Could mergers become more sustainable? A study of the stock exchange mergers of NASDAQ and OMX

This study investigates whether the merger of NASDAQ and OMX could reduce the portfolio diversification possibilities for stock market investors and whether it is necessary to implement national policies and international treaties for the sustainable development of financial markets. Our study is very important because some players in the stock markets have not yet realized that stock exchanges, during the last decades, have moved from government-owned or mutually-owned organizations to private companies, and, with several mergers having occurred, the market is tending gradually to behave like a monopoly. From our analysis, we conclude that increased volatility and reduced diversification opportunities are the results of an increase in the long-run comovement between each pair of indices in Nordic and Baltic stock markets (Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) and NASDAQ after the merger. We also find that the merger tends to improve the error-correction mechanism for NASDAQ so that it Granger-causes OMX, but OMX loses predictive power on NASDAQ after the merger. We conclude that the merger of NASDAQ and OMX reduces the diversification possibilities for stock market investors and our findings provide evidence to support the argument that it is important to implement national policies and international treaties for the sustainable development of financial markets.

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This article belongs to the Special Issue Behavioral Business and Behavioral Financial Economics with Applications