Investment banks (IBs) are often viewed as key players in the capital markets because of their pivotal roles in securities businesses as underwriters. Mainly, they are most useful as producers of information or creators of information market place, often resorting to resolve the asymmetric information problems that exist in the market. Indeed, IBs’ role as the providers of information to the market participants is vital for active financial markets especially for IPOs and renegotiation of corporate loan payments in times of distress. In such situations, investment banks can create added value by producing information for themselves or by designing and running a market place within which information are being produced and traded. As such, the Korean government has made a major regulatory reform so as to introduce investment banking businesses. Despite the favorable regulatory environment, Korea has witnessed thus far very little success with this endeavor as only few domestic IBs can be found in the domestic market. In general, financial companies in the Korean capital market play limited roles in stock brokerage. Other complex financial services related to securities underwriting or M&A deals are mostly performed by foreign investment banks. This paper, therefore, examines to gain better understanding what obstacles exist in Korea’s capital market for securities companies to properly function as full-fledged investment banks. In particular, the paper explains theoretically that it is difficult for an investment bank, which is affiliated with non-financial firms, to produce accurate information about its non-financial affiliates or their rivals, and thus it cannot build up easily its reputation as an IB. This potential conflict of interest often gets in the way for investment banks in Korea to secure their positions in the financial market as proper IBs, or reliable information sources. The game theoretic model used in this paper is based on Bolton et al. (2012), and Chemmanur and Fulghieri (1994). The model is developed in the context of an investment bank underwriting a stock issue and there are three main participants: issuers, investment banks, and investors. Issuers approach the equity market to raise capital for their projects and market their equity either directly to potential investors or through investment banks (or underwriters). Investment banks are producers of information about the issuers. But they produce noisy evaluations of issuers’ projects, which they report to investors when marketing equity in return for a fee from the issuer. Then, investors determine the market value of the equity based on the information provided by the IBs. In this paradigm, investors believe ex-ante that the project is good with the 50% probability. This lack of certainty creates room for the investment banks to perform their role using their expertise to accurately assess whether the project in hand is actually worth the investment. Investment banks obtain fees only from those firms whose equity they market. The fees charged by the investment banks are assumed to be a fraction k of the value added by their services for the issuer firms. This value added can be determined by assessing the difference between the value of equity when the investment bank is involved and the value when it is not when the issuer approaches the equity market directly without the help of an underwriter. After reviewing the report, the issuer has the choice whether to accept or refuse the investment bank’s proposed evaluation report. When the issuer firm turns down the investment bank’s report, it does not pay fees and the report is not disclosed. Once the investment bank’s evaluation report is announced or it is known that the report has been turned down, the issuer sets a uniform price for the investment. Investors, after taking into account the evaluation report and the price, finally decide whether and how much they intend to invest. Investors are divided into two types: sophisticated and naive. Sophisticated investors observe the payoffs of the game for both the investment bank and the issuer and they understand the potential conflict of interest between the investment bank and the issuer. Yet, they are not certain whether the project is good or bad, as they only have access to the investment bank’s report without being able to directly observe the IB’s signals about the project. On the other hand, naive investors simply assume that investment banks always truthfully evaluate the project. The main findings from this model are as follows. First, an IB which is affiliated with non-financial firms is more likely to produce distorted information than an independent IB is. Second, non-financial conglomerates are more likely to integrate with IBs if there are more naive investors in capital markets, if the fraction k is greater, and if the reputation costs are lower. Last, social welfare produced in the case when IBs are affiliated with non-financial conglomerates is always lower than that in the case when the IBs are independent. These results imply that separation of investment banking and commerce could be an important pre-condition for the successful introduction of IBs and their development.

