Impacts of Presidential Elections on the Stock Markets of France and Taiwan

總統選舉對法國和台灣股票市場的影響The relationship between politics, especially presidential elections, and stock markets has been a topic widely covered in the United States. We propose in this research to focus on France and Taiwan, two free countries regarding the civil rights and politic liberties, with a direct presidential election system. We will put them in perspective and analyse if similarities and differences can be identified, regarding the presidential market cycles and the presence of abnormal returns around presidential elections, in comparison of the US. Regarding the presidential market cycle analysis, a very close, but not significant pattern has been found for both French indices compared to the US. The TAIEX in Taiwan shows a very different pattern as Yearly Average Return are alternatively positive and negative, suggesting two cycles in a presidential term. This observation is not applicable for big and mid-caps indices in Taiwan. In addition, not any significant differences have been found between the YAR of big and mid-caps indices for the two countries respectively. Analysing the abnormal returns, significant positive CAARs are found for Taiwan big and mid-caps. For the big-caps index, this result is found for the (-28, 28) period while for the mid-caps, the associated period is (-28,-15) days before the election. The loss of the incumbent shows significant strong negative CAAR for the 1-month period prior and after the elections. The win of this one shows significant positive CAAR for the period associated to the 15 first days of the presidential campaign. The win of the party in power shows the same results, only when we consider big-caps indices