An Empirical Investigation of the Lead-Lag Relations of Returns and Volatilities among the KOSPI200 Spot, Futures and Options Markets and their Explanations

This article empirically examines the lead-lag relations among the KOSPI200 spot market, the KOSPI200 futures market, and the KOSPI200 options market, and provides some explanations for the observed lead-lag relations. In general, the KOSPI200 futures and options markets lead the KOSPI200 spot market by up to 10 minutes in terms of returns and by 5 minutes in terms of volatilities, even after purging the infrequent trading effect as well as the bid-ask spread effect. The KOSPI200 options market leads and lags the KOSPI200 futures market by 5 minutes only in terms of returns. The observed lead-lag relations seem to be caused by the difference in transaction costs of the three markets.