Search results

This study provides empirical evidence on the existence of a mood effect in Korea Stock Market. Given the assumptions that changes in the Consumer Expectation Index and the numbers of suicides proxy for the social mood, I find that the aggregate stock market moves with the changes of investor sentiment, on average. The relation between the KOSPI and mood variables representing for investor sentiment is economically and statistically significant. For example, a 10% increase of the CEI relative to the previous month leads to a 14.7% rise of the KOSPI. The magnitude of the mood effect is even larger on the small cap stocks, especially in the KOSDAQ market. The contemporaneous changes in the KOSPI affected by the changes of investor sentiment are mostly reversed in the next month, suggesting that the mood effect is short-lived and seems to be unrelated to the fundamental information.

This paper examines the hypothesis of local herding (i.e. own-area effects) by individual investors on a particular stock-month. Using a unique dataset on online and offline individual investors’ trading records in Korea, we analyze buying and selling transactions involving 10,000 accounts from February 1999 to December 2005. We find that both online and offline investors in the same area tend to exhibit stronger local herding compared to investors’ trades who are geographically remote. Interestingly, online investors not only present stronger own-area effects but also exhibit more pronounced other-area effects compared with offline investors. Furthermore, our analysis indicates that gender and religious affiliation are important in investment behavior, with male and non-religious investors displaying a greater stock market participation in contrast to investors who are female and Protestant.