Bankruptcy Policy Reform and Total Factor Productivity Dynamics in Korea

Using the firm level panel data, obtained from the period between during , this study shows that the failing firms, accepted in the court-administered rehabilitation procedures after the post-crisis bankruptcy reform in Korea, had experienced less persistent problems in the pre-bankruptcy Total-Factor-Productivity (TFP) performances than those before the reform. The most crucial element of the post-crisis reform in the post-crisis court-administered bankruptcy system is the implementation of an economic efficiency criterion, whereas the pre-reform system benefited failing firms deemed as having high social value and prospects for rehabilitation. The new system removes the possibilities for interested parties to oppose the exit of the firms without economic values. Then, to get an idea of how the bankruptcy policy reform would affect the performance of aggregate TFP, we assess the role of the creative destruction process of entry and exit in total factor productivity growth utilizing plant level panel data in the Korean manufacturing sector during the 1990-98 period. For this purpose, we document the plant entry and exit rates, examine the dynamic relationship between plant turnovers and plant productivity, and quantify the contribution from entry and exit to productivity growth. We conclude that, for sustained total factor productivity growth, it is important to establish policy or institutional environment where efficient businesses succeed and inefficient businesses fail.

Learning-by-exporting in Korean Manufacturing: A Plant-level Analysis

The paper analyzes whether firms that start exporting become more productive utilizing recently developed sample matching procedures to control the problems from self-selection into the export market. We use plant level panel data on Korean manufacturing sector from 1990 to 1998. We find clear and robust empirical evidence in favor of the learning-by-exporting effect; total factor productivity differentials between exporters and their domestic counterparts arises and widens during several years after export market entry. We also find that the effect is more pronounced for firms that have higher skill-intensity, higher share of exports in production, and are small in size. Overall, the evidence suggests that exporting is one important channel through which domestic firms acquire accesses to advanced knowledge and better technology. Also, the stronger learning-by-doing effect for firms with higher skill-intensity seems to support the view that gabsorptive capacityh matters to receive knowledge spillovers from exporting activity.Learning-by-exporting, Productivity, Propensity score matching

Learning-by-exporting in Korean Manufacturing: A Plant-level Analysis

The paper analyzes whether firms that start exporting become more productive utilizing recently developed sample matching procedures to control the problems from self-selection into the export market. We use plant level panel data on Korean manufacturing sector from 1990 to 1998. We find clear and robust empirical evidence in favor of the learning-by-exporting effect; total factor productivity differentials between exporters and their domestic counterparts arises and widens during several years after export market entry. We also find that the effect is more pronounced for firms that have higher skill-intensity, higher share of exports in production, and are small in size. Overall, the evidence suggests that exporting is one important channel through which domestic firms acquire accesses to advanced knowledge and better technology. Also, the stronger learning-by-doing effect for firms with higher skill-intensity seems to support the view that "absorptive capacity" matters to receive knowledge spillovers from exporting activity.Learning-by-exporting, Productivity, Propensity score matching.

Exporting and Performance of Plants: Evidence from Korean Manufacturing

This study examines the relationship between exporting and various performance measures including total factor productivity, using the annual plant-level panel data on Korean manufacturing sector during the period of 1990 to 1998. The two key questions examined are whether exporting improves productivity (learning) and/or whether more productive plants export (self-selection). This study provides evidence supporting both self-selection and learning-by-exporting effects, with both effects being more pronounced at around the time of entry into and exit from the export market. Thus, positive and robust cross-sectional correlation between exporting and total factor productivity is accounted for by both selection and learning effects. These results are in contrast with Aw, Chung, and Roberts (2000) who do not find any strong evidence of self-selection or learning in Korea. Similar effects are observed when shipments or employment is considered as a performance measure. Overall, this study suggests that the benefits from exporting have been realized not only through resource reallocation channel but also TFP channel in Korea.

Learning-to-export Effect as a Response to Export Opportunities: Micro-evidence from Korean Manufacturing

This paper aims to investigate whether there is empirical evidence supporting the learning-to-export hypothesis, which has received little attention in the literature. By taking full advantage of plant-product level data from Korea during 1990-1998, we find some evidence for the learning-to-export effect, especially for the innovated product varieties with delayed exporters: their productivity, together with research and development and investment activity, was superior to their matched sample. On the other hand, this learning-to-export effect was not significantly pronounced for industries protected by import tariffs. Thus, our empirical findings suggest that it would be desirable to implement certain policy tools to promote the learning-to-export effect, whereas tariff protection is not justifiable for that purpose

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Causes of the Decline in Terms of Trade in Korea since the Mid-1990s

This paper examines the causes of the terms of trade decline in Korea since the mid-1990s, using the decomposition methodology suggested by Baxter and Kouparitsas (2000) as well as regression analysis. The main empirical results are summarized as follows. The decomposition exercise of changes in terms of trade showed that Korea’s terms of trade decline for the past decade or so is attributable to goods price effect which were driven by the rise of oil prices relative to manufactures. The decomposition of terms of trade change for 55 countries showed that terms of trade decline due to goods price effect is a phenomenon that was commonly observed for exporters of manufactures since mid-1990s. These results suggest that external factors such as China’s trade expansion, rather than internal factors, are mostly responsible for the decline in terms of trade. In accordance with these results, the regression results suggest that China’s trade expansion contributed to Korea’s terms of trade decline, especially in 2000s, by raising the import prices of oil and raw materials and lowering the export prices of manufacturing products