Volume 12, Issue 3

This paper evaluated how the tax penalty, corporate income feedback tax (CIFT), on retained earnings affected firms’ managerial decisions in South Korea. We focused on how the firms allocated the retained earnings to minimize the additional tax liability. We employed a quasi-natural experiment design resulting from the enactment of the CIFT in 2015 to identify how the tax penalty on earning retention affected investment, dividend, and employment. We took advantage of the eligibility condition of the CIFT to construct a quasi-natural experimental design. Our estimation results show that most firms subject to the CIFT paid out dividends to equity holders to avoid additional tax liabilities despite of modest increase of investment. They did not change wages much. Rather, they decreased wage payment. In sum, the CIFT was not as successful as Korean government wished.

The article discusses the possibility of classifying plagiarism as a culturally motivated crime. Creating works, especially written works, is strongly related to culture as well as to knowledge and skills acquired during education. Therefore, plagiarism can be perceived as a culturally-conditioned act, and, thus, differently perceived depending upon the culture with which the artist identifies themselves. The author juxtapose two legal orders, namely of countries where plagiarism is a crime and those where the failure to mark the authorship of a work results from the customs prevailing in their culture, i.e. societies influenced by Confucian philosophy. The research goal is to raise the hypothesis and determine whether the perpetrator of culturally motivated plagiarism can use one of the tools indicated in criminal law, the so-called cultural defense.

In this study, I analyze the characteristics of consumer attitudes toward digital and non-digital service provision in the platform business and discuss its regulation. Specifically, I employ consumer questionnaires on subscription services and extract comparable objects to examine the interests that end consumers evince in the provision of these goods and services, thereby enabling better distinction between digital and non-digital goods. A logit analysis of consumer attitudes toward digital and non-digital goods shows that low-price appeals are more effective for digital goods than for non-digital goods, and that they are demanded by younger, male, and higher-income consumers based on an online survey conducted in February 2021. In terms of regulatory and research responses, the issue of market dominance needs to be examined in light of business activities based on the characteristics of goods.

This paper investigates empirically whether firm ownership structures contribute to varying levels of legal compliance, which ultimately influence the likelihood of winning a lawsuit. I hypothesize that private companies are more likely to lose employment lawsuits because the rule of law within the company is rarely established. Using collected 2756 employment judgments decided by district courts in Beijing between 2014 and 2018, I test this hypothesis against three other types of ownership structures in China: state-owned enterprises, wholly foreign-funded companies, and partly foreign-funded companies. The statistical result confirms that private companies are more likely to lose cases, thus supporting the proposed hypothesis. In addition, the company’s scale and the company’s life span also have a significant influence on the employment lawsuit result.

In this article, we extend the model of Newman, H., and D. Wright. 1990. “Strict Liability in a Principal-Agent Model.” International Review of Law and Economics 10: 219–231 and strengthens their result that the strict liability can attain social optimum in a principal-agent relation to the situation in which the court appreciates any contractual terms regarding apportionment of damages between an employer and an employee under vicarious liability rule. Our model also generalizes and extends vicarious liability to the negligence-based liability rule.