Is Productivity Growth Correlated with Improvements in Management Quality? - An Empirical Study Using Interview Surveys in Korea and Japan -

Tsutomu Miyagawa,Keun Lee,Kazuma Edamura,Young Gak Kim,Hosung Jung 서울대학교 경제연구소 2015 서울대학교 경제연구소 학술대회 논문집 Vol.2015 No.1

Bloom and Van Reenen (2007) show that differences in management practices are correlated with productivity differences at the firm level. In this paper, we conducted similar interview surveys on management practices in Japanese and Korean firms in 2008 and 2012. We find that overall management scores in Japan -- as an average of organizational and human resource management scores -- are higher than those in Korea. However, the second survey shows that the gap in management scores between the two countries has shrunken over time. In addition, average management quality in Korean large firms has surpassed that of Japanese large firms. This result is consistent with the literature comparing big businesses in Korea and Japan. This study also compares additional aspects of management styles, such as speed in decision-making and the role of various communication channels, which is not done in the literature. When we estimate a production function including management score using all samples, we find a positive and significant relationship between management scores and productivity. Most estimation results show that organizational management scores are correlated with firm performances in Japanese firms, while human resource management scores are correlated with performance in Korean firms. We also find that management practices are correlated with improvements in capital and labor efficiencies. In the case of Japan, better organizational management practices in the past improve current firm performance. Our results show that the Japanese government and firms should promote management reforms to restore international competitiveness.

In-line Automatic Defect Repair System for TFT-LCD Production

Arai, Takeshi,Nakasu, Nobuaki,Yoshimura, Kazushi,Edamura, Tadao The Korean Infomation Display Society 2009 Journal of information display Vol.10 No.4

An automated circuit repair system was developed for enhancing the yield of nondefective liquid crystal panels, focusing on the resist patterns on the circuit material layer of thin-film transistor (TFT) substrates prior to etching. The developed system has an advantage over the parallel conventional system: In the former, the repair conditions depend on the type of resist whereas in the latter, the repair parameters must be fine-tuned for each circuit material. The developed system consists of a resist pattern defect inspection system and a pattern repair system for short and open defects. The repair system performs fine corrections of abnormal areas of the resist pattern. The open-repair system is equipped with a syringe to dispense resist. To maintain a stable resist diameter, a thermal insulator was installed in the syringe system. As a result, the diameter of the dispensed resist became much more stable than when no thermal insulator was used. The resist diameter was kept within the target of $400{\pm}100{\mu}m$. Furthermore, a prototype system was constructed, and using a dummy pattern, it was confirmed that the system worked automatically and correctly.

Import Competition, Industrial Agglomeration and Japanese Manufacturing Plants Performance

( Tomohiko Inui ),( Toshiyuki Matsuura ),( Kazuma Edamura ) 서강대학교 경제연구소 2010 시장경제연구 Vol.39 No.3

During the 1980s and 1990s, Japanese manufacturers began to relocate production from sites in Japan to low-wage East Asian countries such as China, Malaysia and Thailand. Imports of manufacturing goods increased substantially over the same period. This rapid rise in imports, and the quickening spread of globalization, has led to concerns among policymakers that employment growth and plant survival may suffer, with some regions more affected than others. This is the first paper which attempts to examine empirically effect of industrial agglomeration in the region on employment growth and plant survival to increased import penetration from low-wage countries. A rich, plant-level dataset on Japanese manufacturing sectors is used to examine this effect. We find that exposure to low-wage country imports has a negative effect on plant employment growth rates and its survival. However, where plants have high productivity, the effect of low-wage imports is ameliorated. We also find evidence that the advance of globalization has led Japanese firms to consider inter-industry agglomeration, such as output linkage to be less important. However, regions with more input linkages and intra-industry agglomeration remain firms` preferred location for the plants when exposure to low-wage countries is high.

