This paper examines the relationship between environmental management and firm value with a new empirical approach that can reduce the endogeneity problem observed in existing literatures. In the empirical analysis, we check the stock market response to the first announcement of the KRX SRI-ECO index with focus on the stock prices of those firms which are not included in this index. As the announcement is likely to be regarded as an unexpected event that may herald concerns among authorities and regulators, we expect that any stock price changes would be an independent reflection of investor’ perception on the relationship between environmental management and firm value. As a new initiative to strengthen the environmental management of Korean firms, the Korea Exchange has recently decided to introduce a new index, KRX SRI-ECO. The firms included in the index were chosen from the listed ones with strong environmental performance. The main purpose of the introduction of this new index is to raise stock investors’ awareness of environmental aspects of firms as potential performance factors while motivating them to improve their environmental management as a way to enhance their firm values. Since stock values of such firms do increase by being listed in the index, the announcement is expected to encourage other non-listed firms to raise their effort to improve their environmental management. Another advantage is that the development of new index can serve as a new information content in investment in stocks, effectively reminding the investors of the importance of environmental consideration. We conjecture that, given the new event, firms with poor environmental management would feel increased pressure to improve their current status so as to be qualified for the index with an ultimate aim to boost their stock prices. Then, we can expect that on the disclosure date of KRX SRI-ECO index, the level of environmental performance of firms is likely to have a negative relationship with the stock price of firms excluded from this index. Since this conjecture is fundamentally rooted in the assumption that investors do attribute value to the issues pertaining to environmental management, we can conclude that environmental performance has a positive effect on firm value. Above all, the methodology we use in our paper mitigates the endogeneity problem between environmental management and firm value observed in existing literatures. Existing literatures analyzing the relationship have shown that the improvement of the environmental management increases profitability and firm value, and contributes to the competitiveness (Hart and Ahuja, 1996; Klassen and McLaughlin, 1996). However, these researches invariably carry the endogeneity problem: they do not clearly establish whether the improvement in environmental management increases firm value or firms with already high value attain higher environmental performance (Kim, 2010). To minimize such problem, this paper analyzes the relationship between stock price response and the level of environmental performance subsequent to a policy change. Initiated by Lee and Park (2009), this research design has been further developed through a thorough analysis of the relationship between a non-target firm's stock price response and the level of corporate governance on the first target announcement date of corporate governance fund. In doing so, one of the key aims is to mitigate the endogeneity problem between corporate governance and firm value. Unlike the previous attempt, however, we try to further improve the approach by leaving out firms that are included in the KRX SRI-ECO index from our sample so as to more effectively minimize the noise effect due to firms expected of higher stock return for good environmental performance. Another prevailing criticism against existing papers on this topic has been that they would normally adopt arbitrary evaluation criteria for environment management. To correct this draw-back, this paper uses more reliable data, namely the environmental management evaluation score compiled by Korea Corporate Governance Service as a proxy for the level of environmental management of firms. Incorporating such officially accepted figures as those provided by this quasi-government organization, this paper further reinforces the result’s objectivity and reliability the data is also easily available to investors. In addition, we investigate which types of firms show stronger stock price responses vis-à-vis the new event. Empirically, we confirm that stock returns are higher for those firms with higher profitability or higher firm values since such firms can cope with the high opportunity cost of environmental management. At the same time, they are aware of the higher opportunity costs if they fail to effectively deal with the environmental management. Estimated results thus far are as follows: (1) Stock price response (CAR) of the firms excluded from the index around the disclosure date of KRX SRI-ECO index is significantly positive. (2) The environmental management score has a negative effect on the CAR. This result is consistent with our hypothesis that firms with poorer environment management history will react more to the new policy and pay more attention to their environmental management, which consequently elicits positive reaction from investors. This result also implies that the environmental management has a positive effect on firm value. On the other hand, among 5 sub-categories for the environmental management evaluation, environmental organization, environmental management, environmental performance, and activity of stakeholder have significantly negative effects on CAR. (3) When we divide the sample into two groups based on the average ROA in the past3 years and Tobin Q, and re-estimate the effect of environmental management evaluation scores on CAR in each sample, we find that firms with high profitability and firm value tend to show stronger significance.

