Initial Public Offerings and Underwriter Reputation

This paper examined the returns earned by subscribing to initial public offerings of equity (IPOs). Rock (1986) suggests that IPO returns are required by uninformed investors as compensation for the risk of trading against superior information. We show that IPOs with more informed investor capital require higher returns. The marketing underwriter's reputation reveals the expected level of “informed” activity. Prestigious underwriters are associated with lower risk offerings. With less risk there is less incentive to acquire information and fewer informed investors. Consequently, prestigious underwriters are associated with IPOs that have lower returns.     

Characterizing the Risk of IPO Long‐Run Returns: The Impact of Momentum,Liquidity, Skewness,and Investment

We study 6,686 initial public offerings (IPOs) spanning the period 1981‐2005 and find that the new issues puzzle disappears in a Fama‐French three‐factor framework. IPOs do not underperform in the aftermarket on a risk‐adjusted basis and do not underperform a matched sample of nonissuers. IPO underperformance is concentrated in the 1980s and early 1990s, and IPOs either perform the same as the market or outperform on a risk‐adjusted basis from 1998 to 2005. We find that outperformance in the later period is driven by large firms. Factors for momentum, investment, liquidity, and skewness help to explain aftermarket returns, although size and book‐to‐market tend to proxy for skewness. IPO investors receive smaller expected returns due to negative momentum and investment exposure and in exchange for higher liquidity.     

HIGH-TECH IPOS: A TALE OF TWO CONTINENTS

The typical price behavior of an initial public offering (IPO), consisting of a price upsurge on the first trading day followed by subpar performance in the (longer-run) after-market, is one of the most intriguing puzzles in corporate finance. This study focuses on high-tech IPOs in Europe and the U.S. over the period 1998–2001, both to compare the European and U.S. IPO markets and to determine how the price behavior of high-tech IPOs compares to that of IPOs in general. Average initial-day returns were 39% and 64% for the European and U.S. samples, respectively. The median returns were significantly lower, however, indicating that the sample averages are affected by a small group of exceptionally strong performers. But, for the first full year of trading, the median market-adjusted returns were negative for both samples. Not surprisingly, this substandard aftermarket performance was most apparent in companies that failed to generate operating profits.
As with IPOs in general, high-tech IPOs showed higher initial-day returns in "hot" markets than in "cold." Strong first-day performance was a good predictor of IPO volume in the high-tech market, with strong first-day returns triggering a flood of IPOs in subsequent months. Overall, then, the authors' study concludes that the price behavior of high-tech IPOs provides an exaggerated version of the general tendency of IPOs to be underpriced initially but underperform over the longer term.     

Transparency in IPO mechanism: Retail investors’ participation,IPO pricing and returns

Using data from the transparent Indian IPO setting, the paper examines retail investors’ participation, their influence on IPO pricing and the returns they make on IPO investment. The transparency in the mechanism, which allows investors to observe prior investors’ participation, leads to demand which is concentrated at either one or two points of the offer price range. Analysis of investors’ demand during the offer period shows that the participation of retail investors is significantly influenced by the participation of institutional investors. We examine IPO pricing and find that favourable demand by retail investors is positively associated with a high IPO price even after controlling for demand by institutional investors. Further, we find that due to aggressive bidding by overconfident investors, retail investors are, on average, unlikely to make positive allocation weighted initial returns even in a setting where they do not have to compete with institutional investors. Retail investors, however, can earn significant positive allocation weighted initial returns if they limit their participation in IPOs with above average institutional investors’ demand.     

Europe's Second Markets for Small Companies

European stock exchanges have repeatedly opened second markets to list small companies. We explain the motivation for the creation of these second markets, and the reasons why many of them have failed. We find that the average long‐run performance of initial public offerings (IPOs) on second markets is dramatically worse than for main market IPOs. However, the second markets have provided firms with the opportunity to raise funds at the IPO and in follow‐on offerings. The relative success of London's AIM, which is an exchange‐regulated market with minimal regulations, has led other European stock exchanges to establish similar non‐EU regulated second markets. Most of the IPOs on these exchange‐regulated markets are offered exclusively to institutional investors, and are equivalent to private placements. These IPOs, which frequently raise only a few million euros, rarely develop liquid trading.     

Do today's trades affect tomorrow's IPO allocations?

Underwriters using bookbuilding can allocate shares of initial public offerings (IPOs) on the basis of, among other things, commissions paid by investors. In testing the hypothesis that investors trade liquid stocks in order to affect their IPO allocations, we find that money left on the table by IPOs is related to the trading volume of the 50 most liquid stocks near the offer date. For an IPO that leaves $1 billion on the table, there is abnormal volume of 2.7% to 4.1% in the 50 most liquid stocks over the six days ending on the day that trading commences in that IPO, although only during the internet bubble period is this volume increase statistically significant.     

