THE IMPACT OF STOCK SPLITS ON LIQUIDITY

Prior studies suggest that managers of publicly traded companies use stock splits either to improve liquidity by bringing share prices back to a normal trading range, or to convey favourable information to investors and broaden the shareholder base. This study focuses on the first possibility, the one related to liquidity. This dissertation provides new insights on the impact of Stock Splits (SS) on the liquidity of the stock for the firms that perform this corporate action. Liquidity is represented by two measures: Turnover Ratio (TR) and Relative Spread (RS). This analysis was made through two multiple linear regressions where the purpose is to assess if there is a statistical significance of SS for the explanation of the two dependent variables, TR and RS. The analysis was performed for a final sample of 500 companies from the S&P500 index, between the years of 2011 and 2022 and with a total of 111 stock splits done over the 11 and a half years of period analysis. Results found show that the variable SS has a statistical significance for both the first regression (TR) and the second regression (RS), which shows that there is evidence of a linear relationship between stocks splits and liquidity. However, the results also show that the statistically significant coefficient between SS and TR is negative, while the coefficient between SS and RS is positive, which suggests that stock splits actually have a negative impact on liquidity. This empirical result could be acknowledged as an opposition to the optimal price hypothesis, which suggests that splits are used by managers to move share prices into a trading range to increase liquidity.