Ms. Jang Chae-yun, a graduate of Kookmin University’s (President Jeong Seung Ryul) Graduate School of Global Entrepreneurship and Venture Business and currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Business Administration with a concentration in Entrepreneurship, has been selected as the recipient of the Excellence Award in the graduate student thesis competition at the “18th Annual Employment of Persons with Disabilities Panel Academic Conference 2026,” hosted by the Employment Development Institute of the Korea Employment Agency for Persons with Disabilities. The awards ceremony will be held on Friday, November 6, at the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Seoul. The winning paper will be published in the conference proceedings and presented on-site that day.
 
The Employment of Persons with Disabilities Panel Academic Conference has been held annually since 2009 to increase the utilization of employment statistics for persons with disabilities—such as those from the Employment of Persons with Disabilities Panel Survey—and to promote related policy research. The Graduate Student Research Paper Competition is open to master’s and doctoral students both in Korea and abroad, and winners are selected through a review of research proposals and final papers. While previous winners have primarily come from fields related to disability—such as social welfare, economics, and rehabilitation—Ph.D. candidate Jang Chae-yoon was recognized for her research analyzing self-employment and employment issues among people with disabilities from the perspective of entrepreneurship.
 
The award-winning paper, titled “Self-Employment and Sustainable Careers for People with Disabilities: The Relationship Between Sustainable Career Indicators and the Continuation or Exit from Self-Employment,” analyzed 2,751 individual-point-in-time observations from 582 self-employed individuals with disabilities using discrete-time event history analysis and a multinomial logit model, based on eight years of data (2016–2023) from the second wave of the Panel Survey on Employment of People with Disabilities. Through this analysis, the study examined the impact of health, happiness, and productivity indicators—as defined by the Sustainable Career Perspective—on the subsequent continuation or exit from self-employment.
 
The results showed that higher job satisfaction was consistently associated with a lower likelihood of exiting self-employment, and that economic viability—such as whether the business was operating at a loss—was also linked to exit. Conversely, the presence of health issues or business operational difficulties did not show a clear relationship with exit. Based on these findings, Ms. Jang suggested that maintaining self-employment over the long term should be distinguished from building a sustainable career, and recommended that support for entrepreneurship among people with disabilities be expanded beyond the initial startup phase to include subsequent career management as well as support for re-employment and career transition after exit.
 
Professor Kim Jong Sung, the student’s advisor, commented, “Discussions on self-employment among people with disabilities have traditionally focused on business entry or income levels,” adding, “This study is significant in that it views self-employment as a career path and tracks its subsequent continuity and exit.” He continued, “The finding that job satisfaction consistently explains business exit demonstrates that the success of startup support should not be judged solely by survival rates.”
 
Lee Woo Jin, Dean of the Graduate School of Global Entrepreneurship and Venture at Kookmin University, remarked, “This achievement demonstrates that entrepreneurship studies are expanding beyond the study of corporate growth to become a discipline that explains the work and careers of diverse members of society.” He added, “The research capabilities of our doctoral program, recognized through an evaluation by an external public institution, will serve as the foundation for our advancement as a specialized graduate school of entrepreneurship.”
 
Kookmin University’s Ph.D. program in Entrepreneurship is a leading degree program in Korea, operated in conjunction with the master’s program at the Graduate School of Global Entrepreneurship and Venture. Through an educational curriculum that integrates entrepreneurship theory with data-driven empirical research, the program is expanding its research scope beyond the startup ecosystem to include public policy and entrepreneurship among socially vulnerable groups. This year, the program is also strengthening its research support system through the establishment of the AI Entrepreneurship Innovation Research Center (AEIC) and collaborations with overseas universities.
 
Meanwhile, the 18th Academic Conference of the Panel on Employment of People with Disabilities will be held on Friday, November 6, starting at 1:00 p.m. at the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Seoul, and is open to anyone interested in employment statistics and policy research related to people with disabilities.

△ Photo: (Left) Jang Chae-yoon, Ph.D. candidate in Entrepreneurship at Kookmin University; (Right) Poster from the Graduate Student Research Paper Competition at the 18th Academic Conference of the Panel on Employment of People with Disabilities