Narrow Results

This study builds an agent-based computational finance platform that can reproduce the basic characteristics of China’s initial public offering (IPO) market and explain its anomalies. The results of our computational experiments show that along with the increasing proportion of sentiment strategy investors (i.e., those with an information advantage) entering the market, the IPO underpricing rate also rises correspondingly. Sentiment investors usually suffer losses because of their irrational investment decisions, while sentiment strategy investors profit by preying on sentiment investors.

In this paper, we study a large sample of 507 privatization offerings from 39 countries over the period 1979–1996. Our objectives are twofold. First, we document the extent of short-run underpricing of these privatization offerings and measure their variation across countries, industries, and years, as well as drawing comparisons to private company IPOs. Second, we test alternative explanations of the determinants of short-run underpricing drawing on various models of maximizing behavior by underwriters, augmented by variables that proxy for national political objectives. Overall, we find support for elements of asymmetric information theory, investor sentiment theory and the reputation building hypothesis. With the exception of the Gini coefficient, our political proxy variables are typically not significant. Thus to a significant degree, the investment banking strategies believed to characterize IPOs of private companies in industrial countries may also play a role in the IPO strategies of state-owned-enterprises in both industrial and lesser developed economies.

This study investigates whether the extent of earnings management has any impact on offer price in initial public offering (IPO). Using a sample of 581 JASDAQ IPO firms, we find that offer price reflects earnings management to some extent. Firms with conservative earnings management tend to have higher offer prices, and firms managing earnings aggressively tend to be discounted when they fail to exhibit smooth earnings growth. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that underwriters adjust for the effect of earnings management to appropriately pricing the issues. Overall, our evidence could lead to another explanation for IPO underpricing.

The main purpose of this paper is to explore the role of risk management, speculative industry competition effect and hot issue markets. We used a sample of 260 initial public offerings (IPOs) in the Australian resource sector for the 1994–2004 period to test the underpricing effect. We do not find any evidence that risk management can reduce the uncertainty relating to the new issue and hence alleviate the extent of underpricing. A plausible explanation for this lack of evidence is the poor information content of publicly available disclosures regarding risk management activities of IPO firms. We further provide evidence that the underpricing returns for resources IPOs are not impacted upon by the strength of alternative speculative IPO markets. We also show that the degree of underpricing adjusts to both market return in the preceding three months and the average underpricing of resources IPOs in the 12 month period leading to the float which offers an explanation to the hot issue effect observed in the IPO market.

The main purpose of this paper is to study the empirical determinants of the underpricing of H-share initial public offerings (IPOs) during the 1993–2003 period. A special characteristic of H-shares is that they are shares of companies incorporated in China, but are also listed abroad. Our estimates indicate that the average IPO underpricing level of H-shares was about 16.8%. We find that the conventional explanations for the worldwide IPO underpricing are not adequate in explaining the underpricing level of H-shares. Some new factors that are important in explaining the underpricing phenomenon in H-shares are identified. We show that the degree of IPO underpricing is positively associated with market conditions prior to issuance. It is also negatively related to the range of the issuing prices as well as to the growth rate of historical profits. In addition, it is found that firms cross-listed in Hong Kong and America have higher underpricing levels.

This study investigates the underpricing of 135 infrastructure IPOs in China from 1996 to 2012. It follows infrastructure IPO studies in Australia and India which report average underpricing returns to subscribers of 3.5% and 25.4%, respectively. The average underpricing return for Chinese infrastructure IPOs is substantially higher at 86.3%, but interestingly substantially lower than the underpricing of Chinese IPOs generally. The issue size, government ownership and the pre-IPO earnings per share are helpful in explaining the underpricing of Chinese infrastructure IPOs while the underwriter reputation does not appear to have much explanatory power. In addition, we find the underpricing of infrastructure IPOs in China is also affected by its local GDP levels.

At the time of an initial public offering, shares in a firm are typically held by venture capitalists, insiders, corporate investors and angel investors. We examine the role of angel investors in the IPO process. We find that angel investors provide equity capital in industries venture capitalists are less likely to serve and that shareholders in angel backed IPO firms are more likely to sell their shares at the time of the offering. Where venture capital backed IPO firms have higher underpricing, angel backed IPO firms do not, implying that angels may be the preferred investors for early-stage firms.

