This paper investigates whether shareholder lockup agreements in France and Germany mitigate problems of agency and asymmetric information. Despite minimum requirements in terms of the length and percentage of shares locked up, lockup agreements are not only highly diverse across firms but also...

This paper examines the impact of venture-capital (VC) backing on the characteristics of voluntary lock-in agreements entered into by the existing shareholders of UK IPOs, and on the abnormal returns around the expiry of the directors' lock-in agreements. Overall, we find that venture-capital...

Most UK IPOs include lock-in agreements, which prevent the directors and other initial shareholders from selling their shares for a specified period after the IPO. Using a sample of 94 UK IPOs, we analyse their stock performance around the time of expiry of the lock-in agreements. We also look...

When a company offers shares in an initial public offering (IPO), existing owners often enter into lock-in agreements prohibiting them from selling shares for a specified period after the IPO. There is some recent U.S. evidence of predictable share-price movements at the time of expiry of these...

Most UK IPOs include lock-in agreements, which prevent the directors and other initial shareholders from selling their shares for a specified period after the IPO. Using a sample of 94 UK IPOs, we analyse their stock performance around the time of expiry of the lock-in agreement. We also look at...

This paper studies the short- and long-run share price performance of firms that have gone public on the Euro New Markets (EuroNMs) since their foundation in 1996/97. The initial and long-run returns are remarkable in four ways. First, underpricing is on average 2-3 times higher than that on the...

We propose that the long-run performance of IPOs is a function of pre-IPO factors, including managerial decisions and the firm's performance prior to going public. We relate long-run performance to a much richer set of explanatory factors than in the previous literature. Using a number of...

Over the last few years, national and international regulators have taken conscious steps to make capital markets - especially those based in Europe - more shareholder-oriented. On one side, these are welcome initiatives as the recent spectacular corporate failures and anecdotal evidence suggest...

This paper provides an overview of the German corporate governance system. We review the governance role of large shareholders, creditors, the product market and the supervisory board. We also discuss the importance of mergers and acquisitions, the market in block trades, and the lack of a...

In this paper, we analyse the short-term wealth effects of large (intra)European takeover bids. We find large announcement effects of 9% for target firms and a cumulative abnormal return that includes the price run-up over the two-month period prior to the announcement date of 23%. However, the...