Friction Effects of Foreign Stock Ownership
Authors:   Asia-Europe Perspective Association, Seon Junghoon 
Published: June 2018

This paper investigates whether there exist the friction effects of foreign ownership in the stocks listed on the Korea exchange. The friction effects of foreign ownership is defined as a negative effect of foreign stock ownership on the market liquidity. In a perfect capital market in which any market friction does not exist, foreign stock ownership should not affect market liquidity. However, market frictions such as order processing costs, inventory holding costs, and information asymmetric costs exits in real stock markets and thus the friction effects of foreign ownership may exist. According to Stoll (2000), any friction effects that might occur in imperfect markets can be decomposed into two components-real friction and information friction. The real friction is related to order processing costs and inventory holding costs and the component that consumes real resources of liquidity providers. Meanwhile, the informational friction is related with information asymmetry costs and the component that redistribute investors’ wealth without consuming real resources of liquidity providers. Following Stoll (2000)’s view, we decompose the friction effects of foreign ownership into two components: the real and informational frictions. The real friction is defined as the negative impact of an increase in foreign ownership on the trading activity of stocks. The informational friction is defined as the adverse impact of an increase in foreign ownership on the asymmetric information costs of a stock. The empirical studies on whether the friction effects of foreign stock ownership come from real friction, informational friction, or both might suggest through which channel foreign stock ownership affect on market liquidity in a stock market. The existence of real friction indicates that foreign stock ownership impact the market liquidity through trading activity. The existence of informational friction suggests that foreign stock ownership impact the market liquidity through the changes in information environment. This paper uses monthly panel data for 791 firms (355 KOSPI firms and 436 KOSPI firms) from January 2009 to December 2013. Using the monthly panel data and two-way fixed effect panel model, this paper examine the relationship among this month’s trading activity and Amihud(2002) price impact, and previous month’s foreign stock ownership using each stock’s share price, volatility of share price, and market capitalization as control variables. The foreign stock ownership of a stock is measured as the shares of foreign stock ownership divided by the number of shares outstanding at the end of each month. The trading activity of a stock is measures as the monthly average of turnover ratio and trading volume ratio. Amihud(2002) price impact of a stock is computed as the monthly average of the ratio of daily mean absolute return to daily volume for each month. This paper finds the results as follows. First, the inverse relationship between lagged foreign ownership and trading activity of stocks the real friction of foreign ownership is observed for both the KOSPI and KOSDAQ firms. Second, the adverse impact of lagged foreign ownership on the Amihud (2002)’s price impacts of stocks-the total friction effect of foreign ownership is found for the KOSPI firms. The adverse impact, however, is disappeared, when real friction is controlled in the friction effect. Lastly, the total friction effect of foreign ownership is not observed for KOSDAQ firms. Overall, the results suggest that friction effect of foreign ownership is driven by the real friction and the informational friction plays no role in the friction effect.