Can direct government intervention save the stock market?

Abstract

With the aim of restoring the investors’ confidence during the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, the Taiwan government bought 47 blue-chip stocks in the Taiwan Stock Exchange. Our study examines the effect of the government intervention across four periods, including the pre-event, event, holding, and selling periods, the first exploring the stock price behavior during the holding period in the literature. During the holding period, the cumulative average daily abnormal returns (CAAR) curves of the intervened stocks sharply rise while its market volatility begins to decrease. Next, the intervention effect does spread to the non-intervened stocks, and the shareholders of the non-intervened stocks do benefit almost as much as those of the intervened stocks. The policy implications of our results are that the government can save the stock market by setting the holding period in its measures and by concentrating on purchasing a limited number of blue-chip stocks.