The Effect of General Elections on the Stock Market Performance of Firms: Evidence from India

Abstract

The Indian general elections (Lok Sabha Elections) is billed as the ‘country’s biggest festival.’ India is the second most populous country in the world with around 900 million eligible voters in the year 2019. Making sure that all eligible voters poll their votes securely is difficult to do in a single day. Therefore, the election event in India lasts for several weeks. It has been evident that the general elections bring about uncertainty in the economy while stock prices are considered to be sensitive to all new information and prevailing uncertainties. This paper, therefore, intends to study the impact of Indian General Elections on the stock market performances of the firms. This study uses the election event data of 2004, 2009 and 2014 as the sample. Fixed Effect (FE) model, Random effect (RE) model, difference-in-difference (DID) and a triple difference-in-difference methods are preformed to estimate the effect of general election event on the stock market performances of the firms, measured by market capitalization of the firms and their stock returns.