The Response of Korean Stock Market and Market Participants to the Sub-Prime Mortgage Crisis

We investigate how Korean stock market and its participants react to the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Using data for the ABX sub-prime index, we find strong evidence of information transmission from ABX to KOSPI and VKOSPI during 2007 sub-prime mortgage crisis period. Responding to the drop of ABX, domestic institutional investors buy, whereas foreign investors sell. Furthermore, we find KOSPI reacts to ABX less than the response implied by KOSPI response to S&P 500 and S&P 500 response to ABX, which are considered as an efficient channel of information transmission. This phenomenon occurs because domestic investors buy stocks as ABX drops, thus keeping KOSPI from responding fully to information on ABX. On the contrary, foreign investors sell stocks as ABX drops, which show that foreign investors play as a channel for sub‐prime mortgage information transmission. This evidence supports the hypothesis of Kho (2011) that foreign investors have an informational advantage over domestic investors on overseas information.