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This paper empirically analyzes the price discovery process between Korean sovereign CDS premium, spread of Korean government debt, Won-Dollar currency swap rate, and Won-Dollar FX rate. With the global financial and fiscal crisis, especially in the U.S. and Euro-zone, the interests in sovereign default risk have risen. Interests in CDS, an OTC credit derivative contract based on debt issuer’s default risk, also have increased.

A large number of presses have reported that CDS premium would be the best international market indicator for the default risk taken or transferred. However, internationally the CDS market liquidity has not been sufficient enough to validate its properties. Hence, based on empirics, this paper discusses whether Korean sovereign CDS premium can be considered as an appropriate indicator of sovereign credit risk in the Korean economy. Other largely accepted indices which contain the similar information about Korean economic fundamental and Korean external sovereign credit risk are also analyzed and compared: the spread of Korean government debt, Won-Dollar Currency Swap Rate, and Won-Dollar FX rate.

Our findings include: (a) in the price discovery process, Won-Dollar spot rate contributes to the price discovery especially most ‘during the financial crisis period’ and the ‘entire period’ (b) Within the period ‘after the financial crisis’, CDS premium and the other indices have mutual influences on the price discovery process higher than the period ‘before the financial crisis’ (c) while Won-Dollar forward rate shows the similar result with Won-Dollar spot rate, NDF rate and CDS premium make the largest mutual influence on price discovery in the period ‘before the financial crisis.’

This paper examines long-run consumption based asset pricing models by studying sixteen Fama-French size and book-to-market portfolios in KRX (Korea Exchange) as test assets. In our empirical implementation, we follow both models of Hansen, Heaton and Li (2008) and Parker and Julliard (2005).

Hansen, Heaton and Li (2008) used recursive utility framework. The stochastic discount factor for this model depends on the present value of expectations about future consumption growth rates. In the empirical specification for this model, we follow Malloy, Moskowiz and Vissing-Jørgensen (2008). Meanwhile, Parker and Julliard (2005) proposed a model based upon the power utility framework and explicitly considers the consumption adjustment period.

Our main results are surprisingly consistent with the results of existing literatures. By assessing both of these models, we find that the significance of the excess returns of the test assets in predicting consumption growth peaks at the horizon of 2.5 years.

These empirical results partly proves the existence of long-run consumption risk in Korean economy. We can relate stock returns to long-run consumption risk and business cycle. Specifically, the stochastic discount factor of Parker and Julliard’s model captures the financial crises in the years of 1997 and 2003. Moreover, it catches the business cycle pattern of composite leading index in Korea.

Using Hasbrouck’s (1995, 2002) information share method, we examine the mutual price discovery dynamics among Won/Dollar spot, forward, and NDF exchange rates in on- and off-shore FX markets. Our findings include : (i) During the entire period, the mutual price discovery between on-shore FX market and off-shore NDF market are significantly led by on-shore Won-Dollar spot and forward exchange rates. (ii) Within the period around the global crisis, NDF exchange rates have mutual influence on the price discovery, which is expecially greater than the any other period. The results show Won-Dollar spot exchange rate fluctuations during the global crisis are greatly affected by external factors of the international financial markets. Not only that, but off-shore NDF trading promptly reflects the price information of KRW on the factors.