It is often taken as axiomatic that investors prefer high levels of regulation. Yet companies have increasingly chosen to list on stock exchanges with lower regulatory requirements. In this paper we analyse whether investors value high regulatory standards for quoted companies. We use the unusual regulatory environment observed in London – two alternative regulatory regimes with the same trading technology – to analyse these issues. We focus on 218 firms that chose to switch their trading ‘down’ from the highly regulated Main market to the lightly regulated AIM market, and 56 firms that moved ‘up’ to the Main market. Switching firms on average experience down (up) announcement returns of approximately -4% (+5%). However these initial reactions are reversed over several months after the actual switch. Our results suggest that particular investor clienteles exist for the two markets, and that other investors who place little value on the higher regulatory standards become the relevant marginal investors when companies switch to AIM.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Oxford Financial Research Centre in its series OFRC Working Papers Series with number
2008fe18.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: