Can Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs) meet the needs of a market dominated by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)? Future perspective of the Italian market

Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs) are listed investment vehicles without any previous operation born in the US during the Eighties. The main aim of these investment vehicles is to raise funds on the equity capital market through an Initial Public Offering (IPO) in order to invest the collected capital within a 2-year deadline in one (or more) transaction with one (or more) identified target company (business combination) that indirectly goes public after the successful completion of the process. This thesis aims at performing an original research on SPACs in the Italian market, considering that the largest number of existing papers are focused mainly on US SPACs, only few of them have analysed the European context and that no deep analyses have been ever performed on the Italian context. In detail, the purpose of this thesis is to understand whether this type of investment vehicle could be an effective alternative to more traditional listing methods in a market dominated by SMEs such as the Italian market and which are the main characteristics that the parties involved (promoters, investors, target companies) need to be aware of and need to consider in order to maximise their respective interests. A qualitative analysis and a quantitative analysis are performed in order to address the two main questions of this thesis. Firstly, an in-depth analysis of the process and the characteristics of SPACs in the European context is performed with a strong focus one the Italian market. Secondly, a linear regression analysis (consisting of four linear regression models) is implemented on SPACs that have successfully completed a business combination in the Italian market. The final results of these analyses are a starting point for future research and could be extremely useful in convincing the main stakeholders of Italian SPACs about the potentialities of this innovative listing method compared with the more traditional ones.