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The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the choice of underwriters, venture capital (VC) support, industry and their interactions have any impact on the long‐term performance of initial public offerings (IPOs).

Using standard event study methodology, 12 months of abnormal monthly returns for 1,772 IPOs are obtained. ANOVA and regression analyses are performed on both abnormal returns (ARs) and cumulative ARs to investigate the effect of underwriter choice, VC support and industry and their interactions on the long‐term performance of IPOs.

Under a multi‐factor framework, only significant underwriter and VC effects are found. Short‐term price momentum and long‐term price reversal pattern is most pronounced for IPOs that are underwritten by leading investment banks and backed by venture capitalists. The beginning of price reversal coincides with the expiration of IPO lockup period. Although by the end of the first year, IPOs on average underperform the market, investors can earn above market returns by investing in IPOs that are underwritten by leading investment banks and backed by venture capitalists, and divest before the expiration of the lockup period.

The results are limited by the accuracy of the models used in measuring ARs.

The results seem to suggest that a profitable investment strategy may be implemented with regard to IPOs.

The paper analyzes the various effects and their interactions on the long‐term performance of IPOs.

This paper aims to study characteristics of specified purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) and examine the performance of their securities over time.

Previous findings in literature on SPACs' performance around the announcement of merger date are scarce, not uniform, and mostly address the performance of SPACs' common shares. The authors believe that more insights on merger announcements can be obtained if the perf]ormance of all three types of securities that SPACs issue during the IPO, namely units, common stocks, and warrants are analyzed simultaneously. In order to examine the behavior of these securities we form three samples with daily returns for three distinguished SPAC securities. Results are obtained for abnormal returns based on the market model from Brown and Warner.

It is found that SPACs represent a fairly unique way to raise capital. The incentives of their founders, underwriters, and investors are interdependent and successful business combinations generally result in significant returns to founders. The analysis shows that SPACs have a complex corporate structure in which the incentives of the founders, underwriters, and investors are interdependent and where successful mergers result in significant returns to the founders. It also shows that different SPAC securities do not exhibit similar reactions in response to announcements regarding their corporate status. While holders of all three securities realize positive abnormal returns on the merger announcement day, the strongest reaction is observed among the investors holding warrants, while common stock holders react very mildly.

SPACs are recent phenomena in capital markets and very few papers in finance literature describe them. None of the existing papers evaluated performance of all three types of SPAC securities: units, common shares and warrants before this paper.

This study examines whether a regulation on mandatory disclosure of financial forecasts since June 1991 and further sanction imposition since March 1998 contribute to lower IPO firms’ initial and aftermarket returns, and shorten honeymoon periods. The study is based on 423 IPO firms after the regulation required them to disclose their forecasts and 53 IPO firms prior to the regulation. The findings report that initial and aftermarket returns are lower, and honeymoon periods are shorter in the post‐regulation period than those in the pre‐regulation. The findings also report that initial and aftermarket returns are relatively smaller, and the honeymoon periods are shorter after the March 1998 regulatory sanction was imposed after controlling other variables. These results document that the financial forecasts disclosure regulation evidently contributes to mitigating information asymmetry.

The purpose of this study is to assess how the information disclosed in prospectuses impacted the initial public offering (IPO) underpricing at a time of high government interference amid the ongoing pandemic.

The design of this study has several tracks, namely, a macro-level track, which is represented by the government measures to halt the pandemic; a micro-level track, which is followed by textual analysis of IPO prospectuses; and, finally, a machine learning track, in which the authors use state-of-the-art tools to improve their linear regression model.

The authors found that strict government anti-COVID-19 measures indeed contribute to the reduction of the IPO underpricing. Interestingly, the mere fact of such measures taking place is enough to take effect on financial markets, regardless of the resulting efficiency of such measures. At the micro-level, the authors show that prospectus sentiments and their significance differ across prospectus sections. Using linear regression and machine learning models, the authors find robust evidence that such sections as “Risk factors”, “Prospectus summary”, “Financial Information” and “Business” play a crucial role in explaining the underpricing. Their effect is different, namely, it turns out that the more negative “Risk factors” and “Financial Information” sentiment, the higher the resulting underpricing. Conversely, the more positive “Prospectus summary” and “Business” sentiments appear, the lower the resulting underpricing is. In addition, we used machine learning methods. Consisting of more than 580 IPO prospectuses, the study sample required modern and powerful machine learning tools like Isolation Forest for pre-processing or Random Forest Regressor and Light Gradient Boosting Model for modelling purposes, which enabled the authors to gain better results compared to the classic linear regression model.

At the micro level, this study is not confined to 2020, but also embraces 2021, the year of the record number of IPOs held. Moreover, in this paper, these were prospectuses that served as a source of management sentiment. In addition, the authors used a tailor-made government stringency index. At the micro level, basing the study on behavioural finance hypotheses, the authors conducted both separate and holistic analysis of prospectuses to assess investors’ reaction to different aspects of IPO companies as well as to the characteristics of the IPOs themselves. Lastly, the authors introduced a few innovations to the research methodology. Textual analysis was conducted on a corpus of prospectuses included in a study sample. However, the authors did not use pre-trained dictionaries, but instead opted for FLAIR, a modern open-source framework for natural language processing.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relevance of information, transparency and information efficiency in short-run performance of new issues. The current research evaluates the short-run performance of IPOs during 2005-2012, which even includes the recessionary period. The present study evaluates the impact of informational variables on first-day returns.

The short-run performance of the IPOs is measured through market adjusted excess return. A structural equation model (SEM) has been designed to identify how information influences the short-run performance of IPOs.

