Abstract
This paper extends the research on the variance risk premium by considering a small open economy with volatile capital flows—the Korean economy. The empirical analysis in this paper finds that as in the US, the variance risk premium in Korea has a predictive power for the Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI) 200 stock returns over one-month and three-month horizons, indicating that it reflects the level of risk aversion in the Korean economy. The short-term forecasting ability of the variance risk premium is comparable to that of other popular predictor variables, such as the dividend yield and output gap. Moreover, a factor-augmented vector autoregression (FAVAR) analysis shows that the global liquidity sector is more important than the domestic macroeconomic sector in determining the variance risk premium. An increase in global liquidity significantly reduces both the variance risk premium and economic uncertainty.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 105-125 |
| Number of pages | 21 |
| Journal | International Review of Economics and Finance |
| Volume | 65 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jan 2020 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea ( NRF-2016S1A5A8017394 ). I am grateful to the Editor (Carl Chen) and anonymous referee for their valuable comments and suggestions. However, all remaining errors are mine.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Elsevier Inc.
Keywords
- FAVAR
- Global liquidity
- Risk aversion
- Variance risk premium