• EndNote
• RefWorks
• Scholar's Aid
• BibTeX

Export Citation Cancel

Structured financial products have gained increasing popularity in Korea over the recent years, and complaints by investors of such products have also increased. In particular, retail investors have failed some lawsuits regarding equity-linked securities (ELS) issued by brokerage companies for their hedging behaviors, calling for stronger investor protection system to be in place in structured financial product markets. Such need for regulatory reform has inspired this study. In this paper, we hope to provide some insight into more effective regulatory guidelines to better protect retail investors who invest in such products as ELS and ELD (equity-linked deposits). In 2009, in fact, Korea Exchange (KRX) and financial supervisory authorities introduced a new set of the hedge guideline for ELS for better investor protection. The key points of this guideline are as follows. The KRX hedge guideline requires the issuing entities to distribute the sell orders for underlying assets held to hedge their ELS positions at a maturity date to protect asset prices from deviating from fundamental values or fair values. In general, the ELS issuers or financial institutions dynamically execute delta-hedging based on their ELS positions according to the changes in underlying asset prices. In this case, if ELS embeds nonlinear derivatives such as digital options or barrier options, the number of shares of underlying assets that the entities should sell at a maturity date can increase infinitely, making it nearly impossible for them to implement optimal hedging for their positions. As such, ELS hedgers often exploit the sell-orders for underlying assets at a maturity date by manipulating the underlying asset prices, which is of course an unethical trading behavior. To avoid this situation, KRX has introduced the new requirement on the ELS issuing financial companies to distribute the sell orders for underlying assets at the maturity date. However, the more fundamental problems that lead to most of the lawsuits against the ELS products stems from the structural complexity of the structured products, much more than from the unethical behaviors of financial companies. Such products’ complex make-up complicates hedging, consequently making it difficult for the companies to hedge efficiently. As aforementioned, most retail structured products are embedded of nonlinear derivatives, which have infinite delta at a certain point of underlying asset prices at a maturity date under continuous price environments. According to extant literature, including Stoimenov and Wikens (2005) and Bergstresser (2008), the more complexity of structured products results in the higher margins taken by issuing entities. Because of increasing difficulty in hedging for the complex structured products, they tend to set their margins at higher levels than they would otherwise when issuing new securities. Ku et al. (2007) also support this result based on the empirical analysis in Korean ELD markets. Therefore, the regulatory reform that demands for change only in the hedging method without considering the structural complexity of the structured products will not effectively resolve the problem. When issuing entities cannot hedge their assets efficiently, no matter how strict the relevant regulations become, they will continue to engage in unethical hedging behavior to transfer their potential losses to retail investors who are net buyers of structured products. In this paper, therefore, we propose a new regulatory initiative that restricts the maximum delta of structured products at a maturity date. The delta of structured products has two components: the delta per unit and the volume of sales. More specifically, the maximum delta (maximum sell orders at maturity) is determined by the product of maximum delta per unit and the volume of sales. Here, while in continuous prices the structured products embedded with barrier options or digital options have infinite delta per unit, in the consideration of tick size they have finite delta per unit. By restricting this maximum delta (maximum delta per unit times volume) of the structured products, therefore, the newly proposed regulation reduces the possibility for the underlying prices to be distorted by ELS issuers’ self-serving hedging behaviors. In sum, the regulation on structuring is related to both maximum delta per unit and sales volume. Even for a severely structured product, its (overall) maximum delta at a maturity date can be relatively small if its sales volume remains considerably small. Similarly, a less structured product can have large maximum delta at maturity if it has a bigger sales volume, thereby more likely to result in distortion of the underlying asset prices. Hence, for the effective protection of investors in structured financial products from their issuers’ abusive hedging practices, it is important for the new regulation to focus on the structuring of such complex financial products as well as on hedging behaviors of issuing companies. In addition, we investigate the overnight risk induced by the inefficient hedging behaviors of issuing entities under the hedge guideline proposed by the KRX. The overnight risk is quantified by the VaR (Value at Risk) methodology for 6 major individual assets in Korean stock markets. These 6 individual companies are commonly used when structuring ELS and have representative nature in the country’s structured product markets. According to the results, the levels of VaR for those assets are not significantly large, but they can easily increase as the sales volume increases. To reduce the potential overnight risk for issuing entities, therefore, the regulation on structuring (deltas) is necessary. Nevertheless, some may raise a concern about our proposal’s potential risk by claiming that more restriction on the deltas of structured products may hamper the active growth of the structured product markets. However, we maintain that the markets can grow even better, once the structured products are well secured with varying maturity dates.

