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....

We propose an “M&A activity” hypothesis as a partial explanation for IPO underpricing. When going public during active corporate control markets, managers may take actions intended to safeguard their control. In support of this conjecture, we find that pre-IPO M&A activity directly explains...

In 2005-2006 China reformed its stock market by eliminating non-tradable shares. The regulator set general guidelines and then assigned responsibility for implementation to each company. We derive relations that should have been followed by the prices of stocks and exploit a company-level data...

During 2005-2006, the Chinese government implemented a reform aimed at eliminating the so-called non-tradable shares (NTS), shares typically held by the State or by politically connected institutional investors that were issued at the early stage of financial market development. Our analysis,...