대기업집단 소속 공익법인의 공익사업활동 성과에 관한 연구

[Purpose] Nonprofit foundations belonging to Korean large business groups(hereafter, the Foundations) have caused much controversy in society. Their social responsibilities are significant because they receive considerable gift tax exemptions from a large amount of contributions at the time of establishment (Lee and Choi 2018). Considering the purpose of their establishment, it is very important for nonprofit foundations to carry out public services, but there has been little research on them. Therefore this paper empirically examines whether the Foundations are related to performances of public service activities. [Methodology] To conduct empirical analyses, we collected data of academic and scholarship foundations on Korea guidestar and public interest disclose site of the National Tax Service in Korea. We performed a multivariate regression analysis. [Findings] From the empirical analyses, we find that the Foundations are negatively associated with the public service performances using variables related to the public service expenditure and that the Foundations are negatively associated with the public service performances proxied by both the investment asset and the US tax law related variables. Additional analysis that controls the Foundations’ revenue scale and asset characteristics is consistent with the main analysis results. [Implications] The previous studies on the Foundations have been mostly theoretical approaches, legal discussions of shareholding restrictions or case studies, and only a few studies on the performance of public service activities. This paper contributes to the first empirical study to analyze the performance of the public service activities of the Foundations through multivariate regression analysis.