• EndNote
• RefWorks
• Scholar's Aid
• BibTeX

Export Citation Cancel

Inspired by the recent increase in the turnover among analysts, this paper examines the efficiency of matching between analysts and brokerage houses in turnover, and the possibility of adverse selection between current and prospective brokerage houses due to asymmetric information on the analyst forecasting ability. We apply the implication of adverse selection provided by Akerlof (1970) and Wilson (1979) to our analysis of the turnover ratio or job matching among analysts, current and new brokerages. By nature, the current house tends to have hidden information about the predictive accuracy of the analyst additionally as well as publicly-known information such as recent EPS forecasting errors and the contents of her past reports. On the other hand, a prospective employer has to evaluate the analysts’ forecasting ability only based on their performance with the public information. Consequently, employers have to make the hiring decision based on limited information about the analysts’ actual ability to make accurate forecasts. Several studies such as Jackofsky (1984), Greenwald (1986), and Kim (2012) have already addressed the adverse selection issues in the context of analysts’ job separation or multi-period labor market theoretically. In addition to the body of work on this topic, our study proposes a simple model that can link the turnover ratio to the change in analysts’ EPS forecast error, and then tests it. For the model, we assume that there are two different types of analysts: low-type analysts with higher EPS forecast error and higher variance; and high-type analysts with lower EPS forecast error and lower variance. Either type is tempted to accept an offer from a new brokerage house whenever the offer is better than what they are currently receiving. Note that, however, high-type analysts are more likely to reject the offer in the end since the current employer will most definitely suggest a better counter-offer to keep them. On the other hand, low-type analysts may end up moving to another house as such counteroffer is much less likely to be made by their current employers. Based on this observation, we conjecture that as long information asymmetry exists between the prospective employer and the analysts on their true forecast ability, low-type analysts are more likely to move to another brokerage house than high-type ones do when the low-type analysts achieve high performance temporarily. For the test, we examine whether a group of analysts who move to a new brokerage house (“movers”) make more EPS forecast errors at the new house than they do at the previous workplace, compared to the other controlling group of analysts who do not change their workplace (“stayers”). We also consider the efficient matching effect to account for the case in which movers perform better at their new workplace compared to how they did in their previous one, because the matching efficiency can certainly help “the movers” to commit lower EPS forecast errors at new house than they do at the old one, compared to their counterparts. In this study, we adopt two variables to indicate the degree of information asymmetry between current and prospective employers: the years of experience of the analysts, and the number of analysts that cover one stock. The greater the two variables become, the better the predictive accuracy can be expected, which means less EPS forecast errors, allowing new employers the access to more information about the ability of the turnover analysts. In particular, this allows us to test not only the presence of the adverse selection problem, but also whether the extent of information asymmetry is different across different segments of analysts’ labor market. We construct data set on the Korean analysts’ turnover based on their reports from year 2004 to 2010. This paper applies the difference-in- difference method, which estimates the change in forecast errors of movers - experimental group, relative to stayers - the control group between before and after the turnover (job separation). For the overall sample analysis, we find that the EPS forecast error of movers does not in crease significantly after the separation relative to the “stayers,” implying that the adverse selection effect is negligible or limited if there is any. As we segment the analyst turnover market according to the experienced year and the number of competing analysts within the same company, the relative change in the EPS forecast error of movers turns out to vary depending on the criteria. Concretely, the group of movers, who have 3-year or less experience as analysts and also companies that are covered by 20 or fewer analysts, tend to have higher EPS forecast errors after separation, compared to the stayers’ group. Otherwise, the change in forecast errors is not different across movers and stayers. These findings imply that adverse selection exists only in some limited analyst labor market segments. The portion of the aforementioned analyst group (with3-years or less experience and covering stocks by 20 or fewer analysts) accounts for only 9.7% of the total analysts. This implies that the adverse selection issue is not too significant in the overall analyst turnover market. From this perspective, our results indicate that efficient matching has occurred despite sharply increasing wages and the possible adverse selection problem.

• EndNote
• RefWorks
• Scholar's Aid
• BibTeX

Export Citation Cancel

Research topics on the risk-return relationship and market beta have made significant contributions in the field of finance in both academia and practice. These topics, nonetheless, have continued to cause conflicting views. As pointed out in Pettengill et al. (1995, 2002), for instance, which has provided the motivation for this study, an ex-ante model has been defined by unobservable expected stock returns, whereas an ex-post model uses observable actual stock returns as a proxy. Expectedly, the difference between unobservable expected stock returns and observable actual stock returns can create confusion since the most significant property that can actually affect market beta is an actual change that becomes materialized in the market situation. In an up market, stocks with high market beta receive higher return compensation (positive risk premium) than stocks with low market beta. In a down market, on the contrary, stocks with high market beta have lower return compensation (negative risk premium) than stocks with low market beta. On the basis of Pettengill et al. (1995, 2002), therefore, this study attempts to gain more accurate understanding of this complex question by re-examining the cross-sectional relationships between the expected stock returns and the three factors associated with the Korean stock market, such as market beta, firm size, and book-to-market equity ratios. In addition, this study is to design an empirical framework on the basis of studies by Fama and French (1993) and Pettengill et al. (1995, 2002), using the three-step cross-sectional regression analysis proposed by Fama and MacBeth (1973). Specifically, this paper empirically investigates whether portfolio market beta, portfolio firm size, and portfolio book-to-market equity ratio in the past period could significantly explain the change in the portfolio’s excess return in the future period via the cross-sectional regression analysis. Data of stock, bond, and accounting during the period of January 1987 to December 2010 were obtained from the FnGuide. The sub-periods within the overall period were set according to Fama and French (1992). Here, an up market refers to a period showing a positive market excess return, whereas a down market refers to a negative market excess return. The observed results can be summarized as follows. First, as observed in the study of Fama and French (1992), the results from the models that do not reflect the real market situation have no statistical significance of portfolio market beta to account for the changes of the portfolio excess return in a future period. However, the portfolio firm size and portfolio book-to-market equity ratio are statistically significant. Second, through the results from the models that use market beta, which are classified into either up or down markets, as in the study of Pettengill et al. (1995, 2002), this study confirms that portfolio market beta, portfolio firm size, and portfolio book-to-market equity ratio in a past period can significantly explain the change of portfolio excess return in a future period. That is to say, the usefulness of market beta, firm size, and book-to-market equity ratio is confirmed in the cross-sectional relationship with the expected stock returns when considering market situation into market beta. Third, the results from the models that reflect market situation change into variables, such as market beta, company size, and book-tomarket equity ratio, evincing that all of the variables significantly account for the variation in the portfolio excess return in the future period. Finally, this study empirically confirms the robustness of the previous results mentioned, via additional test, reflecting the various influential factors in the empirical design. Simply, the results observed from the additional test show no difference from the previous results mentioned in this study. The results of this study corroborate that the cross-section of the expected stock returns in the Korean stock market might be much closer to that of Pettengill et al. (1995, 2002) than it is of Fama and French (1992), when considering the change in the market situation. On the basis of the observed evidence, this study also confirms as to whether the reflecting properties of the actual data in applications of the expected models might have an important effect on the observed results. In particular, this study finds that the pricing models in financial theories should sufficiently consider the market situation as a control factor when examining the validity of market beta as well as the risk-return relationship. To further expand this study, future researches can re-evaluate the three-factor pricing model with properties of market situation using the time series regression analysis of Black et al. (1972), as well as confirm the three-factor model’s capability to forecast the risk-return relationship.

