NBER Working Papers by Woochan Kim

Disparity between control and ownership rights gives rise to the risk of tunneling by the controlling shareholder, and is prevalent in many emerging market economies and present in some developed countries. At the same time, international investors come from different countries whose home markets are characterized by varying degrees of control-ownership disparity. This paper studies whether this difference in investors’ home countries affects their portfolio choice in an emerging market. It combines two unique data sets on ownership and control in business groups, and investor-stock level foreign investment in Korea. A key finding is that, investors from low-disparity countries disfavor high-disparity stocks in Korea, but investors from high-disparity countries are indifferent. Moreover, i...

The 1997-99 financial crises in the emerging markets have brought to the foreground the concern about offshore investment funds and their possible role in exacerbating volatility in the markets they invest in. Offshore investment funds are alleged to engage in trading behaviors that are different from their onshore counterparts. Because their behavior is less moderated by tax consequences, and because they may be subject to less supervision and regulation, the offshore funds may trade more intensely. They could also pursue more aggressively certain trading strategies such as positive feedback trading or herding that could contribute to greater volatility in the market. Using a unique data set, we compare the trading behavior in Korea by offshore funds with that of their onshore counterpa...

Different categories of foreign portfolio investors in Korea have differences as well as similarities in their trading behavior before and during a currency crisis. First, non-resident institutional investors are always positive feedback traders, whereas resident investors were negative feedback (contrarian) traders before the crisis but switch to be positive feedback traders during the crisis. Second, individual investors herd significantly more than institutional investors. Non-resident (institutional as well as individual) investors herd significantly more than their resident counterparts. Third, differences in the Western and Korean news coverage are correlated with differences in net selling by non-resident investors relative to resident investors.