Executive summary Ten years ago the Directorate General Enterprise of the European Commission established the Observatory of European SMEs (hereafter referred to as u0093the Observatoryu0094) to respond to a perceived information gap concerning SMEs in Europe. The Observatory considers SMEs to...

Exchanges and other trading platforms are often vertically integrated to carry out trading, clearing and settlement as one operation. We show that such vertical silos can prevent efficiency gains from horizontal consolidation of trading and settlement platforms to be realized. Independent of the...

In recent years, demutualized stock exchanges have been increasingly engaging in M&A and alliance activities. To examine the effect of these growth strategies on exchange shareholders’ value creation, we focus on 14 public stock exchanges and investigate their short-run share price responses...