The Impacts of Political Events on Foreign Institutional Investors and Stock Returns: Emerging Market Evidence from Taiwan

Abstract

This study investigates the possible impact of various political events on Taiwan's stock performance. When market-adjusted techniques are applied, seemingly Taiwan's stock market often reacts to the occurrences of political incidents with a significant abnormal price performance. Nevertheless, after employing an MVRM framework that accounts for market risk differences across firms and for distributional tendencies in daily returns, we find that price reactions to most of the political events are rather insignificant, implying those events be largely uninformative with only a few exceptions. The abnormal return behaviors are also frequently comparable between firms with small - and large foreign institutional ownerships. Some considerable volatility shifts in portfolio returns, however, are observed after specific events occur.

Keywords: Political risk, QFII, emerging markets, event studies

JEL Classification: F21, F30, G15