By studying the only mandatory pre-IPO market in the world – Taiwan's Emerging Stock Market (ESM), we document that pre-market prices are very informative about post-market prices and that the informativeness increases with a stock's liquidity. The ESM price-earnings ratio shortly before the...

More frequent, larger, and more recent debt and equity issues in the prior three fiscal years are followed by lower stock returns in the subsequent year. The intercept of a q-factor calendar-time regression for the value-weighted portfolio of firms with at least three large issues is -0.63% per...

Given their actual revenue and spending, most net equity issuers and an overwhelming majority of net debt issuers would face immediate cash depletion without external financing. Debt issuers tend to have short-lived cash needs while equity issuers often have persistent cash needs. On average,...

We examine over 7,400 analyst recommendations in the year after going public for IPOs from 1999-2000. Initiations at the end of the quiet period come almost exclusively from affiliated analysts, while initiations afterwards are predominantly from unaffiliated analysts. Once we control for...

Growth capital investing is the financing of growing businesses that are investing in tangible assets and the acquisition of other companies. Growth capital is common in retailing, restaurant chains, and health care management, and represents 12% of all venture capital (VC)-backed initial public...

We study the predictive power of patents on the long-run performance of venture capital (VC)-backed initial public offerings (IPOs). We show that VC-backed IPOs that have at least one patent at the time of the IPO substantially outperform other VC-backed IPOs, with 3-year buy-and-hold...

Initial public offering (IPO) activity in Europe has recently come to a near-halt and, similarly to the US, this decline has been more pronounced among small firm IPOs. Three alternative explanations have been proposed: the economies of scope hypothesis states that getting big fast has become...

Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) IPOs boomed starting in 2020. While SPAC IPO investors have earned 12.0% per year, returns for investors in merged companies are more complex. They have earned -7.3% in the first year on common shares but 64.4% on warrants. We rationalize why certain...

We review the theory and evidence on IPO activity: why firms go public, why they reward first-day investors with considerable underpricing, and how IPOs perform in the long run. Our perspective on the literature is three-fold: First, we believe that many IPO phenomena are not stationary. Second,...