Analyzing the Impact of ETF Market Growth on the Behavior of Component Stocks

This study analyzes the impact of Korea ETF market growth on trading costs, information efficiency and corporate valuation focusing on the behaviors of individual component stocks in ETFs. The empirical analysis exhibits that an increase in the number of stocks held by ETFs has statistically significant effects on the bid-ask spreads of component stocks. In terms of the information efficiency, the correlations between componet stocks and the market, and industry return are statistically significant, suggesting the expansion of the ETF market could be a factor to allow market systematic risks higher. The impact of ETF on PBR is found to be statistically significant in the positive direction, howing that the growth of the ETF market could be conducive to making the value of component stocks overvalued relative to their fundamentals. These findings explain that negative side effects may occur from the rapid expansion of the ETF market and suggest special attention and policy considerations are needed to avoid unintended effects resulting from the growth of the ETF market.

A Survey on Critical Success Factor of OCIO Business in Korea

This paper reviews the history of OCIO (outsourced chief investment officer) and surveys the critical success factors of OCIO business in Korea. The market size of OCIO business in Korea has rapidly grown up, and the asset management for the retirement pension fund is expected to be the blue ocean for OCIO business. Survey study for OCIO business shows that the main interest of incumbent OCIOs and the potential candidates of Korea is the profitability, although OCIOs in the major foreign financial markets have their main interest in the risk management and/or the effectiveness of in-house supports. This result suggests that the potential OCIOs who prepare the entrance to the OCIO business should consider the needs and/or the purpose of the OCIO adopters and their practical constraints. OCIOs should develop their own unique professional field rather than the general expertise. Also, the Korean financial regulator is supposed to introduce the financial institutions specialized in OCIO business only.

An Analysis of the Asymmetric Volatility under Asymmetric Information and Ambiguity

The asymmetric volatility phenomenon (‘the phenomenon’, henceforth), documented first by Black (1976), refers to the fact that the stock return and its conditional volatility are negatively correlated. To explain ‘the phenomenon’, this paper presents an asymmetric information model under ambiguity, and provides an empirical test of its result as well. We assume that in the Grossman and Stiglitz (1980), uninformed liquidity traders face ambiguity about the distribution of asset payoffs, and that their attitudes toward ambiguity vary depending on the state of the economy. In model I, their utility functions exhibit ambiguity aversion in the bad state and ambiguity neutrality in the good state. In model II, liquidity traders are still ambiguity-averse in the bad state but ambiguity-seeking in the good state. We find that ‘the phenomenon’ appears in model II when the degree of ambiguity is not large. Furthermore, we show that the possibility of ‘the phenomenon’ is higher as the proportion of liquidity traders increases. To perform an empirical analysis, we measure the degree of ambiguity by the Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistic and show that this measure has a positive relationship with the difference between the volatilities in the good and bad states. In addition, we find that the risk factor constructed by the ambiguity measure has explanatory power about returns on 25 portfolios of the Fama-French type in the Korean market.

Evaluation Period and Agency Problem in Outsourced Chief Investment Officer (OCIO)

This article investigates the effect of the performance evaluation period on the long-term investment portfolio choice and the agency problem of outsourced investments. Though investors with the prospect utility are required to raise the portfolio weight on risky assets such as stocks for a long investment horizon, institutional investors and professional fund managers cannot help lowering the portfolio weight on risky assets to minimize the loss and to avoid disappointing clients with a short evaluation period. We find empirical evidence in the Korean capital market that stocks and bonds are indifferent to investors with the prospect utility for an evaluation period with 16 months and the optimal portfolio weight of stocks and bonds is 30% to 70%. Therefore there exists the agency problem between investors (principal) and managers (agent) due to frequent performance evaluations, which is able to explain current excessive investment in fixed income markets of most national pension funds. Our result implies that we need to consider extending the evaluation period of the investment performance to achieve the goal of asset and liability management (ALM) of national long-term funds in this low-interest-rate environment.

Market Reactions to Announcements of Valuation Losses on Conversion Rights Embedded in Convertible Instruments

Convertible instruments are financial instruments embedded with conversion rights such as convertible bonds or convertible preferred stocks. Under the Korean International Financial Reporting Standards (K-IFRS), the embedded conversion rights with certain conditions (i.e., a refixing clause) are recognized as derivative liabilities and are recognized at fair value in issuer’s financial statements. Since the value of convertible rights varies with the underlying stock value, an increase in the issuers’ stock price causes the issuers of convertible instruments to announce large derivative valuation losses. Using disclosures under the title of ‘Loss from Derivatives Trading’ from the KOREA EXCHANGE (KRX) during January 2016 through December 2019, this study examines market reactions to the disclosure of valuation losses on conversion rights embedded in convertible instruments. We find the following results. First, abnormal stock returns on the loss announcement date are significantly negative. Second, abnormal trading volumes peak on the loss announcement date. Third, abnormal stock returns persist in the long-term. Collectively, our findings suggest that investors perceive the loss disclosures as negative news, but fail to impound the information into issuer’s stock prices effectively. This study emphasizes the importance of education on convertible instruments and improvement in the disclosure requirements on valuation losses of conversion rights embedded in convertible instruments by providing evidence that investors face difficulty in understanding the related disclosures.