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The sale of funds employing a dollar cost averaging strategy has allegedly started a new era in Korean fund market. In fact, Assets under management (AUMs) of equity funds have dramatically increased and investment patterns of individual investors have changed to indirect and long-term horizon investments since the dollar cost averaging funds settled down. Accordingly, investment management companies have also changed their trading strategies from frequent changes of holding stocks for higher short-term performance to buy and holding stocks, enabling them to timely react to market movement. In addition, securities companies and banks have been actively attracted to the dollar cost averaging funds, resulting in the changes of funds’ sale channel. This has profoundly influenced the overall financial industry. However, very little research has been conducted thus far on this issue in academy and practices. Most literatures have overlooked the effect of the dollar cost averaging funds on fund market, thus producing erroneous results. Since the onset of the structural changes in fund market in 2005 when the dollar cost averaging funds started to be sold in full scale, this paper benchmarks that year in examining selectivity skill and timing ability of equity fund managers during pre- and post-structural change periods. I conjecture that the investment companies are more likely to critically alter asset management strategies after the sale of the dollar cost averaging funds, which is supposed to have generated significant effects on the performance of fund managers. Therefore, I investigate the managers’ selectivity skills of purchasing (selling) appreciating (depreciating) stocks in advance and their timing ability to switch among fund asset classes in an attempt to profit from the changes in market outlook. In doing this, we use three performance estimation methodologies including combined models of Fama and French (1993) with Treynor and Mazuy (1966), Henriksson and Merton (1981), and Goetzmann, Ingersoll, and Ivkovic (2000). I also employ pooled regression for each year, non-parametric analysis, and dummy variable added regression for robustness test. The results of analyses using various methodologies to estimate performance show that the fund managers’ timing skills of fund managers strikingly improve after structural change in the fund market. For one thing, only 2% of equity funds are observed to hold statistically significant timing ability during the pre-structural change periods, while more than 30% of funds display timing ability during the post-structural change periods. I also provide evidence that fund managers present substantially different timing ability by investment management company, and that the timing skills of fund managers are much more improved after structural change in funds whose stock holding ratio is higher, total cost is lower, and size is larger (more than 100 billion won) or enormously tiny (less than 5 billion won). Meanwhile, the selectivity skills of fund managers deteriorate after structural change, but the extent of decline is not statistically significant. These results suggest that the investment companies may be able to compose holding stocks and to timely alter stocks by focusing more closely on the market movements especially those related to structural changes of fund market caused by the sale of dollar cost averaging funds. In reality, most dollar cost averaging funds are classified not as aggressive growth funds whose purpose is to achieve the highest capital gain accompanied by high share price volatility, but as value funds that primarily hold stocks that are conceived to be undervalued in price in the relatively long term horizon. This implies that trading strategy on equity funds is more likely to change the longer investment horizon and the lower turnover ratio, enlarging the opportunity of timing ability for fund managers. Another implication of the results of this study is that the impact of a rapidly growing fund market on the entire stock market has augmented since the sale of dollar cost averaging funds. Namely, as major liquidity providers, equity funds lead to entire stock market movement. For instance, the Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI) had increased for a while after the introduction of the dollar cost averaging funds, although foreign investors’ stock investments have reverted to a net selling position. This paper contributes to the existing literature in that the sale of dollar cost averaging funds bringing about tremendous structural changes is assessed as a crucial incident that marks the beginning of a new era in the Korean fund market. In addition, the paper minimizes the various biases caused by sample selection through more systematic selection procedure such as excluding master feed funds within family funds, picking one among multi- class funds, and including funds whose inception date is after June 2000 when new classification system of funds was introduced. Above all, this paper propounds salient implication that future researches associated with funds in Korean market should necessarily ponder over the impact of these structural changes on their results.

