Yonsei School of Business

Doctoral candidate Jiyoung Park (Finance major) won the Best Paper Award in the graduate student category at the 14th annual Intellectual Property Paper Contest hosted by the Korea Copyright Commission and organized by the Korea Institute of Intellectual Property. Forty-four papers on intellectual property issues from 20 universities nationwide were submitted. Park received the minister’s award from the ministry of trade, industry and energy for the best paper in the graduate category.

[Jiyoung Park, the second student from the left in first raw] 

Park’s paper, "A Study on Corporate Governance and Innovation Activities," was described as systematically interpreting the hypothesis that companies with sound corporate governance are more successful innovators and have more high-impact technological patents.

Typically, research and development (R&D) investment is the most basic form of innovation directly linked to a company’s profitability. Patents and other intangible assets created through R&D positively influence on corporate value. However, R&D activities require continuous funding and are time-consuming in the long term, which can cause agency problems because of high uncertainties and information asymmetry. Park explored in his paper the relationship between corporate governance and corporate innovation as an institutional device to solve such agency problems.

Park had been studying various financial decision-making processes that involve corporate patent data. Consequently, the data for this paper was already in place to some extent. Therefore, this paper mainly focused on organizing and explaining past studies logically. The author also further enriched the paper by demonstrating the main research results and addressing the study’s limitations that can be the subject of future studies.

In his acceptance speech, Park said, "It is a great honor to receive such a great prize. I want to thank Professor Hyun-Han Shin of Finance, who helped me develop my research. I will work harder to become a researcher who can observe and analyze society insightfully."