Private placements provided by institutional or individual accredited investors are becoming an important financing tool for small public firms worldwide. However, private placement issuers offer, on average, poor returns. We explain this puzzle using 2,987 traditional private placements by...

Most of the analyses of small firms' decision to seek outside equity financing and the conditions thereof have concerned private firms. Knowledge of the risk and return of entrepreneurial ventures for outside investors is consequently limited. This paper attempts to fill this gap by examining...

Small Canadian listed firms issue private offerings more often than public offerings. We analyze the way the firms discriminate between competing selling mechanisms to minimize their issuance costs. We examine a sample of 799 private placements (PPs) and 469 seasoned equity offerings (SEOs)...

This paper proposes a new nonparametric test for conditional independence, which is based on the comparison of Bernstein copula densities using the Hellinger distance. The test is easy to implement because it does not involve a weighting function in the test statistic, and it can be applied in...