"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 goingpublic 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 nearly absent for emerging market IPOs. We hypothesize that extra-legal institutions, including financial...

We study the impact of country-level short selling constraints on IPO underpricing. Examining 17,151 IPOs from 36 countries, we find that IPO underpricing tends to be greater in countries that ban short selling or security lending and in countries where short selling is not practiced....