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The notion of liquidity is widely used in the finance area, such as in the studies of market microstructure and asset pricing. And yet, so many liquidity measures are available with little consensus on which measure is the most appropriate that it is difficult for researchers to decide which one they should adopt for their studies. In the US, Goyenko, Holden and Trzcinka (2009) provide a comprehensive study of liquidity measures. They run horseraces of the widely used proxies of liquidity, plus new proxies they developed against the high-frequency liquidity benchmarks. Lesmond (2005) investigates the liquidity measures of 23 emerging markets using the quarterly bid-ask spread as a benchmark. His study includes the Korean stock market; however, it has a limitation in that the high-frequency measure is not employed as liquidity benchmark. This paper compares various liquidity measures in the Korean stock market to provide a guide for the use of liquidity measures by employing the high-frequency data. The paper runs horseraces of low-frequency liquidity measures derived from daily data against high-frequency liquidity benchmarks from intraday data. At first, I classify the liquidity measures into two categories: spread and price impact measures. Spread measures gauge the direct trading cost while price impact measures the indirect trading cost. Liquidity measures used in the paper are as following: (1) High-frequency spread benchmarks: Quoted spread, Effective spread, Realized spread. (2) Low-frequency spread measures: Roll, Roll2, Gibbs, LOT, Zero, Zero2, Liu, Turnover, Amihud, Pastor and Stambaugh, Amivest, KRX quoted spread. (3) High-frequency price impact benchmarks: Lambda (λ), 5-Minute Price Impact, Static Price Impact. (4) Low-frequency price impact measures: Roll Impact, Roll2 Impact, Gibbs Impact, LOT Impact, Amihud, Pastor and Stambaugh, Amivest. Next, comparisons of liquidity measures are performed on the Korean stock market. The Korean sample is comprised of 271 firms listed in the Korea Exchange for the period from April 1993 to December 2004. Monthly and annual liquidity measures are estimated and compared by using two methodologies: correlation and prediction error analysis. The first correlation metric is the average cross-sectional correlation based on individual firms between the high-frequency benchmarks and the low-frequency liquidity measures. The second correlation metric is the time-series correlation based on an equally-weighted portfolio. The third correlation metric is the pooling correlation based on all month (year)-firm observations. As prediction error metric, the mean bias and the root mean squared error (RMSE) between the benchmark and the liquidity proxy are used. The results from the prediction error are expected to be useful for market efficiency and corporate finance tests, since in these fields the correctly scaled proxy is needed. This paper provides us with important findings about liquidity measures. First, in the comparison of spread measures, the KRX quoted spread, which uses the closing quoted bid-ask spread, has the highest correlations (0.397～0.977) and the smallest prediction errors (mean bias: 0.000～0.007, RMSE: 0.001～0.008) with the high-frequency spread benchmarks. However, this measure has different property with the other low-frequency spread measures because it adopts one observation among high-frequency data rather than proxies spread. Among the spread proxies, Amihud performs the best in correlation analysis (0.12 2～0.943), and LOT in prediction errors analysis (mean bias: -0.002～0.006, RMSE: 0.005～ 0.010). LOT shows the highest accuracy: in summary statistics, the mean of monthly LOT is about 0.8% when the mean of the Quoted and Effective spread is about 1.0%. Moreover, LOT has high time-series correlations with the benchmarks and performs well in the portfolios stratified by the firm size and effective spread. Second, in the comparison of price impact measures, most low-frequency measures, except Pastor and Stambaugh, have high correlation with high-frequency benchmarks. Gibbs Impact and Amihud perform distinguishably well. Pastor and Stambaugh is likely to contain much estimation errors when it is estimated based on individual firms. Also, two robustness checks are performed. First, the sample period is divided into eight sub-periods by using the market index moving averages. Second, comparisons are also done using firms included in the KOSPI200 index. These analyses show the similar results with the previous. The result of a sub-period for 1997. 6～1998. 6, in which Korea experienced the severe financial crisis, shows lower correlations and higher prediction errors than other sub-periods.

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The inquired disclosure is a system operated by the Korea Exchange (KRX) to validate the existence of material information when the price of a listed stock fluctuates substantially. It is different from other timely disclosure since KRX inquires information, and the firm confirms the information inquired by the Exchange whereas in case of other timely disclosure the firm itself mandatorily or voluntarily release information to the investors. According to the efficient market hypothesis, the stock prices react only to new fundamental information. Sometimes, the stock prices exhibit noticeable jump or plunge without any specific public information. In that case, the Exchange inquires of the firm about the reason for the noticeable price changes. In response to the inquiry from the Exchange, the firm usually provides two types of answers such as “nothing unusual” or “something undetermined.” This paper investigates how the demand for inquired disclosure from the Korea Exchange affects the movements of stock price and trading volume for the period of ±20 days surrounding the event. The event date is defined as the day when the Exchange demands the inquired disclosure related to the stock price jump or plunge occurring without any specific public information. Also, this paper investigates the trading patterns of different investors (classified as individual, institutional, and foreign investors) surrounding the day of inquiry. For this purpose this paper examines the cases of the KOSPI-listed firms which are inquired to be disclosed for the explanation of the jump or plunge of stock price for the period from 2005 to 2009. We collected a total of 497 samples which are composed of 436 cases of jump and 61 cases of plunge. Then these samples are divided into four groups depending on price changes and types of firms’ answers, such as jump/something undetermined, jump/nothing unusual, plunge/something undetermined, and plunge/nothing unusual. This paper employs typical event study methodology, and computes the abnormal return (AR) and the cumulative abnormal return (CAR) surrounding the event day using the market adjusted return model. The main results and implications drawn from the empirical analysis are as follows. First of all, we find insignificant abnormal return on the day of inquiry followed by stable price movements, suggesting that the demand for inquired disclosure from the Korea Exchange can play an effective role in calming down price jump or plunge. However, we do not find price reversals on the day of inquiry that are expected to exhibit if the past substantial price changes occurring without any specific public information were bubble. In addition, in case of something undetermined we observe 10-day CAR of -6% following the inquiry after plunge and +6% following the inquiry after jump whereas