An empirical investigation of Yankee stock offerings

This paper examines the operating and investment performance of 100 foreign firms that conduct their initial public offerings (IPOs) in the U.S. (Yankee stock offerings). The uniqueness of these firms is that the U.S. IPOs are their first public equity issue in any market, including the home market. We find significant improvement in the operating performance subsequent to these U.S. IPO events and firms from countries with poor investor protection benefit more. Compared to various benchmarks, unlike the significant underperformance of IPOs documented in many countries, these firms show no significant abnormal long-run stock market performance after 1, 3, or 5 years of seasoning. The findings are consistent with signaling and selective entry hypotheses.