Studying 13,426 IPOs issued in 22 countries between 1998 and 2018, I find robust evidence that greater economic policy uncertainty (EPU) is associated with larger first-day returns. A one standard deviation increase in the EPU index is associated with an additional $1.84 million “left on the...

Greater partisan alignment among lawmakers enhances their ability to respond rapidly to adverse shocks, but it also undermines the quality of checks and balances and encourages excessive governmental intervention in local areas aligned with the ruling party. We investigate how this form of local...

This paper examines the impact of economic policy uncertainty on initial public offering (IPO) underpricing, using a large sample of IPO firms in China. We find that heightened economic policy uncertainty leads to increasing IPO underpricing. Our results are robust to a battery of sensitivity...

We study the association between environmental, social, and governance (ESG) government risk management and firm-level IPO underpricing between 2008 and 2018. Examining 7,446 IPOs issued in 36 countries, we find that IPO underpricing tends to be lower in countries with higher ESG Government...

We examine the relation between litigation risk and IPO underpricing and test two aspects of the litigation-risk hypothesis: (1) firms with higher litigation risk underprice their IPOs by a greater amount as a form of insurance (insurance effect) and (2) higher underpricing lowers expected...

I find that U.S. IPO prospectus disclosure exhibits significant correlation with first day underpricing, consistent with theories of underpricing as caused by informational asymmetry. In particular, a 1 standard deviation increase in positive prospectus disclosure is associated with almost a...