We examine the internal and external determinants of the capital structure of large Korean companies during the 2010-2017 period. Using total, short-term, and long-term debt ratios as proxies for capital structure, we found that both profitability and liquidity affect leverage negatively and significantly. These results are consistent with the experience of other nations, such as Malaysia, Pakistan, and Vietnam. We also show that both asset tangibility and firm size have a positive effect on long-term borrowings but a negative effect on short-term borrowings. These findings are aligned with observations from Pakistani and Vietnamese firms. The external determinants, however, show little statistical significance. Using an empirical approach simultaneously including both firm-specific and external determinants that influence the debt-equity choice for large companies listed on the Korea Exchange, our study complements the literature on corporate finance. For future research, we suggest including a dummy variable for structural changes (e.g. the world financial crisis) and measures of leverage dispersion and industry concentration to increase the power of the statistical models.

This study explores the relationship between corporate performance and corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives in the Ecuadorian banking environment. The first model employs both return on assets and return on equity as proxy for the financial performance while the second model includes the non-financial corporate performance constructs collected by a self-designed online questionnaire. We found a statistically positive relationship among CSR initiates and the financial and non-financial indicators in corporate performance. Our findings revealed that economic, legal, ethical, and philanthropic responsibility initiatives positively affect the non-financial corporate performance of the Ecuadorian banking environment. Similarly, the non-financial corporate performance is significantly positively influenced by the customer's brand trust, customer's brand loyalty, customer's perception of quality, and customer satisfaction. Study results are mostly consistent with the banking environment of other countries, especially in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Lebanon. Customers of the Ecuadorian banking environment perceived banks as socially responsible entities and Ecuadorian banks invest resources in CSR activities as a corporate governance policy to increase their financial and non-financial performance. Future research should include a corporate governance index with a CSR component as an independent variable to increase statistical models' power.Sustainability 2020, 12, 1621 2 of 16 and private institutions recognized that CSR plays an important role in the moral failure of the financial system, which affects directly the banking system's reputation and the effective and efficient communication with their stakeholders, classified into three basic groups: Customers, employees, and community [4]. All these factors positively influence earnings, faith, trust, and customer retention of the banking industry [3,5,6]. Specifically, firms with CSR initiatives are more likely to show positive earnings surprises, affecting their returns and equity performance in the short-term by factor-adjusted abnormal returns, which also show a positive effect on CSR reputation [7]. Therefore, banks and financial organizations adopt CSR practices to be beneficial for society and sustainable economic development.Similarly, CSR can be considered as an important determinant in the progress of the Ecuadorian economic market, especially, in the banking industry. Ecuador reached economic growth and oil bonanza during the period of 2000-2017. examined the relationship between financial development and economic growth in Ecuador for the period 2000-2017. They show that the Ecuadorian financial development using the deepening of deposits and credits increased from 20. 3% and 19.2% (2000) to 40.4% and 35.1% (2017), respectively. Furthermore, the level of bank usage, called "bankization" presents a growing trend over time, rising from 39.0% (2005) to 96.9% (2017), meaning that less than 4% of the Ecuadorians do not access this basic financial inst...

This study examines how organizational culture influences corporate performance in the Ecuadorian service sector. The study employs four organizational culture features and twelve concepts for corporate performance using a self-designed online questionnaire, which were supplied to postgraduate students from academic programs at Universidad de Las Americas (UDLA) in Quito, Ecuador. The respondents were working as managers or employees in small Ecuadorian service firms. The operational items of the questionnaire to measure organizational culture and corporate performance were designed using the Denison model. The findings reveal a statistically positive relationship between organizational culture and firm performance. Moreover, involvement, adaptability, consistency, and mission affect the non-financial performance of the Ecuadorian service sector. Involvement is the critical determinant of the influence of organizational culture on corporate performance, while training shows the strongest association with organizational culture. This study provides a perspective on long-term organizational strategies, vision, and performance. Future research should include the characteristics of the studied firms to increase the effectiveness of the proposed model.

This study examines how leverage affects real earnings management (REM) in non-financial firms listed on the Korea Composite Stock Price Index from 2010 to 2018 by employing total, short-term, and long-term debt ratios (i.e., leverage) as independent variables and four REM metrics as dependent variables. We find a significant positive relationship between leverage and REM in suspicious firms, whereas the effect of leverage is insignificant in non-suspicious firms. We also find that the positive relationship between both variables is stronger in the second half of the fiscal year, which shows the prevalence of the seasonality of REM, as managers collect high-frequency financial information during this period. These findings are consistent with those in the literature that managers increase firm leverage and REM activities to reduce their probability of being discovered, since financial statements in the interim quarters are not often audited. Our study complements the literature by introducing quarterly data to identify clearly REM activities and detect the strongest effect on the relationship between REM and leverage. Moreover, our results from the two-stage least square (2SLS) regression analysis are consistent with our previous findings.

This study reviews the relationship between customer perception factors and AI-enabled customer experience in the Ecuadorian banking industry. The study employs a self-designed online questionnaire with five factors for customer perception (convenience in use, personalization, trust, customer loyalty, and customer satisfaction) and two categories for AI-enabled customer experience (AI-hedonic customer experience and AI-recognition customer service). The final valid dataset consisted of 226 questionnaires. The data analysis and the hypotheses tests were conducted using SPSS 26 and structural equation modeling, respectively. The main findings displayed that all five customer perception factors (individual and joint effect) have a positive and significant effect (at least at the 5% level) on AI-enabled customer experience, AI-hedonic customer experience, and AI-recognition customer service in the Ecuadorian banking industry. Study results are aligned with previous findings from other countries, particularly the banking environment in the United Kingdom, Canada, Nigeria, and Vietnam. The AI techniques involved in the financial sector increase the valuation of customer experience due to AI algorithms recollecting, processing, and analyzing customer behavior. This study contributes a complete statistical and econometric model for determinants of AI-enabled customer experience. The main limitations of the study are that, in the analysis of the most demanded AI financial services, not all services and products are included and the inexistence of a customer perception index. For upcoming research, the authors recommend performing a longitudinal study using quantitative data to measure the effect of AI-enabled customer experience on the Ecuadorian banks’ performance.