in case of nothing unusual insignificant price changes are observed following the day of inquiry. This result implies that in case of something undetermined stock price continues to reflect new information revealed in the market. Next, in the investigation of long-term stock price movements following the demand for inquired disclosure from the Exchange we find that in the case of plunge the stock prices tend to steadily increase following the day of inquiry. In particular, in case of plunge/nothing unusual the stock prices revert to the past level of stock prices. However, in the case of jump, we do not find any significant patterns of long-term price changes following the inquired disclosure. In this paper we also observe that the trading volume significantly increases during ±5 days surrounding the day of inquired disclosure. This finding suggests that investors are getting more sensitively responsive to the information of the demand for inquired disclosure from the Exchange. Finally, this paper investigates the trading patterns of three different types of investors classified as individuals, institutions, foreigners by observing the ratio of each investors' net buying (selling) position. We find that individual investors are the main driving force behind the stock price jump or plunge as net buyers while the institutions as net sellers. In particular, individual investors take net buying position on the day of inquiry and continue afterwards whereas institutional investors take net selling positions during that period only. On the other hand, foreign investors do not exhibit any notable trading patterns, suggesting that foreign investors do not respond to uncertain information in the Korean stock market. On the whole, this study is to contribute to the academic research in the area of market efficiency and informational effect. In particular, this paper can accelerate the studies on the informational effect of inquired disclosure in the Korean stock market. Also, the evidence of this research is expected to provide useful information to the investors in the stock market who frequently observe substantial price changes occurring without any specific public information. In addition, the empirical results of this study reveal important implication to the policy makers who are interested in the effectiveness of inquired disclosure system.

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In corporate finance literature it is well known that how a firm chooses its capital structure depends on its growth opportunity and profitability among many financial and economic variables. According to Fama and French (2002), both growth opportunity and profitability are the main reasons for financing deficits, and the capital structure decisions by firms are closely related to these two variables. There are many competing finance theories or hypotheses that try to explain the relationships between firm’s capital structure and financial and economic variables such as trade-off theory, agency theory, simple pecking order theory, complex pecking order theory, market timing theory and hold-up hypothesis. In this paper, we consider all of the above capital structure theories and hypotheses and test which theories or hypotheses are confirmed and which are not for Korean listed manufacturing companies. In particular, we examine how growth opportunity faced by Korean listed manufacturing firms may affect their choice of capital structure and which capital structure theory best explains financial decision making behaviors of Korean listed manufacturing firms. We extract our data using KISVALUE supplied by National Information and Credit Evaluation (NICE). The sample of our paper consists of 601 Korean manufacturing companies listed both on Korean Stock Exchange (KSE) and on Kosdaq from the period of 2000 to 2010. Based on the sample, we performed panel data analyses. The empirical implications are as follows: First, growth opportunity measured by market-to-book value ratio has a statistically significant positive relationship with book leverage, which is consistent with the simple pecking order theory. However, growth opportunity has a statistically significant negative relationship with market leverage, which is in line with the trade-off theory and/or the complex pecking order theory. According to Fama and French (2002), in the complex pecking order theory, firms are concerned with future as well as current financing costs. Balancing current and future costs, it is possible that firms with large growth opportunities maintain low-risk debt capacity to avoid either foregoing future investments or financing them with new risky securities. Second, we divide the sample into three groups according to the magnitude of their growth opportunity and find the same relationship for all groups as before, which is different from prior studies (Chen and Zhao, 2006; Serrasqueiro and Nunes, 2010), but that the highest growth opportunity firms are least sensitive to debt ratio compared to their lower growth opportunity peers. Moreover, our result seems to suggest that Korean listed manufacturing companies with the highest growth opportunity recognize their financial distress risk higher in the respect that they show low profitability compared to the firms of other countries. In general, it is more effective for the high growth opportunity firms to use more debt financing because they show high profitability and low borrowing cost on average. Third, the simple pecking order theory tested by financing deficit variable is not confirmed because the relationship between debt ratio and financing deficit is significantly positive only for the lowest growth opportunity firms (the other groups have significantly negative coefficients). Furthermore, the simple pecking order theory tested by profitability variable is confirmed because both market and book leverage shows significantly negative relations with profitability. The trade-off theory tested by asset tangibility and firm size variables is confirmed because both market and book leverage shows statistically significant positive relations with them. Also, the trade-off theory tested by bigshare dummy variable is confirmed because it shows a significantly negative relationship with debt ratio, which suggests that the higher the major shareholders’ ownership firms have, the lower the firms’ debt ratios are. Fourth, to test whether the market timing theory is confirmed for Korean listed manufacturing firms, we look at the relationship between debt ratio and external finance weighted average market-to-book ratio. The result depends on whether we use market leverage or book leverage as a dependent variable. We find a significantly positive relationship for book leverage and a significantly negative relationship for market leverage, which suggests that the market timing theory holds only for market leverage in case of Korean listed manufacturing firms. Finally, growth opportunity has a statistically significant negative relationship with bank loan, reinforcing the hold-up hypothesis which claims that firms with high growth opportunity are concerned that their firm-specific information may be monopolized and utilized by banks. According to the grouping analysis based on the magnitude of growth opportunity, the highest growth opportunity firms show a significantly negative relationship between growth opportunity and bank loan, but the lowest growth opportunity firms show a statistically insignificant relationship between them. This seems to suggest that the more growth opportunity firms have, the less preferable are bank loans for them.

