This study examines the impact of the quality of online shopping logistics services on customer satisfaction and in driving subsequent repeat purchasing behavior. Five hypotheses are established to represent the relationships between customer satisfaction and each factor of logistics services: quality of information, quality of order, quality of delivery, price of delivery, and customer service. The research includes surveys conducted over two months from 1 December, 2016, to 31 January, 2017, targeting mostly young Chinese customers with experience purchasing products online, thus representing e-commerce. A questionnaire was distributed to each subject in a sample of 150 Chinese customers with online shopping experience. The empirical analysis indicates that logistics service quality, and primarily the quality of delivery, has a statistically significant impact on customer satisfaction, which, in turn, has a statistically significant impact on repeat purchasing behavior. The results provide insight into the strategy behind China’s rapidly growing online shopping industry, which focuses on maintaining stability through long-term customer relationship management.

From a supply chain perspective, new technologies such as blockchain can improve the efficiency and competitiveness of logistics and increase customer satisfaction. Although blockchain technology has been lauded as a way for firms to build sustainable supply chain networks, the rate of acceptance of this technology remains low. Therefore, this study seeks to identify the factors that discourage firms from merging blockchain with the supply chain. Instead of providing further reasons for adopting blockchain technology, we try to understand what deters firms from adding blockchain to their operations. Following the deductive approach, a confirmatory factor analysis is conducted on pre-test questionnaires to test, improve, and verify the constructs (questions) to measure the hypothesized factors. A theoretical model is proposed based on the hypotheses, and structural equation modeling is applied. The results are estimated using the partial least squares approach and a sample of 83 respondents. Our findings based on our empirical data support most of our hypotheses. We find that various factors impede the adoption of blockchain technologies, including technological barriers, constraints rooted in organizations and the environment, and system-related governmental barriers. In addition, various factors are critical determinants of resistance to blockchain in the technological, organizational, and environmental dimensions.

This study investigates the monitoring effectiveness of the largest institutional blockholder in Korea, the Korean National Pension Service (KNPS), on firms’ engagement in corporate social responsibility (CSR). We use a large, unique sample from Korea, where the financial market is primarily characterized by chaebols. We show that lagged KNPS blockholdings do not significantly influence investee firms’ concurrent CSR indexes. This result indicates that even the largest institutional blockholder in Korea does not actively engage in firms’ CSR initiatives to enhance their long-term performance and prosperity. Overall, our results suggest that institutional investors should more actively serve as an effective corporate governance mechanism in emerging Asian markets, where companies aim to be profitable and long-term corporate governance is very important.

Around the globe, socially responsible activities are being integrated into regulations, and corporate social responsibility (CSR) is increasingly being recognized as a means of sustaining a business and improving its competitiveness. South Korea has made a significant effort to encourage CSR activities in order to increase its firms’ competitive advantage. This study evaluates the sustainable development activities of Korean firms, and empirically analyzes the positive impact of CSR on corporate performance (CP) in Korea over a period of four years. A comparison by industry reveals that CSR has a greater impact on CP in the manufacturing sector than it does in the nonmanufacturing and service sectors. Furthermore, the results for consumption goods are more positive than those for industrial goods, because the former are, in general, more affected by customer feedback. A case study of three Korean firms was used to examine CSR implementation in Korea, recent activities undertaken by Korean firms, and the integration of CSR concepts into firms’ strategies.

We conducted an empirical analysis to verify the relationship between companies’ ownership structures and earnings management. Our sample included 480 nonfinancial companies listed on Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange and Hanoi Stock Exchange from 2012 to 2017, and our explanatory variables included several ratios, such as the controlling shareholders’ stake, management ownership stake, state-owned stake, and foreign ownership stake, which represent different ownership structures. We examined the effects of these ratios on earnings management. Our results suggested that earnings management has a significant linear relationship with the state-owned and foreign ownership stakes. Our results can enhance the understanding of the role of companies’ sustainable ownership structures in limiting earnings management, and they can contribute to future studies of the relationship between earnings management and corporate social responsibility and sustainability reporting assurance practices that focus on corporate ownership structures.

Many studies investigate collusion between political connections and firm performance, but Korean research on this topic is not very diverse. This study, based on financial data of listed Korean companies spanning the period from the 15th to the 19th Korean governments, analyzes whether political connections between governments and enterprises have a positive, negative, or no correlation with firm performance. The results show that the average return on assets for politically connected firms in the sample tends to be 10% higher than the corresponding value for sample firms that are not politically connected. Since existing studies measure political connections in a fragmented way, this study offers necessary implications for exploring the numerous structural problems of and solutions to the chronic issues currently faced by the Korean economy, as it investigates the economic policies from 1998 to 2018 and their influences on firm performance through the analysis of longer-term data.

To maintain its sustainable productivity growth, Vietnam needs to upgrade its education system. Although studies have examined the return on schooling in Vietnam, none have focused on Hanoi (the capital) or Ho Chi Minh (the biggest economy), which differ markedly from the rest of the country in terms of their levels of education and development. We address this gap in the literature using an extended version of the classic Mincerian human capital equation and data from the latest Vietnam Household Living Standard Survey (2016). The Heckman two-stage method is used to address selection bias. In the two cities, there is no wage premium for people with a general education. Thus, workers need to earn at least a vocational degree to increase their wages significantly over those of people with a general education. In general, Ho Chi Minh offers higher salaries (4.45%) and tends to reward experience, whereas Hanoi pays more for an additional year of education (1.95%). Therefore, Vietnam should promote vocational education and develop a more open, flexible system that is less dependent on credential hiring, especially in the public sector. Lastly, we highlight the need to study returns on sustainable education in specific economic regions in Vietnam.

As corporate sustainability continues to improve and enhance the principles of good corporate governance, firms are exerting increasing efforts in terms of transparency and public disclosure. Transparency efforts provide information to the general public on the relationship between corporate governance and improved sustainability. The better informed shareholders are about the connection between corporate governance and sustainability, the more apparent the relationship will become over time. Prior studies assume that blockholders engage in active institutional monitoring by intervening directly in firms’ operations. In contrast, we argue that passive institutional monitoring is a more feasible governance mechanism in the Korean market owing to the market’s unique features (i.e., chaebols and pressure sensitivity). In particular, focusing on the blockholdings of the Korean National Pension Service (KNPS), we study the impact of passive monitoring on firms’ earnings quality, represented by earnings persistence, value relevance, and timeliness. The empirical evidence shows that KNPS blockholdings have a positive and significant impact on corporate earnings quality, indicating that passive blockholder monitoring is a more efficient channel for improving earnings quality in South Korea. Our results may be generalized to other emerging markets in which a few entities with concentrated economic power engender pressure-sensitive corporate landscapes for sustainability.