Why do firms choose nonmarket strategies the way they do? Although the literature demonstrates the impact of firms’ nonmarket strategies, such as informal networks, on firm values, the question of what explains the evolution of such networks over time has curiously escaped sustained analytic attention. Dr. Dongwook Kim at the Australian National University and Dr. Francis D. Kim at Chulalongkorn University offer the first such analysis by examining the trajectory of Korean chaebol families’ network marriages during the entire post-Korean War period as a crucial case. We argue that Korea’s institutional change from dictatorship to democracy has created disincentives for chaebol families’ marriages with high-profile politicians and public servants and thereby decreased the number of chaebols’ so-called political marriages directly and indirectly, the latter being mediated by an increasing number of criminal prosecutions of chaebol families. The argument receives robust support from causal mediation analyses of fifty-two Korean chaebol families’ network marriages during 1955-2015, while accounting for financial openness, economic development, government partisanship, media reporting, and other factors. We suggest that these findings have important implications for understanding firms’ political connections as a key nonmarket strategy and their changes over time.

Dr Dongwook Kim (Ph.D., The University of Wisconsin-Madison) is Lecturer in International Relations in the School of Politics and International Relations at the Australian National University. Prior to coming to the ANU, he was CDDRL Hewlett Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University, Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Chicago, and Assistant Professor of Political Science at Marquette University in the United States. He specializes in international relations theories, international law and organizations, transnational nongovernmental activism, policy diffusion, human rights, and mixed-methods research design. His current collaboration projects also focus on firms’ nonmarket strategies and business-labor relations. His research has appeared in Perspectives on Politics, International Organization, and the European Journal of International Relations.