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This study investigates regional housing market connectedness among the 16 first-tier administrative divisions in Korea and 25 districts in Seoul, the capital city. Time-varying parameter vector au...

We estimate a medium-scale DSGE model, including a financial accelerator and the search and matching framework in labor markets, for the Korean economy, using the Bayesian technique. The estimated model shows that the recent sluggishness in GDP growth can be explained by slow technology growth, and the decline in CPI inflation is affected by a falling markup in domestic homogeneous goods production and a negative intertemporal consumption preference. Although wages, unemployment, and total labor hours are influenced by various factors, households' weak bargaining power causes a slow recovery in wages, while pushing the unemployment rate down. There was also a spillover from non-big-5 to big-5 firms during the global financial crisis, while monetary and fiscal policy has been mostly conservative in the post-crisis period.

Global Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) and non-EPU global uncertainty measures exhibit heterogeneous behavior, especially in 2010s. Using firm-level data from 36 countries, we estimate the effect of global uncertainty on corporate investment in 1997–2016. Eleven global uncertainty measures, including global EPU, are employed to encompass macro, micro, and higher-order dimensions of uncertainty. We find different effect of EPU and non-EPU global uncertainty measures on investment. Only EPU measures negatively affect investment, while non-EPU measures have positive effects, which suggests a possible first-order implication of EPU.

We estimate a Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model with various financial frictions and analyze how well the model explains the Great Recession. Predictive analysis shows that the model can only slightly better explain the large deviation from trend during the crisis relative to a model without financial frictions. Specifically, the risk premium shock, which is a shock to the external finance premium of the entrepreneurs׳ leverage, explains the largest part of the investment downfall during the crisis. However, the ‘balance sheet’ channel of financial frictions in the model, which structurally links balance sheet conditions of financial intermediaries and nonfinancial borrowers to their borrowing rates, is estimated to be weak. We examine alternative prior specifications for how the financial frictions enter the model and continue to find a limited role for these frictions. Rolling-window estimation provides evidence for substantial time variation in parameters governing financial frictions. We conclude that the well-known financial frictions studied in this paper are not able to explain the financial crisis in a linearized and estimated model.

The Korean government implemented money market reform after the global financial crisis, aiming to develop the repurchase agreement (RP, repo) market. In this article, I analyze the reform and its effects on money markets. Results show that the reform strengthened the functionality of the RP market and the monetary policy transmission channel to it. The error correction model indicates that although the adjustments to the equilibrium occurred through the call rate during the global financial crisis, they were processed through the RP rate in later periods. The ability of the RP rate to inform market liquidity conditions has improved.

This study investigates the macroeconomic determinants behind the number of foreign visitors to Korean casinos arriving from major source countries, namely Japan, Mainland China, Hong Kong SAR and Taiwan. Using monthly data from 2006 to 2016, we utilized a Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) model to investigate the dynamic effects of macroeconomic factors on the number of casino visitors. Estimation results supported the conclusion that visitors from Japan and Mainland China—who account for approximately three quarters of the total number of foreign casino visitors—were affected by macroeconomic or financial indicators such as changes in oil prices, exports and exchange rates (Japan), exports and short-term interest rates (Mainland China). In contrast, visitors from Hong Kong SAR did not seem to be influenced by any of these factors. We also found that the MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) outbreak in Korea in 2015 had a significant adverse effect on casino visitors from all regions. Implications and suggestions for future studies are provided along with the results of this study.

We conduct an empirical analysis on the effect of air pollution on retail sales, using monthly regional panel data on air quality and large retail store sales in Korea. We account for regional heterogeneity in air pollution and control for various macroeconomic and climatic factors that can affect retail sales. We also use the air quality indicator in the west coastal islands - affected by trans-border pollution, but uncorrelated with economic activity in the mainland - as an instrumental variable. The estimation result shows that one additional day of PM10 level higher than 80 reduces monthly retail sales by about 0.1 percent in general. However, an adaptive pattern appears over time, in particular when the level of air pollution in the previous month was severe.