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We construct a new iterative method to estimate parameters in structural default probability models and compare their forecasting performances using stock return and accounting data of Korea. To adopt the new iterative method, we select four structural default probability models: Longstaff and Schwartz (1995: LS), Leland and Toft (1996: LT), Merton (1974: DD), and the down and out call option model adopted in Brockman and Turtle (2003: DOC). The new method makes it possible to daily estimate the barrier parameter in LT and DOC, which is not possible under the existing methods [see Vassalou and Xing (2004) and Bharath and Shumway (2008)]. When we adopt the new iterative method to LT and DOC and the existing iterative method to LS and DD in order to analyze out-of-sample and accuracy ratio tests, forecasting performances of above calculated default probabilities are more statistically sufficient than those of default probabilities under other estimation methods. Especially, default probabilities in LT using the new iterative method show statistically supported forcasting performances, though those using the other estimation method have no forecasting performance. Moreover, unlike the results in Bharath and Shumway (2008), default probabilities under the new iterative method satisfy properites of sufficient statistics. The new iterative method is significant in three aspects. First, the new iterative method can offer a new approach to solving two puzzles in asset pricing, the equity premium puzzle and the credit spread puzzle, since the new method provides relatively effective default probabilities among other methods in structural default probability models. Vassalou and Xing (2004) construct rank portfolios by DD’s default probabilities with the existing iterative method used by KMV and study whether equity returns reflect performances for those portfolios. Goldstein (2009) and Chen et al. (2009b) study the relationship between the credit spread puzzle and the equity premium puzzle with structural default probability models. Second, the new iterative method is a simple alternative to MLE(maximum likelihood estimation) which requires heavy and complex calculation [see Ercsson and Reneby (2005), Chen et al. (2009a), Forte and Lovreta (2009), Wong and Choi (2009), and Chen et al. (2010)]. The new iterative method is, in fact, the only method that can daily provide barriers as well as total firm values. Both methods let the first passage time stochastic process of a firm follow a geometric Brownian motion with a drift rate and a volatility rate in, for instance, DOC and LT. Last, we test whether default probabilities of DOC, LT, LS, and DD are sufficient statistics using the forward induction iterative method. Bharath and Shumway (2008) test sufficient statistics only with DD’s default probabilities through the existing forward iterative method of KMV. In order to daily estimate implied barriers and total firm values for DOC using the new iterative method, we follow four steps. First, having fixed a moving window, ordinarily 1 year with 250 business days, we calculate standard deviations of moving averages of equity returns as initial volatility values of a firm under the forward induction. We use the total firm value equal to the book value of the total debt plus the market capitalization as an initial value for a firm on a given day. Second, on that day, we use the Newton-Rahpson method and calculate a implied barrier by taking the derivative of the option value with respect to the barrier. Then using the Newton-Rahpson method again, we calculate a new total firm value by taking the derivative of the option value with respect to the total firm value. Third, we repeat these procedures for the period within the window to get implied barriers and new total firm values. With daily returns of these new total firm values, we compute a new standard deviation and a new mean. Then we update the initial volatility with the new standard deviation for the next iteration, and use the mean as the drift term of the geometric Brownian motion for the total firm value. Finally, we obtain a new volatility following the second and third steps using the new variables generated in the third step. For the period within the window, we repeat the second step until the difference between the existing volatility and the updated volatility converges below the critical level, 10E-4. After we get the converged volatility for the period within the window, we move the window forward by one business day in the forward induction. Next, we follow the first step and repeat the second and third steps until we get a new converged volatility. Hence, we estimate daily total firm values, daily implied barriers, and other parameters to construct the geometric Brownian motion through the full sample period.

