Home Bias of Korean Resident Bond Investors: The Role of FX Hedging

This paper analyzes the home bias of Korean resident bond investors, as their overseas bond investments have rapidly increased after 2000. For this purpose, we introduce the Won/invested currency swap basis (interest rate differential adjusted FX swap return) and the Won/invested currency uncovered basis (interest rate differential adjusted expected FX spot return) along with the interest rate gap based on CIP and UCIP respectively in order to address the return factors in detail. The model coefficients are estimated by the static pooled OLS and the dynamic system GMM over the period of 2002–2018 and 2009–2018 respectively. With these estimation results, we have obtained the following implications. First, it is expected that the level of home bias will decline as Korean resident overseas bond investments increase, as the factors that have traditionally caused home bias continue to mitigate. Second, when Korean residents invest in overseas bond markets, the FX risk has partially hedged at the country level. This suggests that the rapid in/out flows for overseas bond transactions make a significant impact on the FX swap rates as well as spot rates. Third, both groups of investors have taken into heavy consideration both the FX swap basis (or the FX uncovered basis) related to the invested currency/USD as well as to Won/USD. Our findings suggest that the policy makers need to reconsider their conventional monitoring methods which are focused on the Won/USD transactions.