore, this positive influence becomes more pronounced where there is greater information asymmetry. Finally, we show that funds with profit-based compensation structures are more likely to encourage corporate innovation than those with fee-based compensation structures.     

Net Neutrality,Network Capacity,and Innovation at the Edges

We study how net neutrality regulations affect a high‐bandwidth content provider (CP)'s investment incentives to enhance its quality of services in content delivery to end users. We find that the effects crucially depend on whether the CP's entry is constrained by the Internet service provider's network capacity. If the capacity is relatively large, the prioritization reduces the investment as CP's investment and prioritization form substitutes. With limited capacity, however, they become complements and the prioritization can facilitate the entry of congestion‐sensitive content. Our analysis suggests that the optimal policy may call for potentially asymmetric regulations across mobile and fixed networks.