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Korea is scheduled to adopt the risk-based deposit insurance system starting from 2014. There have been growing concerns about the procyclicality embedded in the risk-based deposit insurance program. Indeed, while deposit insurance premium decreases during the economic upswings, poorly performing financial institutions are liable for greater insurance premium during economic downturns. In this paper, we examine whether procylical property of the risk-based insurance weaken with the application of a moving average deposit insurance contract using mutual savings banks (MSBs) in Korea. MSBs in Korea have been experiencing deterioration of loan quality. In particular, credit quality of loans to project financing (PF) firms in real estate has sharply declined in the distressed housing markets. Even though these MSBs have high risk exposure to real estate-related companies, they typically pay only 0.035% of the insured deposit amount as a fixed deposit insurance premium. If the cost of deposit insurance does not increase along with the default risk, the excess cost of deposit insurer becomes a subsidy to those MSBs. We show the risk-based deposit insurance premium by using the well-known option pricing model in this paper. We then evaluate whether the current deposit in surance premium is under-priced or not. Moreover, when designing a risk-based deposit insurance scheme, we should consider not only how to adapt the financial institution specific risk factors to the deposit insurance premium but also the effect of economy-wide systematic factors such as business cycle on the deposit insurance premiums. In a recessionary period, the risk to the financial institution is much higher than it is in an economic expansion; therefore, higher deposit insurance premium should be levied. This causes an adverse effect on the soundness of the financial institution, and the situation will get much worse. This implies that the risk-based deposit insurance scheme comes with a procyclical property. Pennacchi (2005) argues that if the deposit insurance premium is designed as a long-term moving average contract, procyclicality will be reduced. Our study concentrates on estimating the risk-based fair deposit insurance premium of Korean MSBs which currently pay a fixed deposit insurance premium. This paper contributes in the literature that it is the first attempt to price the risk-based deposit insurance premiums of Korean financial institutions, or to be more specific, privately held Korean MSBs. We have also empirically tested whether procyclicality is reduced if risk-based deposit insurance is designed as a moving average-type premium. The results show that the risk-based deposit insurance premium of MSBs is highly under-estimated when compared to their default risk level. Our paper also confirms that risk-based deposit insurance premiums have a procyclical property, which fluctuates along with the business cycle. This suggests that banks with poorer financial strength will be liable for increased deposit premium, and hence the probability of bankruptcy will be greater under the simple risk-based deposit insurance scheme. Thus, we suggest the adoption of the moving average technique in the risk-based insurance scheme to attenuate its procyclicality property. We further find that with a longer moving average window, the average premium gets larger while its standard deviation becomes smaller. The reduction in the standard deviation indicates that the premium imposed on a financial institution does not change substantially in response to radical changes in business cycles. On the other hand, the increase in the average premium suggests that the premium imposed on the moving average deposit insurance system should be assessed highly in expansions relative to simple differential premiums. Also, with a longer moving average window, we show that the imposed premium gets less sensitive to financial strength measures. This implies that the moving average method mitigates the impact and significance of financial strength measures on premiums, indirectly showing the attenuation of procyclicality in risk-based deposit insurance system. In addition, the attenuating effects are substantial for mutual saving banks with weak capital adequacy, weak asset quality and weak earnings, and in small or medium sizes. As a result, the adoption of the moving average differential deposit insurance contract would be more beneficial to financial institutions with poorer financial strengths that would be severely affected by business fluctuations. The findings of this paper suggest several policy implications. While deposit insurance system plays an important role in attenuating moral hazard problems, it has been well known that the risk-adjusted deposit insurance can also destabilize financial markets by making bank performance procyclical. Based on the results of our analysis, we suggest that it is not necessarily so. Moving average deposit insurance scheme ensures that insurance premium varies with risk exposure of each bank, but the moving average of yearly risk-adjusted risk premium can smooth out the time-series variation of deposit insurance premium at the same time. We do show that the moving average (1 to 5 year moving windows) of yearly risk-adjusted risk premium can mitigate the potential problem of procycality of deposit insurance. However, we do not thoroughly examine how to set the optimal moving average window length, a crucial question for practical purposes. We leave this issue for the future research. As noted earlier, the Korean government has a plan to adopt a risk-based deposit insurance premium system. The main result of our research suggests that we adopt the moving average scheme into the risk-based insurance program, and this idea can be used as a policy reference tool for designing the risk-based deposit insurance system.

