Nearly 20 competing new stock markets opened their doors in 12 Western European countries during 1995–2005. These stock markets copied the NASDAQ model, with low barriers to entry and tight disclosure rules, and had one common aim—to attract untested, early stage, innovative, and high-growth small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The main hypothesis of this chapter is that by setting the entry barriers too low, these new markets risked attracting too many low-quality firms, creating a “lemons problem” that negatively impacted the survival prospects of all firms listed on that market. The key finding is that the initial public offering (IPO) firm failure on six of these new stock markets is almost double the IPO firm failure on long-established official stock markets with more stringent listing requirements. The exception is the unregulated Alternative Investments Market, where firms have similar survival prospects compared to companies listing on London’s Official List.
THE LONG-TERM PERFORMANCE OF INITIAL PUBLIC OFFERINGS ON EUROPE’S NEW STOCK MARKETS