Prospects and problems in modeling group decisions

This paper summarizes some of the major issues related to group decision modeling. We briefly review the existing work on group choice models in marketing and consumer research. We draw some generalizations about which models work well when and use those generalizations to provide guidelines for future research.     

Technological Progress and Youth Employment in South Korea

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes the extent to which technology progress and youth employment are related. In doing so, we divide workers into two groups – young workers and old (prime-aged) workers - and then estimate the elasticity of substitution between (physical) capital and workers à la Jaimovich et al. (2013. “The Demand for Youth: Explaining Age Differences in the Volatility of Hours.” American Economic Review 103 (7): 3022–3044) by using the Korean labour market data between 2000 and 2014. Our findings indicate that the elasticity of substitution is greater (or at least not smaller) for young workers than for old workers.     

The political economy of defense procurement and acquisition: The case of South Korean ministry of defense

South Korea faces growing problems in the area of productivity and competitiveness throughout its economy. These problems are also present in the economies of the armed forces. The purpose of this paper is to present methods of improving the productivity of the South Korean Ministry of Defense's acquisition and procurement processes. It also attempts to mention the South Korean defense environment including defense industry after the Second World War, to point out the problems of Korean Fighter Program (KFP) as a case study, to explain concepts and principles of Total Quality Management, which is a management philosophy and methods, and to provide with the possible solutions of its defense acquisition and procurement represented as KFP.     

Uncertainty in foreign policy making: A Bayesian game analysis of Korea

Bayesian games are used to analyze situations where at least one player is uncertain about the other's preferences. For the past decade or so, the Bayesian models have been rigorously applied to various aspects of international relations involving uncertainty. These models have contributed to our understanding of international relations by uncovering complicated strategic interactions through deductive reasoning and by generating many empirically testable hypotheses. Apart from these efforts for general theory developments, however, scholars rarely applied Bayesian models to analyze real‐world international events, although many of them involve situations where one or more players are uncertain about the other's preferences. Some of these events are interesting and important in their own right, given their potential impact on regional security and the amount of attention paid by scholars and politicians alike. Therefore, these cases warrant independent studies utilizing Bayesian models. In this paper, we have developed two Bayesian models for the changing relationships North Korea has with South Korea and the United States. We also discuss another interesting aspect of North‐South Korea‐United States relations where North Korea is simultaneously playing similar, but separate, games with South Korea and the United States.     

House Prices and the Stance of Monetary Policy: The Case of Korea

Abstract

This paper is an empirical investigation on whether the Bank of Korea should respond to the housing price developments in conducting monetary policy. For that aim, we construct a small scale empirical model of the Korean economy, simulate the estimated model with a set of alternative monetary policy rules, and compare the stabilization performances of those rules. There turns out to be ample room for further stabilization of inflation and output, if the central bank shifts from the historically conducted monetary policy rule to the optimal rule. The stabilization gains under the optimal rule, however, are not attributable to additional policy indicators (such as housing price inflation) the optimal rule involves. Rather, the optimal rule improves upon the historical one because the former takes a quite different reaction scheme toward the historical policy indicators. Moreover, as long as the Bank of Korea maintains appropriate reactions to the historical policy indicators, housing price inflation does not contain much extra information for further stabilization     

Independence and Architecture of Financial Supervision: With Focus on the Effects on Banking Stability

Abstract

Empirical work on the performances of supervisory governance and architecture is scarce relative to the intensifying debates on related institutional arrangements. Using an expansive panel data-set, this paper is a first attempt to explore the effects of governance, architecture and their interactions on banking stability. Empirical analyses reveal that independence matters, as a major governance factor, and the two critical architecture factors, the integration of authorities and the central bank' involvement undermine banking stability. Also, in spite of the interaction between independence and architecture, its effect appears to be limited.     

Korea's first industrial revolution, 1911–1940

We estimate output and population of colonial Korea to show that per capita output grew 2.3% with population expanding 1.3% per year from 1911 to 1940. Growth accounting indicated that productivity advance accounted for roughly one half of the per capita output growth. Primary production as a share of GDP fell from 69% to 42% during the period. Rapid productivity improvement caused nontradable sectors to become increasingly important, while capital accumulation drove industrialization. Demographic expansion, per capita output growth, and structural change occurred at considerably faster rates in northern than in southern provinces.     

Past and future of the labor force in emerging Asian economies

In this paper we investigate the determinants of past changes in the labor force of 12 emerging Asian countries, and attempt to make projections of the labor force in those countries for the period 2010–2030. Results from our regression analysis of the labor force indicate that the wage earnings elasticity of labor supply is negative, albeit insignificant, for men and significantly positive for women, and it has a significantly positive association with educational level and a negative one with age. We also find that per capita income shows a negative relationship with the labor force in general for younger age groups and older age groups, and more capital-intensive countries have smaller female labor force. Using extrapolation, the paper predicts that the labor force will increase in all 12 countries during the first two decades of the period 2010–2030, but will eventually decline in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. The paper also makes projections of the unemployment rate and the average working hours in those countries.     

Spurious welfare reversals in international business cycle models

Several papers have documented spurious welfare reversals: incomplete-markets economy produces a higher level of welfare than the complete-markets economy. This paper first demonstrates how conventional linearization can generate approximation errors that can result in welfare reversals. Using a two-country production economy, we argue that spurious welfare reversals are not only possible but also plausible under reasonable values for model parameters. This paper then proposes an approximation method that modifies the conventional linearization by a bias correction. This method can be easily implemented and approximates welfare as accurately as a second-order perturbation method.     

A New Approach to Measuring a Multidimensional Productivity Index: An Application for 60 Selected Countries

This study aims to develop a productivity index which takes into account the multidimensional characteristics of productivities. Our multidimensional productivity index (MPI) not only measures individual productivities of economic resources but also evaluate productivity enhancing general capacities of economy. Individual productivity indices such as labor productivity are limited because they do not consider the factors, such as the globalization of economies and the market and institutional variables, that could have profound impacts on productivity. The multidimensional Productivity Index (MPI) is measured for 60 countries including 23 OECD countries and 10 Asian countries. Our methodology employs the concept of technical efficiency that allows us to measure the extent to which institutional and market factors contribute to the economic performance. Our findings indicate that standard productivity measures such as labor productivity may overestimate the overall productivity differences across the economies.