A stock exchange is a place to list and trade stocks. Many Anglo-American exchanges have seen a dramatic transformation from mutual membership organizations to for-profit and even self-listed corporations. In contrast, China’s exchanges still maintain the “strange” characteristic – they...

We study firms that go public through reverse mergers (RMs) versus initial public offerings (IPOs) in China. Using a manually assembled data set, we show that pre-listing RM firms are larger, more profitable, and less politically connected than pre-listing IPO firms. Chinese RM firms also have...