• EndNote
• RefWorks
• Scholar's Aid
• BibTeX

Export Citation Cancel

To understand the dynamics of futures trading and stock market volatility, this study examines the relationships among the salient endogenous variables: stock market volatility, futures return, trading volume, and open interest. We use a structural vector auto-regression (SVAR) model, which is identified based on the empirical results of previous studies and reasonable inferences about capital markets. To just-identify the SVAR model, first, we assume that futures return shock does not have a contemporaneous effect on stock market volatility. This does not mean that it has no effect at all on stock market volatility. In fact, we conjecture that it must have some effect on the stock market volatility through lagged relationships among the variables. Second, futures return and trading volume shocks are assumed to have temporary effects on each variable. For these restrictions, we follow the method of Blanchard and Quah (1989). Finally, we believe open interest shock does not have contemporaneous effects on stock market volatility, futures return and trading volume because open interest shock is generally viewed as a natural aftermath of trading. Given the above just-identification of our SVAR model, we investigate the contemporaneous, lagged, and overall effects by over-identifying restrictions. The overall effect is classified into two components: contemporaneous and lagged effects. As known, a contemporaneous effect is defined as a concurrent impact of each shock on each variable. Lagged effects are estimated from the reduced-form VAR. Observing these two types of effects, we study the nature of the dynamic relations that exist among endogenous variables. A graphical representation of dynamic relations could be seen from impulse-response function analysis. Variance decomposition is also done to evaluate relative importance of each shock. Our major empirical findings are as follows. First, the volatility shock of stock market increases futures trading volume concurrently. Futures traders are very sensitive to spot volatility shock. In the sense of Black (1986) and Hong (2000), informed and uninformed traders quickly adjust their futures positions based on asymmetric information; consequently, such behavior increases futures trading volume. Second, the responses of open interest to other shocks reflect demand characteristics of hedgers who are not informed. If open interest is determined by hedgers’ demand as mentioned by Bessembinder and Seguin (1993), the contemporaneous effects of various shocks on open interest show the demand characteristics of hedgers, i.e., uninformed traders. The positive effect of volatility shock on open interest implies that volatility shock increases hedgers’ open interest. This is interpreted as hedgers’ behavior to manage spot market volatility. Statistically insignificant is the effect of futures return shock on open interest, which is concurrent irrelevance of futures return with hedgers’ demand behavior. On the other hand, volume shock decreases open interest concurrently. We interpret this phenomenon as hedgers’ liquidation of open interest, which results in increases in the trading volume. Third, futures trading plays a positive role in decreasing stock market volatility. The negative effect of volume shock on stock market volatility is consistent with the fact that the stock market uncertainty may be decreased by noise traders’ behavior. This finding supports the results of Cox (1976), Danthine (1978), Kwon and Park (1997), and Ohk (2005). Fourth, the impulse response function analysis also supports the results of hypothesis tests. Responses of volatility to various shocks fade away much more slowly than those of other variables. Stock market volatility does not respond to open interest at all. Negative response of stock market volatility to volume shock disappears more than twenty days later. On the other hand, responses of futures return, trading volume, and open interest to various shocks quickly disappear within 2 days at most. This behavior is consistent with the results of reducedand structural-form VAR estimation. Fifth, variance decomposition results show relative importance of each shock. Stock market volatility is explained by its own shock (69.48%) and volume shock (24.08%), while most of both futures return and open interest are explained by their own shock (94.02%) in the long-run. Similar to the case of stock market volatility, trading volume is also explained by volatility shock (66.56%) and its own shock (32.09%). These results confirm the close relationship between stock market volatility and trading volume. Finally, test results of hypotheses re-confirm the importance of concurrent relationships and indirect lag effects among overall effects. The validity of reduce-form VAR, however, is not evinced by the fact that indirect lag effects are important, because the contemporaneous effects are too substantial to overlook. Hence, we conclude that the SVAR estimation, accompanied by impulse response function and variance decomposition analyses, is an appropriate method for studying the relationships among the stock and futures market variables. While many other studies have previously investigated the same issue, our study stands out from the rest in research methodology. Most of previous studies estimate the dynamic relationships among the same variables as in this paper, but they used reduced-form VAR. This means that they are not able to consider contemporaneous effects of each variable. Unlike them, this study investigates an important issue of the dynamic relationships among stock and futures market variables using structural VAR. In this way, this paper makes an important contribution to extant research by suggesting that contemporaneous effects should be considered.

