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Since the Asian financial crisis and the global financial crisis, the regime shift behavior has been notable in the stock markets. We examine the effects of interest rates and foreign exchange rates on stock returns and the cross-correlations of Korean stock returns associated with three other countries: Japan, USA, and China, using the Hamilton 2-regime Markov Switching model, for the period January 1993–December 2016. In both regimes, the volatility in the Korean stock market is greater than Japan and USA, but less than China. In regime 1 with low-volatility, the stock returns of both Korea and Japan are significantly affected first by their exchange rates and then by their interest rates. In regime 2 with high-volatility, the Korean stock market is explained by neither of the two exogenous variables while the Japanese stock returns respond positively to the exchange rates but negatively to the interest rates. The transition probability from regime 1 to regime 2 is greater than the reverse probability in the Korean stock market, which is opposite in Japan. Considering all four countries simultaneously, the Korean stock market is highly influenced by both the US and Japanese stock market in regime 1 with low-volatility, but only influenced by the Japanese stock market in regime 2 with high-volatility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]