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We investigate the cross-sectional and time-series determinants of idiosyncratic volatility in the Korean market. In particular, we focus on the empirical relation between firms’ asset growth rate and idiosyncratic stock return volatility. We find that, in the cross-section, companies with high idiosyncratic volatility tend to be small and highly leveraged, have high variance of ROE and Market to Book ratio, high turnover rate, and pay no dividends. Furthermore, firms with extreme (either high positive or negative) asset growth rates have high idiosyncratic return volatility than firms with moderate growth rates, suggesting the V-shaped relation between asset growth rate and idiosyncratic return volatility. We find that the V-shaped relation is robust even after controlling for other factors. In time-series, we find that firm-level idiosyncratic volatility is positively related to the dispersion of the cross-sectional asset growth rates. As a result, this study is contributed to show that the asset growth is the most important predictor of firm-level idiosyncratic return volatility in both the cross-section and the time-series in the Korean stock market. In addition, we show how the effect of risk factors varies with industries.

This paper aims to investigate the impact of corporate dividend policy on the capital structure in the Korean stock market. To distinctly discern the voluntariness of changes in corporate dividend policy, we analyze companies that, following a substantial increase, do not reduce dividends for the subsequent two years or, after a significant decrease, do not raise dividends for the following two years. Our empirical findings indicate that companies that increase dividends experience a significant decrease in both book and market leverage, even after controlling for variables such as target leverage ratios. This result suggests that a large increase in dividends can effectively reduce information asymmetry, leading to a lower cost of equity. On the contrary, after a decrease in dividends, both book leverage and market leverage significantly increase, revealing a symmetric relationship between dividend policy and capital structure. In conclusion, large dividend increases in Korean companies not only reduce information asymmetry but also lower the cost of equity capital, resulting in observable changes in the leverage ratio.