• EndNote
• RefWorks
• Scholar's Aid
• BibTeX

Export Citation Cancel

This paper tests if uninformed short sales affect stock prices by examining short selling activities and stock price movements surrounding convertible bond (CB) issuance dates. We assume that short sales associated with CB arbitrage are uninformed since CB arbitrage is a hedge strategy to pursue market-neutral profits. By examining tick -by-tick data containing information on short sales as well as normal trades, we are able to extract a sample of CB arbitrage from all Korean companies which issued CBs during our sample period from January 2004 to June 2006. We find that short sales increase dramatically around the issuance dates of CBs, which clearly demonstrates the existence of CB arbitrages in Korea. Moreover, we find that the foreign investors, more likely hedge funds, are the major players of CB arbitrage. Then, we investigate the impact of uninformed short selling on stock prices. To control the announcement effect of CB issuances we use CB issuers that are not associated with short-selling activities as a control sample. We find that CB arbitrage does not reduce stock prices beyond the level that is normally affected by CB issuance without short selling. This result implies that stock market is efficient enough to absorb unexpectedly large amounts of uninformed short sales.

• EndNote
• RefWorks
• Scholar's Aid
• BibTeX

Export Citation Cancel

Since the introduction of the Act of Financial Investment Services and Capital Markets in 2009, the fund markets in Korea have enormously grown. In this study, we examine three salient composites: fund style, performance persistency, and market timing ability of fund managers. To this end we use all equity funds survived during the period of 2001 through 2009 (all 139 funds). In addition, we look into the relation between the persistency of fund style and the fund performance. We also study how the fund performance has been changed since the financial crisis in 2007. To classify fund styles and examine fund performance, we use a return-based style analysis as in Sharpe (1992). The return-based style analysis sort funds according to the magnitude of the coefficient estimates. Unlike Sharpe who uses simply a regression model comprised of several indexes, we use the Fama-French (1993) five-factor model composed of three equity factors and two bond market factors. The equity factors are the market factor and two factors related to size and book-to-market, namely SMB and HML, respectively; the bond market factors are term spread and default spread. The spread in yields between 5-year Korean Treasury Bonds (KTB) and 91-day Certificate of Deposit (CD) is used as term spread, and the spread in yields between BBB3-rated and AA3-rated corporate bonds is used as default spread. The reason we select the Fama-French 3 factor model to analyze equity funds in Korea is that, as recently reported by Kim, Kim, and Shin (2012), the Fama-French 3 factor model explains Korean stock returns best among many factor models considered. Our paper is the first paper that uses the bond market factors in analyzing equity mutual funds in Korea. Following Sharpe (1992), we classify fund style according to the estimated coefficients (or factor loadings) on each of the five factors. For example, if the magnitude of the factor loading of a fund on SMB is in the top (bottom) 30%, this fund is classified as small (large) fund. If the magnitude of the factor loading of a fund on HML is in the top (bottom) 30%, this fund is classified as value (growth) fund. If the magnitude of the factor loading of a fund on term spread is in the top (bottom) 30%, this fund is classified as business sensitive (insensitive) fund. If the magnitude of the factor loading of a fund on default spread is in the top (bottom) 30%, this fund is classified as high (low) credit risk fund. Of course, one fund can be classified into multiple funds. If the factor loading of a factor falls between top 30% and bottom 30%, this fund is not classified. The main results of this study are as follows: First, we confirm that the Fama-French 5-factor model shows the best goodness of fit and the lowest tracking errors for Korean equity mutual funds among many factor models considered, such as the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), the Fama-French (1993) three-factor model, and Carhart (1997) four-factor model. To compare the performance of the factor models, we estimated the models by observing the year-by-year rolling over for the three-year period for its monthly returns. We also find that the two bond factors are important for better understanding the performance of Korean mutual funds. In particular, since fund performance is affected by business cycles, the use of the bond factors would be essential in analyzing fund performance. Further, the bond factors are good proxies for business cycle. In fact, we confirm that mutual funds returns in Korea are significantly positively correlated with the Korea business-leading indicator and are sensitive to business cycles, which are also determined by the same indicator. Another important finding is that large and growth funds, rather than small, value funds, perform better and take more fund inflows in Korea. Also, Korean mutual fund managers tend to build their investment strategies toward value, large, business cycle-and creditsensitive fund styles. Fourth, only fund managers of a fraction of mutual funds show significant selection ability while most fund managers rarely show market timing ability. For some fund managers equipped with market timing ability, their market timing ability tends to be higher during the recent financial crisis (2007~2009) than during the other times. To analyze the market timing ability of fund managers, we use the conditional model on macroeconomic variables by following Ferson and Schadt (1996) to adjust for time-varying of the factor loadings. Fifth, while only a fraction of mutual funds show positive abnormal returns, they are shown to last just briefly. Rather, low performance (i.e., negative abnormal returns) tends to be strongly persistent. These results are somewhat consistent with the performance of U.S. mutual funds. Among the funds showing positive abnormal returns, growth and large funds show stronger persistence of good performance than do value and small funds. This result implies that the persistency of fund style could be related to good fund performance. Finally, there also exists in Korea the smart money effect, indicating that investors have an ability to identify superior fund managers and invest accordingly; this attests to the fact that fund inflows improve fund performance. Our study indicates, however, that this effect lasts only for three years.

