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...

A questionnaire survey of investors in initial public offerings (IPO's) was undertaken to learn about patterns of investor behavior that might be relevant to theories of their underpricing. Respondents were asked for their perception of the allocation process, their concern with stockbroker or...

We document that net equity issuance is considerably more sensitive to aggregate stock returns and Q's than to firm-level stock returns and Q's. Very similar patterns also emerge when we look at merger activity. In light of earlier work (Campbell 1991, Vuolteenaho 2002) which finds that...

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...

Financial economists in recent years have closely examined and intensely debated the performance of initial public offerings using data after the formation of NASDAQ. The paper seeks to shed light on this controversy by undertaking a large, out-of-sample study: we examine the performance for up...

A number of studies claim that aggregate managerial decision variables, such as aggregate equity issuance, have power to predict stock or bond market returns. Recent research argues that these results may be driven by an aggregate time-series version of Schultz's (2003) pseudo market timing...

Returns in emerging capital markets are very different from returns in developed markets. While most previous research has focused on average returns, we analyze the volatility of the returns in emerging equity markets. We characterize the time-series of volatility in emerging markets and...

The emergence of new equity markets in Europe, Latin America, Asia, the Mideast and Africa provides a new menu of opportunities for investors. These markets exhibit high expected returns as well as high volatility. Importantly, the low correlations with developed countries' equity markets...

Firm-level stock returns exhibit comovement above that in fundamentals, and the gap tends to be higher in developing countries. We investigate whether correlated beliefs among sophisticated, but imperfectly informed, traders can account for the patterns of return correlations across countries....