The presence of both restricted and unrestricted, US-style, bookbuilt initial public offer (IPOs) in Hong Kong provides an ideal environment to test numerous underpricing models by simultaneously measuring the effects of allocation restrictions on the investment bankers' price discovery, underwriting, and distribution functions. While clawbacks, a set of allocation restrictions favoring retail investors not participating in the roadshow result in diminished and more expensive price discovery, they also reduce the investment bankers' dependence on institutional investors to dispose off IPO shares, resulting in lower underpricing. This favors models that highlight the importance of the underwriting function on underpricing, and shows that allocation restrictions can impact more than just price discovery. In addition, this study shows that individual investors can partially offset the loss of roadshow information caused by clawbacks, countering the idea that investment banks are unable to extract any pricing information from investors outside their list of roadshow regulars.

This study develops a structural model of the initial public offering (IPO) pricing process that enables the estimation of adjustment rates for public and private pricing information gathered during bookbuilding. The estimated upward adjustment rate of public information is only 21%, significantly less than the 28% rate of private information. Adjustment rates decline towards the IPO date, especially for upward adjustments. The findings contradict information acquisition theories that predict a complete adjustment to public information and highlight the inefficiency of the IPO bookbuilding mechanism in handling new information even when information is publicly available and especially when it is favorable.

This study examines the impact of covenant violations on the implied cost of equity capital and the underpricing of seasoned equity offerings (SEOs). Using a novel dataset of 1,028 first-time covenant violations from 1996–2011, we find a higher level of SEO underpricing during the period immediately following covenant violations. This suggests that creditors require violating firms to issue equity to lower leverage and that equity investors interpret the violation negatively. We also find that violating firms experience an average increase of 8.48% in the implied cost of equity capital. By comparing analysts’ earnings forecasts before and after the violations, we conclude that the negative effects on equity owe to the loss of flexibility that accompanies covenant violations, and are not simply a reflection of the deteriorating health of the firm.

This paper examines the impact of the recently passed Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act on the behavior of market participants. Using the JOBS Act — which relaxed mandatory information disclosure requirements — as a natural experiment on firms’ choices of the mix of hard, accounting information and textual disclosures, we find that relative to a peer group of firms, initial public offering (IPO) firms reduce accounting disclosures and change textual disclosures. Because it allows a partial revelation of IPO quality, only textual disclosures affect underpricing. We also find that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) changes its behavior post-JOBS Act in responding to draft registration statements. Specifically, the SEC’s comment letters to firms are more negative in tone, and more forceful in their recommendations, focusing on quantitative information. Finally, under the JOBS Act, investors place more emphasis on the information produced by the SEC when pricing the stock. Returns following public release of the letters vary by about 4% based on letter tone.

Earlier studies document positive first-day return for initial public offerings (IPOs), commonly interpreted as underpricing of the issue. The empirical evidence also indicates that IPO underpricing is negatively related to the public float (the fraction of the firm sold to the public). One possible explanation for this relation is that firms allocate a fixed amount of money for underpricing, and set an issue price accordingly — a behavioral characteristic. But, if indeed firms allocate a fixed amount of money to underpricing, then this underpricing should diminish in the public float. Using a sample of IPOs between 1996 and 2008, we provide empirical evidence that indeed the relation between underpricing and the public float is non-linear. Specifically, the higher the public float, the less the decrease of underpricing in the public float. Moreover, in our regression analysis, regressing underpricing on the reciprocal of the public float provides the best fit. As we show, this result is consistent with firms allocating a fixed amount of money for underpricing. This finding is important because it helps predict underpricing and has implications for firms, investors and regulators.

This paper follows Chan, Stohs, and Wang (2001), which argues that the underlying value of the real estate is not by itself the reason for the very substantial differences in underpricing returns between real estate investment trust (REIT) IPOs and industrial company IPOs. We use variables identified in previous studies that have helped explain the underpricing of industrial company IPOs to help explain the underpricing of property trust IPOs. We find that the prospectus forecast dividend yield is a critical variable in the valuation and hence underpricing of REIT IPOs compared to industrial company IPOs. The sentiment towards the market and whether or not the issue is underwritten also impact the underpricing of REITs but the impact is much less than on industrial company IPOs.