European stock exchanges have repeatedly opened second markets to list small companies. We explain the motivation for the creation of these second markets, and the reasons why many of them have failed. We find that the average long-run performance of initial public offerings (IPOs) on second...

High-growth firms deserve increasing attention from researchers, as they account for the largest amount of new job generation and contribute to wealth and general economic development. However, although it’s easy to conceive that firms rapidly growing hundreds of times their original size are...