In-line Automatic Defect Repair System for TFT-LCD Production

Takeshi Arai,Nobuaki Nakasu,Kazushi Yoshimura,Tadao Edamura 한국정보디스플레이학회 2009 Journal of information display Vol.10 No.4

An automated circuit repair system was developed for enhancing the yield of nondefective liquid crystal panels, focusing on the resist patterns on the circuit material layer of thin-film transistor (TFT) substrates prior to etching. The developed system has an advantage over the parallel conventional system: In the former, the repair conditions depend on the type of resist whereas in the latter, the repair parameters must be fine-tuned for each circuit material. The developed system consists of a resist pattern defect inspection system and a pattern repair system for short and open defects. The repair system performs fine corrections of abnormal areas of the resist pattern. The open-repair system is equipped with a syringe to dispense resist. To maintain a stable resist diameter, a thermal insulator was installed in the syringe system. As a result, the diameter of the dispensed resist became much more stable than when no thermal insulator was used. The resist diameter was kept within the target of 400±100 µm. Furthermore, a prototype system was constructed, and using a dummy pattern, it was confirmed that the system worked automatically and correctly.

Comparing the Management Practices and Productive Efficiency of Korean and Japanese Firms: An Interview Survey Approach

Keun Lee,Tsutomu Miyagawa,Young Gak Kim,Kazuma Edamura 서울대학교 경제연구소 2016 Seoul journal of economics Vol.29 No.1

In this study, we conduct interview surveys on management practices in Japanese and Korean firms following the study of Bloom, and Van Reenen (2007). The average management scores in Japanese firms are higher than those in Korean firms, and human resource management is positively associated with firm performance. When a Korean dummy is added as a shift term in regressions with the merged sample, its coefficient is negative, implying that Korean firms have low efficiency. However, when the cross terms of the Korean dummy are added with capital and labor, the significance of the shift term disappears. This observation entails that any efficiency difference between the two countries does not come from a technical efficiency (shift term) but from a factor efficiency (marginal productivity of labor and capital). One robust result of this study is that a high output elasticity of capital is observed in Korean firms, whereas a high output elasticity of labor is noted in Japanese firms despite the high capital ― labor ratios in the former. One interpretation of this puzzle is that Japanese firms have pursued the optimization of labor uses and have been relying on labor-saving growth in the face of labor shortage and aging and that Korean firms have relied on capital for growth, continuously renovating and updating their capital, thereby recording a high capital productivity in contempt of aggressive labor.

Micropump-Integrated Balloon Type Microactuators

Joon-wan Kim,Satoru Yamashita,Shinichi Yokota,Kazuya Edamura 대한기계학회 2013 대한기계학회 춘추학술대회 Vol.2013 No.5

Study on increasing output power density in ECF micropumps

Joon-wan Kim,Seiya Furuki,Shinichi Yokota,Kazuya Edamura 유공압건설기계학회 2015 유공압건설기계학회 학술대회논문집 Vol.2015 No.10

Electro-Conjugate Fluid (ECF) is a kind of functional and dielectric fluid. When a high DC voltage is applied to a pair of electrodes immersed in the ECF, a strong and active jet flow of ECF (ECF jet) is generated between these two electrodes. To satisfy high output power and easy fabrication at the same time, triangular prism and slit electrode pairs (TPSEs) for a novel ECF micropump was proposed and developed by MEMS technology based on photolithography with thick photoresist and nickel electroplating. In order to get higher output power density, this study proposes a new approach to efficiently remove dead volume and to increase density of electrodes for ECF jets. High density TPSEs proposed in this research were successfully fabricated by our MEMS technology. ECF micropupmps are realized with a base plate, a silicon rubber sheet, a cover plate and a device chip whose dimensions are 10 mm x 10 mm x 1 mm. Finally, this paper experimentally investigates ECF jet characteristics of the ECF micropumps. The experiment results show that our novel approach to increase output power density for ECF micropump is very effective.

Optical anisotropy in single-walled carbon nanotubes.

Yoo, Seongwoo,Jung, Yongmin,Lee, Dong Soo,Han, Won-Taek,Oh, Kyunghwan,Murakami, Y,Edamura, T,Maruyama, Shigeo Optical Society of America 2005 Optics letters Vol.30 No.23

<P>Optical anistropy at optical communication wavelength was observed in films of vertically aligned single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs). We report the control of both the polarization state and transmission of incoming light at 1550 nm by azimuthal and axial tilting of SWNT film about its aligned axis. The experiments reveal that the polarization state of light is susceptible to the azimuthal angle of the aligned direction of a SWNT having semiconductor characteristics and the intensity of the output beam after SWNT film shows cosine function dependence on the axial tilting angle.</P>