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This study examines the forecasting ability of the adjusted implied volatility (AIV), which is suggested by Kang, Kim and Yoon (2009), using the horserace competition with historical volatility, model-free implied volatility, and BS implied volatility in the KOSPI 200 index options market. The adjusted implied volatility is applicable when investors are not risk averse or when underlying returns do not follow a normal distribution. This implies that AIV is consistent with the presence of risk premia for other risk such as volatility risk and jump risk. Using KOSPI 200 index options, it is shown that the AIV outperforms other volatility estimates in terms of the unbiasedness for future realized volatilities as well as the forecasting errors.

This study examines the problems associated with the management fee on outsourced CIOs in the public pension funds in Korea and proposes a better management fee structure. The main results of this study are summarized as follows. First, the outsourced CIO is likely to make a profit, provided that the management cost of the outsourced CIO is lower than a fixed ratio in a fee structure. Second, the profit margin of public funds increases as the fixed ratio decreases. Third, the outsourced CIOs can make a sure profit under the existence of the fixed fee only, regardless of the performance of public funds. In addition, the profit of outsourced CIOs increases as the level of delegation fees for sub-management firms decreases. However, such a fee structure may result in making worse the overall performance of funds ultimately. Fourth, it is necessary to introduce the performance-linked fee structure when the outsourced CIOs of public pension funds are selected. Such a fee structure can mitigate the possibility that the outsourced CIOs reassigns fund to sub-management firms with low management capacities, thereby lowering the fund’s overall performance.

As global exchanges have listed volatility derivatives competitively, volatility has been recognized as a new investment vehicle and/or a hedging means for traditional financial assets such as stocks and bonds. Following this trend, KRX has begun to announce VKOSPI from KOSPI200 index options prices since April 13, 2009 and listed VKOSPI futures on November 17, 2014. However, VKOSPI futures has still not been activated than those listed in developed countries. In this paper, we investigate the informational efficiency of VKOSPI futures and analyze the illiquidity problem of VKOSPI futures. More specifically, we execute a VAR analysis of VKOSPI, VKOSPI futures, VIX and VIX futures to find out their lead-lag relations. In addition, we further conduct a Granger causality test, impulse response analysis and variance decomposition to examine their dynamic relations. According to the results, we find that VKOSPI leads VKOSPI futures and that VIX and VIX futures lead VKOSPI and VKOSPI futures significantly. Based on the results above, lastly, we propose several policies to make the VKOSPI futures market more active and informative.

This study verifies the existence of implied volatility distortion by the rapid growth of structured products such as Equity Linked Securities (ELS) in Korean financial markets and provides the policy implications to overcome such a distortion. The most ELS products issued in Korea have a step-down auto-callable payoff structure consisting of short position in down-and-in barrier put options and long position in digital call options. Financial companies which have issued ELS are exposed to the volatility risk, i.e. long vega position, and tend to execute the volatility transactions of short vega. For instance, the financial companies issue Equity-Linked Warrants or sell listed/over-the-counter vanilla options, both of which have short position in volatility risk. Accordingly, the demand for selling volatility is stronger than for buying volatility in the Korean financial markets. According to the empirical results, we conform that the rapid growth of the ELS products induces the pressure for lowering volatility and furthermore, the volatility spreads, defined as the difference between implied volatility and realized volatility, also decrease with respect the amount of the newly issued ELS. Lastly, to mitigate the volatility distortion effect, we suggest to list VKOSPI-related derivatives securities such as VKOSPI futures and options, which in turn balance the trading demands for selling and buying volatilities.

In this paper, we investigated the risk averse ness of KOSPI 200 option investors with very flexible risk preference structure. Contrary to the most of previous research either assuming a time-invariant underlying asset return distribution or assuming a well-known functional form for the underlying utility functions. we directly assume functional forms for Investors’risk aversion functions. With the direct specification on the risk aversion functions themselves. we can avoid the possibility 이 suffering from Internal inconsistency and of obtaining misleading risk aversion functions. From our empirical results using KOSPI 200 Index option prices from 1997 through 2006. we discovered that the investors' relative risk aversions exhibit ‘sharply decreasing' across wealth. In addition, our Implied subjective PDFs are found to more accurately forecast the distribution of realization than both the risk neutral PDFs and implied subjective PDFs from previous methods. For the robustness of our empirical results, we test the effects of estimation errors In the expected risk premium, and of financial crisis in the late of 1990s.

