We review the theory and evidence on IPO activity: why firms go public, why they reward first-day investors with considerable underpricing, and how IPOs perform in the long run. Our perspective on the literature is three-fold: First, we believe that many IPO phenomena are not stationary. Second,...

By investigating the entire IPO pricing process, beginning when the offering is filed, the paper contributes to the existing literature along four dimensions. First, price updates during the registration period are predictable based on firm and offer-specific characteristics known at the time...

We analyze institutional allocation in initial public offerings (IPOs) using a new dataset of US offerings between 1997 and 1998. We document a positive relationship between institutional allocation and day one IPO returns. This is partly explained by the practice of giving institutions more...

Equity market liberalizations are like IPOs, but they are IPOs of a country's stock market rather than of individual firms. Both are endogenous events whose benefits are limited by poor investor protection, agency costs, and information asymmetries. As for stock prices following an IPO, there...

We study theoretically and empirically the relationship between investor beliefs, ownership dispersion and stock returns. We find that high dispersion, measured by high breadth or low Herfindahl index, forecasts returns positively for large stocks, as in Chen, Hong and Stein (2002), but...

Using holdings data on a representative sample of all Shanghai Stock Exchange investors, we show that increases in ownership breadth (the fraction of market participants who own a stock) predict low returns: highest change quintile stocks underperform lowest quintile stocks by 23% per year....

Large institutional investors own an increasing share of equity markets. We conjecture that a financial market in which large institutions dominate operates differently than a market populated by smaller independent investors. To support this view, we show that funds within the same family...

This paper examines the book building mechanism for marketing initial public offerings. We present a model where the underwriter selects a group of investors along with a pricing and allocation mechanism in a way that maximizes the information generated during the process of going public at a...