Effects of MIFID II on Stock Trade Volumes of Nasdaq Stockholm

Sammanfattning: Introducing new financial legislation to financial markets require caution to achieve the intended outcome. This thesis aims to investigate whether or not the newly installed revised Markets in Financial Instruments Directive- the MIFID II regulation - temporally influenced the trading stock volume levels of Nasdaq Stockholm during its introduction to the Swedish stock market. A first approach of a generalized Negative Binomial model is carried out on aggregated data, followed by an individual Fixed Effects model in an attempt to eliminate omitted variable bias caused by missing unobserved variables for the individual stocks. The aggregated data is attained by taking the equally weighted average of the trading volume and adjusting for seasonality through Seasonal and Trend decomposition using Loess in combination with a regression model with ARIMA errors to mitigate calendar effects. Due to robustness of the aggregated data, the Negative Binomial model manage to capture significant effects of the regulation on the Small Cap. segment, even though clusters of the data show signs of divergent reactions to MIFID II. Since the Fixed Effects model operate on non-aggregated TSCS data and because of the varying effects on each stock the Fixed Effect model fails in its attempt to do the same.