Exchange competition in listing services: evidence for Italian companies

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the monopolistic position that many important and well renowned exchanges around the world still maintain on offering and pricing of listing services. Our results show that US exchanges are more expensive for medium sized firms whilst EU markets apply higher fees to the largest companies. Many exchanges, particularly in the EU, are still taking advantage of their exclusive control position by applying premium price policies to the largest companies in order to cross‐subsidise smaller companies. Up to now, demutualisation of stock exchanges did not lead to the expected reduction of listing fees.