We analyze the optimality of allowing disclosures of different types of information before equity offerings and of alternative rules for private securities litigation, where courts may penalize unduly optimistic disclosures ex post. In our model, firm insiders, with private information about...

An IPO is one of the most important events in the life-cycle of a developing firm. The going-public decision is, however, complicated by the persistently cyclical market for public offerings. This Chapter analyzes the macroeconomic determinants of IPO market cyclicality alongside the strategic...

We examine the choice and the offer spreads between callable and non-callable bonds. We find significant differences by industry sector so our results are segmented by financial and non-financial industries. For the financial sector, the popularity of callable and non-callable bonds is...

Rating agencies produce ratings used by investors, but obtain most of their revenue from issuers, leading to a conflict of interest. We employ a unique data set on the use of non-rating services, and the associated payments, in India, to test if this conflict affects ratings quality. Agencies...

Syndicated loan offerings exhibit U-shaped underpricing. We develop a model of loan underwriting that incorporates the lead bank's loan retention to explain this phenomenon. The bank partially adjusts the offer price for “hot” loans with strong demand, resulting in underpricing to induce...

Based on a dataset including 11,636 private debt placements issued globally between 1999 and 2016, we investigate the association between borrower-lender information asymmetry and the cost of debt for issuers. We observe that information asymmetry due to being a private or unrated firm is...

We characterize optimal IPO design in the distinct adverse selection problems: one affecting the IPO stage and one arising in the after-market. Allocating shares to an investor with superior information in the after-market depresses the share's value to less informed investors. However, because...

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to model asymmetric information and study the profitability of venture capital (VC) backed initial public offerings (IPOs). Our mixtures approach endogenously separates IPOs into differentiated groups based on their returns' determinants. We also analyze...

Using word content analysis on the time-series of IPO prospectuses, we find evidence that issuers trade off underpricing and strategic disclosure as potential hedges against litigation risk. This tradeoff explains a significant fraction of the variation in prospectus revision patterns, IPO...