Dong-hyun Oh

Technical change and total factor productivity growth for Swedish manufacturing and service industries

This article presents alternative specifications of the production functions of a large panel of Swedish firms for the period 1992 to 2000. The period can be characterized as a transition when long-run productivity growth in the Swedish economy improved from being among the weakest to one of the strongest within the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). In order to present a detailed exploration of this dramatic change, the time trend and general index models are applied to estimate Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth, rate of technical change and returns to scale. The models are extended to allow for firm specific as well as time-varying technical change. The parametric TFP measures are also compared with the nonparametric Solow residual, and several hypotheses are tested to explain the growth patterns in the Swedish economy. It is found that the improved growth rate, initially starting in large exporting manufacturing firms, after a deep economic crisis at the beginning of the 1990s, spilled over to the rest of the economy, both manufacturing and services.

Productivity growth, efficiency change and technical progress of the Korean manufacturing industry

By using a plentiful plant-level data-set, we examined productivity growth of the Korean manufacturing industry for the period 1993–2003. In doing this, we employed the Malmquist productivity growth index. We also investigated decomposed components of productivity growth. A second-stage regression analysis was employed to find determinants of productivity growth. Empirical results show that after the 1997 financial crisis productivity and efficiency decreased, whereas technology improved. The result of the second regression analysis indicates that a competitive market condition, R&D activities, export activities and innovativeness increased the rate of productivity growth. It also shows that productivity converged during the study period.

Do Software Intellectual Property Rights Affect the Performance of Firms? Case Study of South Korea

The aim of this study is to find the relationship between software intellectual property rights (IPRs) and the performance of software firms in South Korea. In order to measure the performance of software firms, we employed the concept of efficiency of data envelopment analysis (DEA). With measured efficiency, we use tobit regression to investigate which IPR has a stronger effect on efficiency. The empirical results show an obvious tendency: the average efficiency of software firms having any kind of software IPR is higher than that of firms not having them. Moreover, the results of tobit analysis show that both software copyrights and patents have a positive effect on the performance of software firms, and that the effect of patents is higher than that of copyrights.

The scientific impact and partner selection in collaborative research at Korean universities

This study seeks to bridge the gap between scientometrics literature on scientific collaboration and science and technology management literature on partner selection by linking scientists’ collaborator preferences to the marginal advantage in citation impact. The 1981–2010 South Korea NCR (National Citation Report), a subset of the Web of Science that includes 297,658 scholarly articles, was used for this research. We found that, during this period, multi-author scientific articles increasingly dominated single-author articles: multi-university collaboration grew significantly; and the numbers of research publications produced by teams working within a single institution or by a single author diminished. This study also demonstrated that multi-university collaboration produces higher-impact articles when it includes “Research Universities,” that is, top-tier university schools. We also found that elite universities experienced impact degradation of their scientific results when they collaborated with lower-tier institutions, whereas their lower-tier partners gained impact benefits from the collaboration. Finally, our research revealed that Korean universities are unlikely to work with other universities in the same tier. This propensity for cross-tier collaboration can be interpreted as strategic partner selection by lower-tier schools seeking marginal advantage in citation impact.

Robust estimation in stochastic frontier models

This study proposes a robust estimator for stochastic frontier models by integrating the idea of Basu et al. (1998) into such models. It is shown that the suggested estimator is strongly consistent and asymptotic normal under regularity conditions. The robust properties of the proposed approach are also investigated. A simulation study demonstrates that the estimator has strong robust properties with little loss in asymptotic efficiency relative to the maximum likelihood estimator. Finally, a real data analysis is performed to illustrate the use of the estimator.