Politics and elections at the Spanish stock exchange

Résumé

This paper examines the influence of Spanish major political events on the stock market performance. The analytical results demonstrate that there are no systematic differences in excess returns in the last two years preceding an election, that market responses are of the same magnitude when incumbents win or lose the election, and that there is no difference between the excess returns during left-leaning and right-leaning governments. Regarding to the stock market performance around election dates, negative price changes are observed in the days prior to elections, reverting to positive once the election takes place. Our results are in line with the work of Brown, Harlow and Tinic (1988) on the Uncertain Information Hypothesis that postulates that volatility of stock returns increases following the arrival of unexpected information and prices rise as uncertainty is resolved.