As a nation experiencing rapid economic growth, South Korea and its government have made a continuous effort toward efficient research investments to achieve transformation of the Korean industry for the fourth industrial revolution. To achieve the maximum effectiveness of the research investments, it is necessary to evaluate its funding’s worth and default risk. Thus, incorporating the concepts of the Black-Scholes-Merton model and the Greeks, this study develops a default-risk evaluation model in the foundation of a system dynamics methodology. By utilizing the proposed model, this study estimates the monetary worth and the default risks of research funding in the public and private sectors of Information and Communication technologies, along with the sensitivity of the R&D economic worth of research funding to changes in a given parameter. This study finds that the public sector has more potential than the private sector in terms of monetary worth and that the default risks of three types of research funding are relatively high. Through a sensitivity analysis, the results indicate that uncertainty in volatility, operation period, and a risk-free interest rate has trivial impacts on the monetary worth of research funding, while volatility has large impacts on the default risk among the uncertain factors.
This study analyzes the effect of the capital structure of Korean manufacturing firms on default risk based on Moody’s KMV option pricing model where the probability of default is obtained by measuring the distance to default as a covariant in logit model developed by Merton (1974). Based on the panel data of manufacturing firms, this study achieves its primary objective, using a fixed effect regression model and examines the effect of a firm’s capital structure on default risk amongst publicly listed firms on Korea exchange during 2005-2016. Empirical results obtained suggest that the rise in short-term debt to assets leads to increase the risk of default whereas the increase in long-term debt to assets leads to decrease the default risk. The benefits of short-term debt financing over a short-term period fade out in the presence of information asymmetry. However, long-term debt financing overcomes the information asymmetry and enjoys the paybacks of tax advantage associated with long-term debt. Additionally, size, tangibility and interest coverage ratio are also the important determinants of default risk. Findings support the trade-off theory of capital structure and recommend the optimal use of long-term debt in a firm’s capital structure.