• EndNote
• RefWorks
• Scholar's Aid
• BibTeX

Export Citation Cancel

Many corporate governance literatures emphasize the importance of outside directors’ monitoring role and their independence. Theoretically, board of directors performs crucial roles in modern corporations where ownership and management are separated. As fiduciaries of shareholders, outside directors monitor managers who may pursue their own interests. Hence, as an internal governance mechanism, the independence of outside directors is a crucial factor in determining the effectiveness of monitoring and disciplining the management. In spite of this theoretical background, previous empirical studies failed to show consistent evidences in support of the effect of outside directors. Perhaps the lack of consistency in proving an effect of outside directors on performance can be interpreted as an indication that they have failed to distinguish “independent” and “friendly” outside directors. If researchers do not correctly distinguish independent outside directors from those who are not, the effects of outside directors on firm value cannot be clearly discerned as positive effects of independent directors may get cancelled out by the potential negative effects of non-independent directors may have on the firm value on average. Unlike prior studies, this paper, using hand collected data on the independence of outside director, examines how independent or friendly outside directors affect firm value as the directors would engage in monitoring and supervising a firm’s management. For the empirical analysis, we classify outside directors as ‘friendly’ or ‘independent’ by more refined and strict definition of independence of outside directors. Using this data classified into independent or friendly outside directors, first, we test the effect of independent (or friendly) outside directors on firm value. And then, we test whether the effect of independent (or friendly) outside directors on firm value varies with firm characteristics. Through these tests, we hope to verify that the value of outside directors depends on their independence alone. That is to say, the purpose of this paper is to provide new empirical evidence of the effectiveness of outside directors by focusing on the value of their independence in job performance. Our main finding supports that independent outside directors have a significant and positive effect on firm value. But friendly outside directors have either negative or no influence on the firm value. This result implies that independent outside directors play a pivotal role in enhancing firm value. We also explore how the relationship between the board independence and firm characteristics affect firm value. For this test, we run regression analysis using the interaction terms between board independence and the firm characteristics. According to the results about the effect of independent outside directors on firm value depending on firm characteristics, the firms with a longer corporate history, the higher level of capital expenditure, advertisement expenses, selling and management cost, the competitiveness in the industry, free cash flow and possibility of agency problems has more positive valuation effect of board independence. In other words, the interaction terms between the ratio of the independent outside directors variable and some of firm characteristics variables are positive and statistically significant in some firms’ characteristics. However, given the ratio of friendly board members who have school or business ties with management or with the firm, firm value is lower when firms have the higher level of leverage, sales growth rate, volatility of equity returns, and ratio of fixed assets. In other words, the interaction terms between the ratio of friendly outside directors variable and some of firm characteristics variables are negative and statistically significant in some others firms’ characteristics. This result implies that independent outside directors are very important on firm value in Korea regardless of firm characteristics. And finally, to mitigate the endogeneity problem and to check robustness of our previous results, we conduct additional tests as follows: First, to check robustness of our previous results, we run regression analysis using the alternative definition for independent outside director. The results using new definition are consistent with our previous results. Second, to deal with endogeneity problem, we run regression analysis using the data which show the change of the ratio of independent outside directors in board composition. By this regression, we are able to capture the importance of independence of BOD directly. This method can mitigate the endogeneity problem that has hampered previous attempts to estimate the effect of board independence. The results are consistent with our previous results. Third, to address the endogeneity problem caused by reverse causality, we run reverse regression by changing explanatory variables with dependent variables. According to the result, tobin’s Q doesn’t affect the level of board independence. Consequently, we confirm that our result is robust. In short, our results imply that the effectiveness of the boards’ monitoring role depends on their independence and the independence of outside directors is important for enhancing firm value. All in all, this empirical evidence suggests that Korean listed companies should reinforce the independence of board of directors by appointing independent outside directors to improve the firm value and correct the current problems with outside director system. As shown, our study contributes to the literature by promoting enhanced understanding about the crucial effect the independence of outside board members have on improving firm value.

