SEOUL, October 27 (AJP) - A Kookmin University doctoral student has been selected for an excellence award in a graduate paper contest for research on why self-employed people with disabilities stay in business or leave it.
Jang Chae-yun, a doctoral student in entrepreneurship in the university's Department of Business Administration, won the prize in the graduate student paper contest at the 18th annual conference on the Panel Survey of Employment for the Disabled, Kookmin said Tuesday. The Employment Development Institute, the research arm of the Korea Employment Agency for Persons with Disabilities, hosts the event. Jang is a graduate of the university's Graduate School of Global Entrepreneurship and Venture.
The award will be presented on Nov. 6 at the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Seoul, where Jang will also present the paper. It will be published in the conference proceedings.
The conference has been held every year since 2009 to encourage the use of disability employment data, including the Panel Survey of Employment for the Disabled (PSED), and to support related policy research. The paper contest is open to master's and doctoral students in South Korea and abroad, who are judged first on a research proposal and then on a final paper.
Past prizes have mostly gone to work in social welfare, economics and rehabilitation studies. Jang approached disability self-employment from the field of entrepreneurship, the university said.
Her study drew on eight years of PSED data, from 2016 to 2023, covering 582 self-employed people with disabilities. Using 2,751 yearly observations of those individuals, she tested whether measures of health, happiness and productivity predicted who kept working for themselves and who left self-employment in later years.
The clearest link was job satisfaction. People who were more satisfied with their work were consistently less likely to leave self-employment. Economic viability, including whether a business was running at a loss, was also tied to leaving. Health problems and difficulties in running the business showed no clear relationship.
Jang argued that keeping a business open for a long time is not the same as building a sustainable career. She called for support for entrepreneurs with disabilities to extend beyond the startup stage to career management, and to help with finding new work or changing course after they leave self-employment.
Kim Jong-sung, Jang's adviser, said self-employment among people with disabilities had so far been discussed mainly in terms of starting a business or income levels. He said the study stood out because it treated self-employment as a career path and followed whether people stayed or left.
"The finding that job satisfaction consistently explains exits shows that the results of startup support should not be judged by survival rates alone," Kim said.
Lee Woo-jin, dean of the Graduate School of Global Entrepreneurship and Venture, said the award showed that entrepreneurship research was expanding "beyond the study of business growth into a discipline that explains the work and careers of a wide range of members of society."
Kookmin runs its entrepreneurship doctorate together with the graduate school's master's program. The university said the program combines entrepreneurship theory with data-based research and has widened its scope to public policy and entrepreneurship among disadvantaged groups. This year it launched the AI Entrepreneurship & Innovation Center and expanded its work with overseas universities, including the Fred Kiesner Center for Entrepreneurship at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.
The conference opens at 1 p.m. on Nov. 6 and is open to the public.
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