This paper examines the impact of securities regulation and exchange listing standards on the valuation of venture capital-backed IPOs in Canada and the United States. We use a sample of IPOs in both countries matched by size and sector over the 1986-2007 period. The data strongly indicate...

We analyze the economic consequences of disclosure and regulation within a context of significant information asymmetry and lenient regulation. In Canada, firms can enter the stock market at a pre-revenue stage by fulfilling each of the requirements of an initial public offerings or using...

In this paper, we empirically investigate Canadian initial public offerings (IPOs) to provide one case on the international evidence on the long-run performance of IPOs. Specifically, we examine whether the choice of a performance measurement methodology directly determines both the size and...

We measure the long-run performance of 141 Canadian IPOs between 1986 and 2000, using continuously rebalanced and purged control portfolios (size and book-to-market ratios). Results remain relatively similar irrespective of whether we use an event-time approach (buy-and-hold abnormal returns and...

Evidence of underpricing of initial public offerings (IPOs) has spawned a considerable theoretical literature attempting to explain the apparent contradiction to market efficiency. This article reassesses that evidence by examining not just common shares Canadian IPOs, but also unit and Junior...

I consider the problem of the design of an optimal self-selecting contract scheme for a principal who is buying a good from an agent which has the opportunity of making a cost-reducing unobservable investment prior to the contracting stage. Because of a hold-up problem, the agent will randomize...

We analyze optimal trading mechanisms in environments where each trader owns some units of a good to be traded and may be either a seller or a buyer, depending on the realization of privately observed valuations. First, the concept of virtual valuation is extended to ex ante unidentified...

In a general framework with independent private values of the bidders, we propose a game, with a simple economic interpretation, that allows implementing the optimal auction outcome when the seller ignores the distributions of the different bidders' valuations. In this robust or detail-free...