• EndNote
• RefWorks
• Scholar's Aid
• BibTeX

Export Citation Cancel

We investigate how the short sales regulations temporarily enforced during the financial crisis of 2008 affected market liquidity and informativeness of short sales. In specific, we compare the effects of regulations on stocks with ELW/Futures to those on stocks without them to study the empirical implications of Diamond and Verrecchia (1987), which distinguish between short-restriction and short-prohibition. During the financial crisis of 2008, among others short sellers took a lot of blame for having caused the market confusion. Accordingly, in an attempt to appease the market uncertainty for the time being financial supervisory authorities in many countries adopted a reinforced regulatory step by temporarily prohibiting most short sales. Korea was no exception. On the 30th September, 2008, Financial Services Commission announced that the short sales of all listed stocks would be prohibited temporarily except for market making activities for ELW, ETF, individual stock Future/Option, and this provision went into effect on the 1st October, 2008. Because of these exceptions made in the prohibition of short sales, the regulatory change brought about different effects across stocks. Investors prohibited from short sales could replicate short position by trading a combination of derivatives, which were written on each stock. For instance, a speculative investor could buy put ELWs on stocks instead of shorting them directly. An ELW market-maker might sell this put ELWs and then hedge its risk by shorting the suitable amount of the underlying stocks. In other words, the stocks with derivatives were influenced by short-restriction, in which short-selling was sub-stantially possible, but the cost of short-selling increased. However, the stocks without derivatives were affected by short-prohibition, not short- restriction. Because it requires highly sophisticated expertise to implement synthetic positions with derivative trading strategy, the replications of short position are available to only informed investors. As a result, short-restriction selectively drives out uninformed traders much more than informed traders, potentially increasing the proportion of informed short sellers. However, short-prohibition eliminates short sales by informed and uninformed investors equally. This is the key difference in the effects of short-restriction from those of prohibition. On the theoretical basis, Diamond and Verrechia (1987) suggested that any changes in the short selling environment could influence the mix of informed and uninformed traders. Diamond and Verrecchia argued that as short-restriction and short-prohibition influence the composition of investors differently, the effects of short-restriction on market are different from those of prohibition. They predicted that short-restriction has stronger impacts on market liquidity and informativeness of short sales than short-prohibition does. To verify the claim, we analyzed the effects of short restriction and prohibition in the Korean market. We divide KOSPI200 index stocks into 58 stocks with ELW/Furtures, and 116 stocks without those, and compare the effects of short-restriction on market liquidity and informativeness of short sales to the effects of short-prohibition on those. We use trading data from 1st January, 2008 to 31th may, 2009 for our comparative analysis. To control for systematic differences between the two groups and to accurately identify the actual influences of regulations, we use a propensity score matching technique. Using market capitalization, trading won volume, turnover, and volatility, known as determinant factors for option listing, we obtain a propensity score for each stock with ELW/Futures and match it to two closest match stocks without ELW/Futures. The empirical results are as follows. Firstly, Amihud measure, R2 measure, and intraday quoted return volatility increased for all sample stocks during short sales regulations, and these changes were especially strong for stocks with ELW/Futures. The higher Amihud measure, R2 measure, and intraday returns volatility mean the lower market liquidity, market quality and market depth. So these results could be interpreted that the general market liquidity decreased during regulations, and market quality and market depth of stocks with ELW/Futures were more damaged. Secondly, the overall informativeness of short sales increased during short sales regulations, and the change was relatively larger for stocks with ELW/Futures than for those without. To examine the informativeness of short sales, we regressed each stock’ return on both contemporaneous and previous short selling volume. We found that coefficients of short selling volume grew stronger during the regulations and that the changes were more statistically and economically significant in those stocks with ELW/Futures. These results support Diamond and Verrecchia (1987)’s model that short-restriction has stronger impacts on market liquidity and informativeness of short sales than short-prohibition does, as short-restriction changes the composition of the remaining short-sellers. Our results are also consistent with those of Kolasinksi, Reed and Thornock (2010), which distinguishes outright prohibition and constraints by comparing stocks with listed options to stocks without in the US market. Thirdly, buyer order imbalances significantly increased, and relative bid-ask spread decreased during the short sales regulations. Limitation on non-holders’ selling activities during the regulations intensified buyer order imbalances, and forced up the trading prices over mid-quote prices, decreasing the relative bid-ask spread. Our research is the first one to empirically investigate the influences of short-sale regulations on market efficiency in the Korean stock market. Although short-sales regulations have been frequently used as emergency measures to stabilize stock markets to the outside shock, there has been no in-depth research conducted about the impacts of short sales regulations. We anticipate our research to contribute to designing short-sales institutions both academically and practically.

