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This study examines whether government support for small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs), aimed at stimulating their growth, achieves its intended goal. We argue that government subsidies create the incentive for SMEs to remain small in order to keep receiving such support and thus SMEs are reluctant to grow. We call this phenomenon the Peter Pan syndrome. Using a dataset of Korean manufacturing firms during the period of 2010–2012, we find that the Peter Pan syndrome indeed exists and that the likelihood of the Peter Pan syndrome is conditioned by factors that influence their incentive to remain as SMEs.

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The purpose of this study is to formulate and solve the scheduling problem to heat-treatment process in forging process and apply it to industries. Heat-treatment is a common process in manufacturing heavy forged products in ship engines and wind power generators. Total complete time of the schedule depends on how to group parts and assign them into heat furnace. Efficient operation of heat-treatment process increases the productivity of whole production system while scheduling the parts into heat-treatment furnace is a combinatorial problem which is known as an NP-hard problem. So the scheduling, on manufacturing site, relies on engineers' experience.To improve heat-treatment process schedule, this study formulated it into an MIP mathematical model which minimizes total complete time. Three methods were applied to example problems and the results were compared to each other. In case of small problems, optimal solutions were easily found. In case of big problems, feasible solutions were found and that feasible solutions were very close to lower bound of the solutions. ILOG OPL Studio 5.5 was used in this study.

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