The results of structural model reveal that the sale of promoters’ stake and underwriters’ reputation are the major contributors towards information and are found to be highly significant statistically. The model also shows that the issue size (a component of information) is statistically insignificant at 5 per cent. The model suggests that the availability of information has negative impact on the first day returns indicating that the issuer which disclose maximum information to the public get lower returns on the listing day and hence, their issues are less underpriced.

The present study has a contribution in investment decisions for global investors, as the participation of international investors is common in IPOs of emerging markets. The findings of the study are expected to be useful to the practitioners in predicting the pricing of IPOs based on the informational variables influencing their performance.

One of the key elements of survival models is that they enable the researcher to determine whether the length of time an individual (or economic entity) spends in a particular state affects the probability of exiting that state. Natural applications in economics and finance include the analysis of unemployment spells, corporate bankruptcies and mortgage pre‐payments. The distinguishing feature of most applications is the definitive event that marks the transition from the origin to the transition state. We believe that limiting the use of survival analysis to applications in which the event duration appears to be ‘naturally’ available is an unnecessary constraint. For example, the date of emergence from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection is a subjective management decision and the true event duration, though treated as definitive, is in reality quite ambiguous. We propose that survival models can and should be extended to analyze researcher‐defined events such as the length of time a stock takes to reach a preset price target. We illustrate our point with an examination of IPO aftermarket behavior.

The purpose of this paper is to review recent contributions to the theoretical and empirical literature on informational cascades.

This paper reviews and synthesises the existing literature, methodologies and evidence on informational cascades.

Many financial settings foster situations where informational cascades and herding are likely. Cascades remain mainly an area of experimental research, leaving the empirical evidence inconclusive. Existing measures have limitations that do not allow for a direct test of cascading behaviour. More accurate models and methods for empirical testing of informational cascades could provide more conclusive evidence on the matter.

Outlined findings have implications for designing policies and regulatory requirements, as well as for the design of collective decisions processes.

The paper reviews and critiques existing theory; it summarises the recent laboratory and empirical evidence and identifies issues for future research. Most of other theoretical work reviews informational cascades as a subsection of herding. This paper focusses on informational cascades specifically. It distinguishes between informational cascade and herding. The paper also reviews most recent empirical evidence on cascades, presents review and synthesis of the theoretical and empirical development on information cascades up to date, and reviews the model of informational cascades with model criticism.

This paper aims to study how primary and secondary market investors react to intangibles information disclosed in Italian IPOs. Previous literature on intangibles information disclosure as a determinant of IPO underpricing has reported inconsistent results; moreover, an area that has remained unexplored is to what extent different categories of market investors react to such information disclosure.

Based on a sample of firms listed on the Italian Stock Exchange, the authors use factor analysis to uncover the most relevant intangible assets disclosed in IPO prospectuses; this information is then included in a series of regressions which read into the reaction of primary and secondary market investors by means of price variations.

Primary market investors are found to be more sensitive to information regarding the company’s attitude towards its human capital and to that describing its innovation capacity in terms of IT and R&D investment. Secondary market investors are more sensitive to strategic alliances, research and development and future plans.

The findings can be generalized, but the empirical evidence would be more relevant if tested in different geographical contexts (i.e. Europe and/or the USA).

The empirical results could help firms be more selective in their disclosure, thus possibly soothing management’s concerns regarding an overly extensive, and therefore risky, dissemination of non-financial information and avoiding them to incur unnecessary costs.

Being aware of how the stock market reacts to the information disclosed is crucial in determining new regulations and accounting standards.

The authors introduce an unbiased categorization of intangibles variables that supplants the multiple classifications proposed in the literature, and the authors set apart the reaction of primary and secondary market IPO investors to the intangible information disclosure.

The purpose of this study is to examine the role of venture capital (VC) in supporting corporate growth and innovation through participation in private placements. While VC provides essential financial support to companies, it remains unclear whether this involvement serves a strategic investment role or a purely financial one. This study seeks to elucidate the role of VC by analyzing changes in the price discount of private placements following VC participation.

The authors take the private placement events of China A share listed companies from April 2005 to January 2023 as the sample, and examine the influence of VC subscriptions on price discount rate.

VC subscriptions to private placements increase information asymmetry, consequently raising the discount rate. This relationship is influenced by the transaction characteristics and information environment. Specifically, VC subscriptions further elevate the discount rate when VC are geographically dispersed from the issuers, possess industry expertise in the issuers’ sector, allocate raised funds for asset restructuring or non-digital investments and when the issuers are in their growth stages. Moreover, the positive correlation between VC subscriptions and the discount rate is more pronounced under conditions of lower internal control quality and weaker external media supervision. Higher discount rates in VC-subscribed private placements result in lower R&D investment and investment efficiency by the issuers, leading to larger-scale VC sell-offs and ultimately diminishing the market and financial performance of the issuers.

The issuers should diligently assess the behaviors and motives of VC and selectively choose issuance targets and methods to manage risks associated with price deviations in private placements. Additionally, this study recommends that regulatory authorities develop a more detailed regulatory framework that considers transaction characteristics and the information environment. This strategy should help optimize external regulatory measures like media coverage and protect the interests of small and medium-sized investors.

This study extends research on the “name chasing” motive and certification effect of VC in private placements, enriches the literature on the mechanisms forming discount rates and provides insights for refining regulatory policies on private placements.

In this chapter we investigate whether the pricing of IPOs on Europe’s new stock market differs from that of IPOs on main market segments. We report a 22.3 percentage point difference in the average first-day return of new market IPOs (34.3%) and the average first-day return of main market IPOs (12%). We show that reduced incentives to control wealth losses and different firm and offer characteristics partially explain the higher average first-day return on new market segments. We also find that the bundling of IPO deals has been more important to control underpricing costs on new market than on main market segments.