The Impact of the French Securities Transaction Tax on Market Liquidity and Volatility

58 Pages Posted: 15 Jan 2014 Last revised: 5 Jan 2016

See all articles by Gunther Capelle-Blancard

Gunther Capelle-Blancard

Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne - Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne (CES); PSB Paris School of Business

Olena Havrylchyk

CEPII, Centre d'Etudes Prospectives et d'Info. Internationales, Paris; Université Paris Ouest - Nanterre, La Défense - EconomiX

Date Written: February 1, 2014

Abstract

In this paper, we assess the impact of the securities transaction tax (STT) introduced in France in 2012 on market liquidity and volatility. To identify causality, we rely on a distinctive design of the tax, which is imposed on large French firms only, all listed on Euronext. This provides two reliable control groups (smaller French firms and foreign firms listed on Euronext) and allows us to use a difference-in-difference approach in order to isolate the impact of the tax from the other economic changes that have occurred simultaneously. We find that the STT has reduced stock trading, but we find no significant effect on theoretically based measures of liquidity, such as price impact, and no significant effect on volatility. The results are robust whether we rely on different control groups (German stocks listed on the Deutsche Börse), different datasets (firm-level or aggregated data), different periods (from one to six months), or different methodologies (propensity score matching, regression discontinuity design).

Keywords: Financial transaction tax, Securities transaction tax, Tobin tax, Volatility, Liquidity, Financial regulation, Euronext

JEL Classification: G21, H25

Suggested Citation

Capelle-Blancard, Gunther and Havrylchyk, Olena, The Impact of the French Securities Transaction Tax on Market Liquidity and Volatility (February 1, 2014). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2378347 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2378347

Gunther Capelle-Blancard (Contact Author)

Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne - Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne (CES) ( email )

106-112 Boulevard de l'hopital
106-112 Boulevard de l'Hôpital
Paris Cedex 13, 75647
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PSB Paris School of Business ( email )

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Paris, 75013
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Olena Havrylchyk

CEPII, Centre d'Etudes Prospectives et d'Info. Internationales, Paris ( email )

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Paris, F-75007
France

Université Paris Ouest - Nanterre, La Défense - EconomiX ( email )

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Nanterre cedex, Nanterre Cedex 92000
France

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