Decomposition of the Business Cycle Shock and the Default Rate of SMEs in Korea

This paper, through a structural VAR identified by a long-run restriction which is imposed by a neoclassical growth model, decomposes the real price index of capital accumulation (= deflator for fixed capital accumulations/consumption expenditure deflator), labor productivity (= real GDP/total employee hours), and total employee hours into three business cycle shocks: (i) investment-specific technology shock, (ii) neutral technology shock, and (iii) non-technology shock, and explores which shock has played a significant role in contributing to decreases in the default rate of SMEs. Empirical results drawn from Korean data spanning from 2000:Q1 to 2016:Q2 indicate that when the two technology shocks arise by 1%p, the default rate decreases by 0.03%p to 0.05%p permanently. In contrast, the impact of the non-technology shock on the default rate is highly transitory : the default rate decreases by 0.02%p in response to the 1%p increment in non-technology shock but turns back to its initial level after about three quarters. These imply the technology shocks could account for the most of variations in the default rate of SMEs. Our empirical results, therefore, deliver the policy implication that SME financing should focus on innovative firms with aggressive funding.

Information Contents of Order Flow Toxicity in the Options Market : The Case of KOSPI200 Index Options

This study estimates the VPIN (volume-synchronized probability of informed trading) of the KOSPI200 index options, the measure of order flow toxicity suggested by Easley et al. (2012), for the first time. To apply the VPIN approach, options are categorized by their real-time moneyness. I examine the predictive power of VPIN for the future stock market volatility using time-series regression analysis. The empirical result shows that the toxic order flow measure estimated by price changes has more information than that estimated by the actual order imbalance. In general, put options contain more information than call options, and the toxic order flow measure of OTM (out-of-the-money) put options contains the most significant information about the future stock market volatility. In addition, the predictive power of toxic order flow measure is much significant in the highly volatile than in the stable market. The volatility predictability of toxic order flow measure declined significantly after the option multiplier increase, whereas it has gradually recovered over time.

Contemporaneous Correlation between the Return and the Change of Trading Volume

This study demonstrates the contemporaneous correlation between return and the change of trading volume (CCRV) in the Korean stock market and analyzes the effect of trading volume change on the return and its volatility of individual stocks. Also, we examine the underlying reasons for CCRV in the Korean stock market. The empirical analysis covers individual stocks listed in KOSPI and KOSDAQ and their portfolios from 1989 to 2015. The main results are as follows. First, the CCRV in the Korean stock market dominantly appears positive. Second, at the individual stock level, the daily return volatility induced by CCRV accounts for 4.22% of the total daily return volatility. Third, the return volatility induced by CCRV is largely offset by well-diversified portfolios. Lastly, the ratio of positive CCRV decreases in stocks with very high or very low liquidity. The above result suggests that the illiquidity premium hypothesis is appropriate in explaining CCRV in the Korean stock market. In addition, the above results also indicate that the changes of trading volume can act as an idiosyncratic risk factor that can additionally intensify or weaken the response of the return toward the news. Furthermore, these results suggest that a strategy with sufficient consideration for CCRV is essential for the stock price prediction, the valuation of derivatives, and portfolio management.

Korean Firms’ Allocation of Cash Flow

This study investigates where Korean firms allocate cash flow. Our sample consists of listed firms in the KOPSI section of Korea Exchange over the period 2001-2016. Our estimation based on a system of equations shows that the largest use of Korean firms’ cash flow is repaying debt, followed by buttressing cash reserves and financing investment. On average, Korean firms allocate 38.5% of cash flow to repaying debt (specifically, 27.3% to paying off short-term debt and 11.2% long-term debt), 32.1% to buttressing cash reserves and 21.5% to financing investment. After dividing the sample into financially constrained and unconstrained firms (based on dividends, firm size or bond ratings), we find that financially constrained firms use more of cash flow in financing investment but less of it in reducing long-term debt (or total debt) than financially unconstrained firms do. As a result, the negative relation—that is, substitution—between cash flow and external finance (primarily long-term debt issuance) is less strong for financially constrained firms than it is for financially unconstrained firms. This finding is consistent with Almeida and Campello’s (2010) result from their U.S. study.

Price Momentum in Korea and the Effect of Investors’ Trading

This study investigates domestic individual, institutional and foreign investors’ trading, to test Hong and Stein (1999)’s behavioral explanation that momentum profit is generated as some uninformed investors underreact to information on medium-term prices. Using Hvidkjaer (2006)’s methodology, we examine the respective investors’ trading tendencies reflected in their active price-setting orders. We analyze a special database compiling details on every transaction for the stocks listed on the KSE during 1996:12~2009:08. During 2001~2007, individual investors’ underreaction in trading large-size winner stocks contributes to positive momentum profits. They seem to induce weak negative profits to emerge in 1997~2000, too. Foreign investors underreact to small-size loser stocks, incurring positive momentum profits during 2001~2007. They engage in positive feedback trading, when they trade large-size winner stocks. This trading tendency does not seem to be based on information on firm fundamentals, as we find those winner stocks’ returns are not sustained. Institutional investors’ trading seems to be relatively in line with future returns, but evidences are not strong enough to support they are informed investors. Overall, the behavioral hypothesis on investors’ underreaction seems to explain medium-term momentum profits in Korea, but evidences differing across subsamples suggest possibility of other unknown influences.