This article differentiates itself from the large volume of existing literature on business groups, such as Korean chaebols, in several aspects. First, it uses productive efficiency rather than financial efficiency as a performance measure. Second, it defines chaebols in three alternative ways...

In this paper, we revisit an old issue on the relation between management ownership and firm’s value. The Korean panel data on the business group firms, allows us to compute ownership right and control right separately for each business group affiliated firm. Our measures are different from...

Beauty has been shown to be valuable in many markets and supposedly can be improved through plastic surgery. This raises the question of how effective plastic surgery is in improving a person’s beauty and economic outcomes. We find empirical evidence that while people improve their facial...

This paper analyses corporate loan guarantees among the Korean chaebol affiliates. Loan guarantees are found to be efficiency-neutral under a set of ideal conditions characterized by perfect and symmetric information, no agency problem, and no governmental interference in private financial...

We provide the rationale for the existence of yes-men and no-men in an organization or a group. On one hand, a person is inclined to conform to the instruction of another, because he cannot ignore the information contained in the instruction, even though his own evidence contradicts the...