Trading patterns of big versus small players in an emerging market: An empirical analysis

This study uses a Vector Autoregressive (VAR) model to examine interdependencies among institutional investors, big individual investors, and small individual investors, and the effects of their trading on stock returns on the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TSE). The results imply that, during the sample period, big individual investors are the most well informed players; their trading affects not only stock returns but also small individual investors. Small individual investors are not well informed and are slow learners. Their orders to trade tend to provide liquidity to institutional and big individual investors, but there is no compensation for their liquidity services. We find that institutional investors follow neither positive-feedback nor negative-feedback trading strategies. Overall, the responses to shocks, except for those of small individual investors, decay quickly, indicating that the TSE can absorb shocks quickly and efficiently. Our analysis implies that small individual investors would be better off institutionalizing their investment decisions (e.g., by investing in mutual funds).     

The Benefit of Excluding Institutional Investors from Fixed-Price IPOs: Evidence from Taiwan

A simple way to mitigate the winner's curse in initial public offerings (IPOs) is to reduce the number of informed investors in IPO markets. In Taiwan, institutional investors are not permitted to subscribe to fixed-price IPOs. Excluding institutional investors raises uninformed investors' allocation rates. We show that the winner's curse is still present in Taiwan's fixed-price IPO markets even without the participation of institutional investors, but that IPO underpricing is reduced by at least 4 percent due to alleviating the winner's curse, as institutional investors are excluded from the fixed-price offerings.     

A theory of the transition to secondary market trading of IPOs

We develop a model in which investment banks and institutional investors collaborate in smoothing an initial public offering's (IPOs) transition to secondary market trading. Their intervention promotes welfare under the assumption that significant new information arrives in the market in the immediate aftermath of the IPO. Under this assumption, it is optimal to stage the offering and suboptimal to commit to selling shares at a uniform price. The optimal strategy yields an economic rationale for secondary market price stabilization for IPOs carried out via a well-coordinated network of repeat institutional investors.     

IPO price performance and block-trading activities: Evidence from Hong Kong

This research studies whether the trading behavior of IPO block holders is informative to small investors. The results show that IPOs have more block trades initiated by sellers on the first trading day than seasoned stocks do, and the level of block-trading activities is negatively associated with IPOs' long-term performance. This research also examines the impacts of the change in rules for IPO share allocations – which aimed at realizing a more even allocation between large and small investors – on IPO block-trading activities. The findings support the hypothesis that IPO block holders may have superior information on newly-listed companies.     

Innovations in financing: The impact of anchor investors in Indian IPOs

In 2009, the Securities Exchange Board of India allowed qualified institutional investors to anchor initial public offerings (IPOs) by participating in the issue at a price and allocation publicly disclosed preceding the issue. We study anchor investors (AIs) in Indian IPOs during 2009–2017. We find the share allotment and the number of AIs separately have significant impacts on valuation and underpricing; however, the net effect is nonsignificant. Further, AIs significantly influence other institutional investors' participation in the IPO and induce lower aftermarket volatility. Overall, our evidence suggests that AIs boost demand for and mitigate ex ante information uncertainty of IPOs.     

Bookbuilding vs. fixed price revisited: The effect of aftermarket trading

Investors who possess information about the value of an IPO can participate in the offering as well as trade strategically in the aftermarket. Both the bookbuilding and the fixed price IPO selling methods require more underpricing when aftermarket trading by informed investors is considered. Bookbuilding becomes especially costly, since the potential for profit in the aftermarket adversely affects investors' bidding behavior in the premarket. Unless the underwriter can restrict its bookbuilding effort to a small enough subset of the informed investors, a fixed price strategy that allocates the issue to retail investors produces higher proceeds on average, contrary to the conventional wisdom in the literature. We therefore find a benefit to limiting access to the premarket and, hence, provide an efficiency rationale for the practice by American bankers of marketing IPOs to a select group of investors. We also provide unique policy and empirical implications.     

The Underpricing and Excess Returns of Initial Public Offerings in Taiwan Based on Noisy Trading: A Stochastic Frontier Model

Initial public offerings (IPOs) are typically offered at prices lower than the transaction price in the early aftermarket. With a stochastic frontier model, we measured the fair offer price of an IPO and then the deliberate IPO underpricing and the market misvaluation based on the estimated fair offer price. Our results show that IPOs are deliberately underpriced. The extent of noisy trading leading to significantly higher market transaction prices explains the excess IPO returns. We conclude that initial IPO returns result primarily from the noisy trading activities instead of the deliberate IPO underpricing.     

Do institutional investors play hide-and-sell in the IPO aftermarket?

