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...

Over the past two decades, private equity has contributed to a shrinking of the U.S. stock market. We develop a political economy model of private equity activity to study the wider economic consequences of this trend. We show that private and social incentives to delist firms from the stock...

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...

This study investigates the role of repeated interactions between venture capital firms and unaffiliated investment banks in the IPO process. Our main findings are threefold. First, we find strong evidence of venture capital investors' influence on their portfolio firms' underwriter choice...

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...

Much of the new equity declined by existing shareholders in UK SEOs is bought in a few large blocks, both by other existing holders and by new investors. The paper argues that a placing process via negotiation with investors facilitates the purchase of large blocks better than the alternative...

This article jointly examines the differences of laboratory versions of the Dutch clock open auction, a sealed-bid auction to represent book building, and a two-stage sealed bid auction to proxy for the “competitive IPO”, a recent innovation used in a few European equity initial public...

Information-based theories of financial intermediation focus on delegated monitoring. However, there is little evidence on how markets discipline intermediaries who fail at this function. We exploit the direct link between corporate fraud and monitoring failure and examine how a venture capital...

Characteristics of the investment banking industry, particularly the extreme concentration of spreads at exactly 7%, seem consistent with some form of collusion through which underwriters can extract surplus from the IPO. I present a model of investment banking that, under the assumption of...