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The purpose of this paper is to study corporate governance restructuring strategies of companies to adapt to new market conditions following conversion into a for-profit structure. It focuses on the changes in the composition of the board of directors.

The paper conducts a field experiment using stock exchanges, which have become more international over time, and many of which have been forced to demutualize and convert to for-profit structures to compete more efficiently. The paper does a fine-grained analysis of restructuring in the composition of the board using the ANOVA technique. The paper also examines the impact of this board composition restructuring on the reputation of the exchanges using a regression technique.

The authors find that the stock exchanges restructured board composition and refocused them to create better value. Results suggest that the conversion of a company to a for-profit structure brings efficiencies when accompanied by changes in the governing bodies. The authors also find that converting to for-profit firms had a positive impact on the reputation of the exchanges. The positive impact was even greater when accompanied by changes in board composition.

A stronger focus on the corporate governance dimension to understand the successful demutualization of stock exchanges is needed.

The authors analyze the corporate governance dimension during demutualization processes of an under examined sector. The financial performance of the stock exchanges the authors study significantly improved after their conversion to for-profit organizations and provide an example of successful corporate governance restructuring.

In recent years, stock exchanges have been increasingly integrating and merging their activities at a national and international scale. While consolidation is often driven by technological, legal and competitive changes, whether merger activities are efficient in terms of market microstructure remains unknown. Academic research to date has analyzed the causes behind these mergers primarily from the technological, legal and competitive perspective, whereas relatively little literature considers their impact on the exchange itself. The paper aims to consider the case of the Euronext merger to explain this topic by studying this merger and its effect on Euronext's market risk (measured by volatility).

The paper uses a standard General Auto‐regressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (GARCH (1,1)) process to study the volatility of the underlying markets and use break methodology to highlight the merger effects. It also adds control samples to account for any change in volatility that could be caused by factors other than the merger event.

The results suggest that the Euronext merger did not affect the market risk. In particular, the paper finds no evidence that the integration onto the same platforms for trading and clearing had a significant effect on the volatility of the merging markets.

This study contributes to clarify business issues and to guide policy makers on exchange industrial organization.

The present paper further contributes to the ongoing discussion about the drawbacks and merits of horizontal exchange integration.