Monotonicity of Chi-square Test Statistics

This paper establishes monotonicity of the chi-square test statistic. As the more efficient parameter estimator is plugged into the test statistic, the degrees of freedom of the resulting chi-square test statistic monotonically increase.

Maximum Likelihood Estimation and Specification Test of the Proportional Hazard Model Using Grouped Durations,

This article develops parametric and semi-parametric, maximum likelihood estimation methods of the proportional hazard model for the case when durations are grouped and heterogeneity is not fully measured. This article also extends Ryu's (1994b) specification tests for the proportional hazard model. The proposed test statistic is easy to implement, takes into account the form of alternative hypothesis to increase power, and identifies the source and direction of non-proportionality. This article identifies the nature of the bias resulting from neglected heterogeneity. This bias is essentially a sample selection bias, well-known in the literature. Gamma and discrete distributions are used to model unobserved heterogeneity. By updating the heterogeneity distribution at each stage of duration process, this article addresses the sample selection bias. The results obtained in this article are applied to tackle left-censoring problem.

The Recall and New Job Search of Laid-off Workers: A Bivariate Proportional Hazard Model with Unobserved Heterogeneity

Workers who lose their jobs can become re-employed either by being recalled to their previous employers or by finding new jobs. Workers' chances for recall should influence their job search strategies, so the rates of exit from unemployment by these two routes should be directly related. We solve a job search model to establish, in theory, a negative relationship between the recall and new job hazard rates. We look for evidence in the PSID by estimating a semi-parametric competing risks model with explicitly related hazards. We find only a small negative behavioral relationship between recall and new job hazard rates.

Management Ownership and Firm's Value: An Empirical Analysis Using Panel Data

Demsetz and Lehn (1985), Morck, Shleifer, and Vishny (1988), and McConnell and Servaes (1990) report different empirical findings regarding ownership structure and corporate profitability. In this paper, we re-estimate the relation between management ownership and firm's value after controlling for the history of management ownership as well as inter-firm differences using panel data. Further, we consider the possibility that the current ownership structure is jointly determined with the firm value, an endogeneity argument a la Demsetz (1983). We find that history of the management ownership, not its current level, matters in determining the firm value, which is consistent with information asymmetry arguments.

Joint Determination of Internal Organizational Design: Decision-Making, Task Allocation, and Incentive Scheme,

This paper studies the issue of designing an optimal organizational form: design for sub-units' task allocation, decision-making structure, and incentive schemes for organizational members. Depending on the way tasks are allocated between the sub-units, and whether decision-making is centralized or not, organizations face a trade-off between coordination and information. Task allocation by production processes calls for coordination more strongly than the allocation by final products. Centralized decision-making serves for better coordination, whereas decentralization serves for better information. The coordinational benefit under centralization gets bigger as the organization's common uncertainty increases, and this benefit is magnified when the sub-units are functionally divided by production processes. The informational benefit under decentralization gets bigger as the organization's local uncertainty increases, and this benefit is magnified when the sub-units are designed autonomous. Thus, complementarily designed organizations tend to have centralized decision-making structures and fixed salary scheme, whereas less complementarily designed organizations tend to have decentralized decision-making and 'pay for performance' incentive contract.

Discriminatory vs Uniform Price Auction: Auction Revenue

We compare auction revenues from discriminatory auctions and uniform price auctions in the case of the Korean treasury bonds auction market. For this purpose, we employ detailed bidder level data for each of 16 discriminatory auctions recently carried out in Korea. We first theoretically recover unobserved individual bidding functions under counter-factual uniform price auctions from the observed bidding functions under the actual discriminatory auctions, and then empirically estimate revenue differences. To test significance of the auction revenue differences, we use Bootstrap re-sampling methods where uncertainty in the cut-off yield spreads and uncertainty in the bidders are addressed individually as well as simultaneously. Our results indicate that uniform price auction increases the auction revenue relative to the discriminatory auction in most of the 16 cases, justifying the Korean government’s decision to switch to the uniform price auction mechanism in August 2000Treasury bonds auction, discriminatory auction, uniform price auction, hazard rate, Bootstrap re-sampling, yield spread, bidding function, bid shading

Corporate Governance and Long Term Performance of the Business Groups: The Case of Chaebols in Korea

The existence of the business groups has been associated with market failure in emerging economies, and thus their performance has been argued and found to have declined with development of market institutions surrounding them. This paper takes up this issue of long-term performance of the business groups but argues that it has also to do with the internal problems, such as changes in the ownership and governance structure. It finds, with the Korea data and new method and theoretical grounds, that the relative performance of the business groups, the Chaebols, had consistently declined over the 1980s and 1990s although they were more efficient than the non-Chaebol firms during the early 1980s. The results are robust to different estimation methods, and also to controls for the possible survivorship bias, industry composition, and scale effects. The paper explains the performance change by examining the decrease of the shares held by the controlling families and the associated aggravation of the agency problem leading to unjustifiable expansion drives.Business groups, Long Term performance, Corporate Governance, Chaebols