• EndNote
• RefWorks
• Scholar's Aid
• BibTeX

Export Citation Cancel

This paper studies the profitability of the contrarian trading strategies in the Korean stock market in an attempt to provide some insights into why the trading strategies generate the abnormal profits. It has been reported in most foreign literature that the momentum strategies (i.e. buying stocks with high returns over the previous 3 to 12 months and selling stocks with poor returns over the same time period) earn significant profits for the following 3 to 12 months. Contrary to these empirical facts on foreign stock markets, many Korean academic papers reported that contrarian strategies (i.e. buying losers and selling winners) are significantly profitable in the Korean stock market. Yet no research effort has been made to explicate this strange phenomenon in the Korean market. The first objective of this paper, therefore, is to explain why this surprising phenomenon happened in Korea. Secondly we attempt to determine the sources of the expected profits of the trading strategies that use the past information. In contrast to the previous literature using the circumstantial evidence on the causes of the profitable trading, we directly look into the profits of the trading strategies as suggested by Lo and MacKinlay (1990) and Conrad and Kaul (1998). Adopting this approach we divide profits of trading strategies into two components: one that results from time-series predictability in security returns and the other component that arises due to cross-sectional variation in the mean returns of the securities contained in the portfolio. The significance of the time-series components (namely, overreaction and lead-lag effect) is interpreted to support the behavioral explanations on the trading profits, while significant cross-sectional variation in the mean returns indicates the risk-based explanations of the traditional asset pricing theory. We empirically show that contrarian strategies are able to generate profits only in the pre-crisis period. After the Asian crisis, momentum strategies earn significant profits just like in most foreign markets. At first, it may sound puzzling how the completely opposite strategies can remain significantly profitable in the consecutive periods in the same market. But these opposing outcomes in the Korean market do make sense if we consider the substantial structural changes which have taken place in the Korean investors’ behavior. It is suspected that the profitability of contrarian strategies in pre-crisis period is due to the dominant retail investors. For example, the individual investors traded more than 80 percent of the total amount in 1992. They are evidently inclined to buy cheap losers and sell high-priced winners, which leads to the profits of contrarian trading. Ever since the Korean market was opened to foreign investors in the aftermath of the 1997 crisis, the foreign investors and domestic institutional investors have quickly dominated the stock market trading. Their share of the trading amount jumped to 35 percent in 2005 and more than 45 percent in 2008. The dominance of institutional investors is suspected to be the main reason for the profitable momentum strategies. These explanations are also supported by Khil, Kim, and Sohn(2006), who report that the institutional investors and foreign investors show the positive feedback trading behavior while retail investors are chasing the negative feedback trading behavior in the Korean market. For the robustness check on the J-T strategies, we also test the profitability of contrarian trading strategy using the weighted trading approach. The trading strategy in Jegadeesh and Titman (1993) uses the stocks in the lowest past return decile and in the highest return decile to form the winners and losers. But in the weighted trading strategies, every stock in the sample is traded, with their weight measured relatively to the average return of all stocks. In the whole sample period, the weighted strategy does not generate significant profits. But the contrarian weighted trading did create profits in the pre-crisis period and significant losses in the post-crisis period. This outcome supports the previous findings on the performance of the J-T contrarian strategy. The analysis of the sources of trading strategies’ profits found that the investors’ overreaction is a significant factor, implying that the behavioral biases of the traders account for most of the trading strategies’ profits. However, the cross-sectional difference of individual stocks’ mean returns (reflecting the risk of each stock) also contributes to the profitability of trading strategies. This risk-based explanation indicates that the profit-generating trading strategies are compatible with the traditional asset pricing theory. The significance of both over-reaction and risk-based differentials in the Korean market implies that the profitability of trading strategies does not support or deny the behavioral or rational investment theories. If the former factor is larger than the latter, then the momentum strategies will generate profits, while if the over-reaction dominates, then the contrarian profits will be found significant. These results show that trading strategies’ profits can not be explained by either behavioral theory or traditional risk-return theory alone but by both of them. This conclusion is in line with that of Daniel, Hirshleifer and Subrahmanyam (2001), claiming that both investors’ irrational behavior and systematic risks determine the asset prices.

• EndNote
• RefWorks
• Scholar's Aid
• BibTeX

Export Citation Cancel