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...

This paper examines the debt underwriting relationship for banks. Publicly-traded investment and commercial banks (“banks”) are unique as they are the only firms capable of underwriting their own securities. In nearly 30% of their debt issuances, banks hire another underwriter and do so...

In April 2012, the JOBS Act was passed to help revitalize the IPO market, especially for small firms. During the year ending March 2014, IPO volume and proportion of small firm issuers was the largest since 2000. Controlling for market conditions, we estimate that the JOBS Act has led to 21...

A competing risk hazard model is employed to examine the reasons for Hong Kong's Growth Enterprise (GEM) companies transferring to the Main Board (MB) in the period 2000-2012. In our sample during the period 21 companies or 15% of the original stock moved up to the MB. The modal life expectancy...

This paper examines the impact of economic policy uncertainty on initial public offering (IPO) underpricing, using a large sample of IPO firms in China. We find that heightened economic policy uncertainty leads to increasing IPO underpricing. Our results are robust to a battery of sensitivity...

When companies raise equity finance they have to make two choices: the issuing method (cash versus rights) and, when they choose the rights issue method, whether rights should be traded or not. We study these choices using a sample of 15,751 rights issues and 22,016 cash offers announced during...

We examine the relation between litigation risk and IPO underpricing and test two aspects of the litigation-risk hypothesis: (1) firms with higher litigation risk underprice their IPOs by a greater amount as a form of insurance (insurance effect) and (2) higher underpricing lowers expected...

This Article examines a third exit option in venture capital to supplement IPOs and trade sales: secondary markets for the sale of individual ownership interests in start-ups and venture capital (VC) funds. While investors can readily buy shares in publicly-traded companies, until recently they...