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This paper analyzes how international small-cap stocks affect portfolio diversification from the perspectives of Korean investors who hold stakes in the major 24 countries’ MSCI small-cap index funds. We also examine correlations between cap-based index funds for the whole period from June 1994 to December 2010 and its sub-periods. Finally, we perform the Huberman-Kandel mean-variance spanning tests on the returns of the small-cap funds from those countries, in the cases of both fully-hedged and no-hedged risks for foreign exchange rate volatility. Korean investors’ investments in international funds have sharply grown thanks to the backdrop of Korea’s quickly expanding fund industry. In fact, Korea’s total fund sales have grown from KRW 234 trillion as of the end of 2006 to KRW 309 trillion at the end of 2010, recording a compound annual growth rate of 8%. The figure of Korea’s total fund sales as of the end of 2010 is equivalent to 30% of Korea’s GDP or 27% of Korea’s stock market capitalization. Especially, the proportion of Korea’s international fund investments among total fund sales has grown from 8% at the end of 2006 to 21% at the end of 2010. Generally, investment in international funds is an effective way to diversify a portfolio, thereby reducing risks inherent to asset investments. Accordingly, one may expect that portfolio diversification through international fund investments is to be more active as a coping mechanism during a financial crisis. Interestingly, however, during the previous global financial meltdown Korea’s international fund investments lagged behind domestic fund investments. In fact, as of the end of 2010, while Korea’s total fund sales went up by 10%, Korea’s total international fund sales dropped by 13% compared to 2007. This shows Korean investors’ shifted risk-minimizing strategy by reducing, rather than boosting, international fund investments . This change in the strategy can be explained by the fact that global crisis generates the effect of diluting the advantage of international portfolio diversification, shrinking the benefits from diversified international investments became smaller as a result. In short, Korean investors make the endogenous portfolio choices mainly to reduce international fund investments while increasing domestic fund investments that are less affected by the global crisis. This article, therefore, studies whether Korean investors can utilize the benefits of international diversification with small-cap funds. For this study, we used Datastream’s MSCI monthly indices covering small- and large-cap funds from 24 countries during the period from June 1994 to December 2010 and its sub-periods (the period from June 1994 to December 2002 and the period from January 2003 to December 2010). We analyze: returns, risks, and the Sharpe index of each cap-based fund by country; the correlation of each cap-based fund; the mean-variance spanning tests for small-cap funds; and their relation with international exchange rates. The main results can be summarized as follows. First, cap-based returns of both smalland large-cap funds in Korea were negatively correlated with changes in the international exchange rates in major economies around the world. Taking into account the positive correlation between international and domestic fund returns, we found that international exchange rates have a complementary relationship with international fund returns because the reduction in international fund returns would be smaller than the favorable changes in exchange rates in case of global crisis. Thus, risks incurred by international fund investments would be less when international exchange risks are not hedged. Second, global integration has eroded the benefits of diversifying investments across different countries, industries, and cap-based stocks. Especially global integration and, hence, the weakening benefits of international portfolio diversification have been accelerated since the year 2000. Third, Korea showed less correlation with BRICs countries than it did with developed countries or Asia, and the Sharpe ratios of BRICs countries were higher than those of other countries. While Korean investors’ international fund diversification to BRICs countries was more effective than it was to other countries, the Korean economy was, nevertheless, highly correlated with Asian countries. Also, the Sharpe ratios of Asia countries were higher than those of other countries. The benefits from international portfolio diversification in Asian countries were likely to be smaller, which can prompt the decrease in Korean investors’ international fund investments in Asia countries even though their total fund sales increased during the global financial crisis. Fourth, spanning tests resulted in no rejection of the null hypothesis over small-cap funds in most countries. Thus, Koreans investments in international small-cap funds do not bring additional benefits to each country’s index fund worldwide. The results were more strongly supported for the period from January 2003 to December 2010 than the previous period, from June 1994 to December 2002. Fifth, the Sharpe ratios of Korean investors’ international fund investments were higher in the case of no-hedged risks for international exchange rate volatility than in case of fully-hedged ones. The correlations of fund returns among countries were also lower in the case of no-hedged risks from international exchange rate volatility. The results of spanning tests with no rejection of the null hypothesis over small-cap funds in most countries were more strongly supported in the case of no-hedged risks for international exchange rate volatility. Sixth, the analysis of variance decomposition for each country’s small-cap fund return showed that the influence of global factor on the return and its variance greatly increased during the period from January 2003 to December 2010 compared to that from June 1994 to December 2002.