We document a robust buy/sell asymmetry in the choice of the broker in the IPO aftermarket: institutions that sell IPO shares through non‑lead brokers tend to have bought them through the lead underwriters in the IPO aftermarket. This trading behavior is consistent with institutional investors hiding their sell trades and presumably breaking their laddering agreements with the lead underwriters. The asymmetry is the strongest in cold IPOs and is limited exclusively to the first month after the issue, when the incentives not to be detected are the strongest. We show that the intention to flip IPO allocations is not an important motive for hiding sell trades from the lead underwriters. We find that hiding sell trades is an effective strategy to circumvent underwriters' monitoring mechanisms: the more institutions hide their sell trades, the less they are penalized in subsequent IPO allocations.     

IPO flipping in Australia: cross-sectional explanations

We access electronic share settlement records for each subscriber and aftermarket investor in 419 Australian IPOs to investigate whether initial subscribers flip their allocations, and we relate this flipping behaviour to issuer, shareholder, underwriter and market characteristics. We find that the main determinants are underpricing (consistent with the disposition effect, i.e., a tendency to realise gains before losses), whether the IPO market is “hot” (a proxy for the representativeness heuristic) and ex ante risk characteristics. When flipping is analysed separately for underpriced and overpriced IPOs we find that the most overpriced IPOs are flipped more than the less overpriced ones, a result which contrasts the disposition effect. This result is due to the action of institutional, rather than individual, investors. We also relate flipping activity to the firm's long-run return, and find that the flipping behaviour of large (informed) investors is unrelated to long-run returns, while uninformed investors consistently flip more of the IPOs that have better long-run returns.     

Performance and diversification benefits of IPO-focused mutual funds

We investigate whether mutual funds that invest in initial public offerings (IPOs) outperform the Renaissance IPO Index, IPOX® 100 U.S. Index, and other comparable equity funds that do not invest in IPOs. We also explore whether investors gain diversification benefits by investing in IPO-focused mutual funds. Using a sample of active open-ended US equity mutual funds, we find that IPO-focused funds outperform the Renaissance IPO Index and comparable funds that do not invest in IPOs. Moreover, they provide investors with the benefit of diversification along with better returns. We also find the value added by active management based on IPO strategy.     

IPO Trading without Market Makers or Underwriter Price Support

We investigate the trading behavior and liquidity supply of Chinese initial public offerings (IPOs) that trade in an order‐driven market system with pure limit order books where no market makers or price support is allowed. We find large trades and quoted depths dominate the first day of trading, but this pattern quickly reverses as small trades and quoted depths are more prevalent on subsequent trading days. Quoted depths are positively related to the number of shares offered in the IPO and trade size, but are negatively related to underpricing. Trade size and transaction immediacy are positively related, and large and positive (negative) order imbalance is associated with more aggressive buys (sells). Finally, long‐run performance is not related to initial order imbalance. Overall, our results suggest that despite underwriters not participating in the IPO aftermarket, liquidity provision evolves very quickly and price discovery is immediately reflected in prices.     

An empirical investigation of whether Australian capital gains tax reforms influence individual investor behaviour

This paper examines whether an asset's qualification for discounted tax treatment is associated with positive abnormal trading volumes and negative abnormal returns, as would be predicted if investors modified their behaviour to reduce their tax liability. Our examination of 152 initial public offerings (IPOs) documents that there is an incremental increase in abnormal trading volume for those IPOs that have experienced a significant increase in price since listing over those IPOs that have increased only marginally. Although we provide only limited evidence to suggest that this increase in trading volume is accompanied by a decrease in returns, this is not unexpected in a market that has anticipated this type of behaviour by the relatively small proportion of individual investors able to benefit from the discounted tax treatment.     

Reversal of Monday returns

This paper elaborates an interesting aspect of the Monday anomaly: Monday returns are relatively more likely to reverse over the subsequent days. We document that, although the Monday low-return anomaly disappeared, the subsequent reversal of Monday returns remains robust to date. The reversals, measured over a five-day horizon, are pervasive across international stock markets, reasonably stable over time, significant following both positive and negative Monday returns, and not confined to extreme Monday returns. Trading strategies designed to exploit these reversals earn economic profits. We examine potential explanations for the reversal of Monday returns using trading flows data of investor types from Korea. All predictions of the Foster and Viswanathan [J. Finance, 1993, 48, 187–211] model are confirmed: volatility is higher, trading volume is lower, market depth is lower and price impact costs are higher on Mondays. The model implies lower price quality on Mondays, but does not specifically predict reversal of Monday returns. We show that the trading intensity of international/institutional investors is lower on Mondays. This appears to make the market relatively more susceptible to individual investors’ trading, which is negatively correlated with international/institutional investors. Thus, Monday returns are relatively more likely to reverse during the subsequent days of the week when institutional investors trade more aggressively.