The lack of data on private firms has made it difficult to empirically examine theories of why firms go public. However, both public and private banks must disclose financial information to regulators. We exploit this requirement to explore the going-public decision. Our results indicate that...

Country-level institutional quality is positively correlated with the underpricing of initial public offerings (IPOs). The association is strong for IPOs issued in developed markets, but absent for emerging-market IPOs. We hypothesize that extra-legal institutions, including financial reporting...

We find that relative to fundamentals, dual-class firms trade at lower prices than do single-class firms, both at the IPO and for at least the subsequent 5 years. The lower prices attached to duals do not foreshadow abnormally low stock or accounting returns. Moreover, some types of CEO turnover...

We analyze a sample of dual and single class initial public offerings (IPOs) to investigate whether empirical estimates of underpricing determinants are consistent across alternative measures of firm size and alternative techniques intended to account for underwriter price stabilization efforts....