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The pairs trading is a strategy often adopted to identify arbitrage opportunity based on historical equilibrium in spread between the share prices. Basically, an investor evaluates the current position of the spread based on its historical fluctuations and seizes the moment when the current spread deviates from its historical mean level by a pre-determined threshold. In this study, the well-known basic pairs trading strategy, one of typical market neutral strategies, is modified so as to utilize high frequency data, and it is also applied to the constituent shares of the KOSPI (The Korea Composite Stock Price Index) 100 index. We also introduce the use of the high frequency equity data in strategy modeling, although the industry practice for market neutral hedge funds is to use daily sampling frequency of equity data in designing a trading model. In this study, intraday stock prices data sampled at a 30-minute interval is used for the strategy, and the performance is analyzed in high frequency domain. The data set covers the horizon from the 1st of October 2008 to the 31st of July 2010, which includes bullish, bearish, and flat market periods within the horizon. We highlight how perfor- mance varies depending on market condition, industry group, and timing of the market entry. This study is distinguished from the most previous works on the traditional pairs trading strategy in that we introduce the use of high frequency data in strategy modeling instead of daily closing prices, which allows us to analyze the performance of the strategy in high frequency domain. More specifically, we extract the trading signal, which is based on the spread between stocks of comprising a pair, by estimating time adaptive regression coefficient using the Kalman filter scheme. This study is the first practice in the realm of the high frequency market neutral trading strategy that extracts trading signal by estimating time adaptive regression coefficient using the Kalman filter scheme. Moreover, our loss-cut strategy clears position if holding duration exceeds the pre-determined maximum trading duration. As for the underlying universe for the strategy, we confine ourselves by considering only the most liquid top 100 stocks in terms of larger trading amounts and higher liquidity as a basket for our experiment. This is to get rid of other external variables that may add undesirable noises to the overall performance which would make it difficult to analyze pure performance of the strategy itself. We analyze the results of out-of-sample performance test from various angles. Major findings include that arbitrage profitability is, in fact, present without being subject to market condition even when conservative transaction costs are taken into account. In particular, our strategy outperforms better in the bear market condition, showing 2.55% of average rate of return per trade in bearish period, which is higher than 0.80% in the bullish period and 0.39% in the flat period. The performance of the pair trading strategy varies depending on the industry group. Those industry groups dominantly influenced by domestic demand i.e. non-cyclical in Korea such as Distribution, Household & Personal Products, and Automobiles and Components show relatively higher winning ratios and average rates of return per trade whereas the industry groups involving fast-paced technological development and variable international demand such as Technology Hardware and Software & Services give out relatively low statistics. The results also demonstrate that the performance of the strategy is dependent upon the time when trading position is set up during daily trading hours; the performance of trades entered around at opening and closing of the daily market appears to be relatively superior to that of trades executed in the rest of daily trading hours in terms of the average rate of return per trade, the winning ratio, and the information ratio. Recalling that intraday volatility pattern is generally formed in U-shape, the strategy seems to achieve higher performance in intraday time zone with higher volatility, which also corresponds to our previous finding that our strategy returns outstanding figures in volatile market trend. Besides, the strategy seems to take advantage of inefficiency derived from where stock price reflects the undisclosed market information. Furthermore, we introduce an enhanced version of the pair trading strategy and compare the performances with the basic strategy. One difference between the basic and the enhanced model is that it selects high-ranking pairs to trade for the next time period based on a set of in-sample statistics, which includes in-sample ADF (Augmented Dickey-Fuller) test t-statistics, in-sample information ratio, and in-sample mean reversion strength. In our study, moving window with the size of 2 weeks is considered as an in-sample period. It is verified that the performance of the enhanced strategy had better profitability and reliability compared with our basic strategy.

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The main purpose of this paper is to review the literature on derivatives securities published in Korean finance and economics journals by focusing on three research areas: derivatives markets, the valuation of derivatives securities, and risk management. First, the literature on derivatives markets is reviewed in terms of four issues: the effects of launching the derivative securities on the underlying assets markets; the lead and lag effects between derivatives and the underlying assets markets, which have drawn substantial attention from academia; and the price discovery functions of derivatives markets as well as the expiration-day effects of options. In addition, papers analyzing arbitrage trading strategies with derivative securities are reviewed. Second, for the valuation of derivatives securities, we review papers presenting theoretical models for the pricing of futures, various types of options, and interest rate derivatives. Then, empirical papers on the valuation of derivative securities are reviewed. These papers examine empirically the distributions and stochastic processes of the underlying asset prices, as well as the behavior of volatilities in order to understand and overcome the limitations of the standard models. Third, we review the literature on risk management, which is regarded as one of the main functions of derivative securities. These papers investigated how to formulate effective hedging strategies using derivative securities. Finally, we make suggestions as to the next steps and directions for future research on derivative securities in Korea based on the review of the literature.

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