The Behavior of Stock Prices on Ex-Dividend Day in Korea

This paper studies the behaviour of stock prices on the ex-dividend day in the Korean stock market. Since a majority of listed Korean firms are December firms whose fiscal year end in December and whose ex-dividend day falls on the same calendar day in the year, we use stock prices of Non-December firms to estimate the general stock price movements not related to cash dividends. We estimate excess returns on days around the ex-dividend day. Our major findings are (a) there is no tax clientele effect in Korea, (b) the opening price stock prices fell by the amount of the current cash dividend per share until 2001, but it does not fall as much as the current dividend per share since 2001. Furthermore, in contrast to the U.S. and the Japanese findings, (c) stocks earned negative excess returns on the ex-dividend day until 2001, after which all stocks are earning positive excess returns on the ex-dividend day, and (d) the closing stock price on the ex-dividend day that used to be even higher than the cum-dividend price until 2001 is lower than the opening stock price since 2001. The evidence suggests a structural break has happened around the year 2001.