The Effect of the Targeted Subsidies Plan on the Stock Returns: Iranian Evidence

Abstract The current study aims to investigate the relationship between Iran’s Targeted Subsidies Plan and the stock returns of listed companies on the Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE). Stock returns is obtained from the indices of three industries: pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and machinery and equipment. Moreover, the present research uses gold price and dollar price as control variables. The Targeted Subsidies Plan is the independent variable that takes the value of zero before implementation and one after implementation. Multivariate regression is used for data analysis over the period 2009-2011. The results indicate that there is no relationship between the Targeted Subsidies Plan and market returns. Moreover, paired t-test is applied to verify the results of regression analysis, which rejects the results of the regression model. This is because of the higher accuracy of regression analysis compared to paired t-test which only examines one variable. Therefore, we rely on the results of regression analysis and reject the existence of a significant relationship between the Targeted Subsidies Plan and the stock returns of the studied industries.