Since the introduction of ELS (Equity-linked securities) in 2003, the structured products have become one of the most important investment vehicles to Korean retail investors. However, the rapid growth of those structured products has induced the imbalance of Korean financial markets and may have eventually damaged the financial stability of Korean economy. In this paper, we investigate how Korean securities companies issuing the structured products hedge their positions and how their activities affect the financial stability. In addition, we conduct a simple empirical analysis to examine the relationship between the issue of ELS and the financial stability using FSI (financial stability index) provided by Bank of Korea. According to the results, the balance of ELS affects the financial stability negatively and this is significant even after adjusting for the control variables such as the KOSPI index, VKOSPI, the risk-free interest rate, and CPI. More specifically, the balance rather than the amount of monthly issuance is significant to financial stability. In addition, the decrease in underlying indices reduces the early redemption, thereby damaging the financial stability. Lastly, we suggest several solutions to alleviate the negative effects.

Previous literature emphasizes the importance of a closing call auction system because it can not only improve the price discovery effect, but also mitigate the possibility of price manipulation. However, Korea Exchange, which has adopted a closing call auction system, has still suffered from the price manipulation, most cases of which are likely to be related to the derivatives contracts. Based on this environment, this paper investigates why KRX experiences the closing price manipulations so much, even though it adopted the closing call auction system. Generally, a price manipulation occurs when the legal/administrative penalty is less than the expected economic gain or when a specific market structure increases an incentive to manipulate the price. In this paper, we find that the adoption of a closing call auction price as a settlement price for KOSPI derivatives contracts strengthens the incentive for closing price manipulation, which is supported by Kyle (2007). Kyle (2007) shows that if a closing price is used as a settlement price and investors can execute the ‘market-on-expiration orders’ surely, the derivatives with cash settlement are susceptible to the price manipulation such as squeezing or cornering, equally as the derivatives with physical settlement. As such, KRX is the only financial market that satisfies the above conditions. This paper tries to verify this argument by introducing the Hong Kong Exchange case, the Korean ELS-related manipulation case and the Deutsche Bank case. Therefore, we strongly recommend changing the settlement price of KRX derivatives contracts into an average price, which is similar with the well-developed financial markets.

This study aims to examine the return predictability of variance risk premium, which is defined as the difference between risk-neutral variance and expected realized variance, on KOSPI 200 index returns. Although extant literature shows that variance risk premium estimated from U.S. index options has a predictive power on underlying returns, little study has been conducted in KOSPI 200 index returns. In addition, there is no conclusion for the predictive power of variance risk premium in other financial markets. In this paper, we can find the predictive power of S&P500 variance risk premium on KOSPI200 index returns as well as on S&P500 index returns, but cannot find the predictive power of KOSPI200 variance risk premium on both indices. These results are consistent to Londono (2012) and Bollerslev et al. (2013). The poor performance of KOSPI200 variance risk premium is explained by the assumption that U.S. economy is a leader economy, while Korea economy is a follower economy. To support this conclusion, we conduct Vector Auto-Regression (VAR) using two variance risk premiums. Two premiums have bi-directional lead-lag relationship but S&P500 variance risk premium is informationally superior to KOSPI200 variance risk premium regarding return predictions.

We examine whether the suitability principles hold for the mutual fund industry in Korea, by analyzing the dynamics and the characteristics of the multi-class fund flows. For 12-years from 2002 to 2013, the volatility of fund flows associated with A-class fund, which is more appropriate for long-term investments, is larger than that associated with C-class fund. Therefore, it can be interpreted that the suitability principles do not hold. To examine the empirical observation, we mainly focus on the role of the dollar cost averaging (DCA) style funds. We show that if we adjust for the effect of DCA funds, the suitability principles does not hold only before the 2008 financial crisis. Thus, we argue that individuals' irrational decision making is caused by heavy investments on A-class fund through DCA style types before the financial crisis. This leads to the observed violation of the suitability principles before the crisis. Our findings also suggest that after the financial crisis, the mutual fund industry in Korea becomes mature.

This paper conducts a factor analysis using the implied variances of S&P 500 index options and KOSPI 200 index options. After estimating the factors that influence variance risks, we rotate the factors to decompose them into a common factor and local factors. The results show that 10~12 percent of variance risks in both markets is explained by the common factor and 65 percent of S&P 500 implied variances and 70 percent of KOSPI 200 implied variances are explained by each local factor, which is in contrast to the results for bond markets that the most variation of interest rates could be explained by a common factor. To figure out the source of common and local factors, additionally, we adopt the regression models that incorporate the risk-neutral (RN) variance, skewness, and kurtosis as explanatory variables. Approximately, the common factor is mainly determined by the RN variance of the S&P 500 index and RN higher moments of the KOSPI 200 index. In contrast, the S&P 500 local factor is influenced by the RN variance of the S&P 500 index and the KOSPI 200 local factor is explained by the RN higher moment of the KOSPI 200 index.