Specified Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs) are a special type of public companies currently available to investors in financial markets. As an investment vehicle, modern SPACs are traced back to 18th century England where blank checks were first mentioned as blind pools during the infamous...

Assuming benevolent managers, the debt-overhang problem suggests that distressed firms generally refrain from issuing equity. In contrast, agency theory predicts that distressed firm managers have strong self-interests to finance even deteriorating projects through equity issuance. This paper...

This research considers the strategies on the initial public offering of company equity at the stock exchanges in the imperfect highly volatile global capital markets with the nonlinearities. We provide the IPO definition and compare the initial listing requirements on the various markets. We...

Using a sample of 418 private placements by firms on the Taiwan stock markets, we examine their announcement returns and post-issue performance. Placements are classified into three categories: recapitalization, investment, and general purpose. We find that issuers of private placements tend to...

Nearly 40% of IPO firms redact information from their SEC registration filings. These firms exhibit characteristics consistent with the need to shield proprietary information from potential rivals. They experience greater underpricing, but pre-IPO insiders reduce underpricing-related wealth...

The phenomena associated with the performance of newly listed companies has increased the interest of many researchers who have developed a vast literature on long-term underpricing and underperformance, which together with hot and cold issue markets, represent the three anomalies that have...

This study examines the association between real earnings management, governance attributes, and IPO failure risk. Using a sample of 4174 IPOs firms that went public over the period of 1998-2011, we find evidence that real earnings management and governance attributes are associated with IPO...

We use machine learning techniques to conduct out-of-sample predictions of the underpricing of U.S. initial public offerings (IPOs) from 1990 to 2019. Using predicted underpricing based on ex ante information to sort the IPOs into 10 groups, we find that the underpricing averages for the top and...

Were we to distill 2020 into a single word, from the capital markets’ perspective at least, it would certainly be SPACs, which – although to a different extent – are now having their momentum on both shores of the pond. If, in the US, SPACs are really enjoying a new lease of life due to...

Using novel data on employee stock purchase plans (ESPPs), we show that aggregate purchases of company stock by lower-level employees predict future stock returns. Firms in the top quartile of ESPP purchases outperform those in the bottom quartile by 10% in the year after purchase. The relation...