Initial public offering (IPO) companies are exempt from Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, leaving investors to assess the quality of an IPO company's internal controls, which affect the quality of management-provided financial information, without an opinion on internal controls...

The Securities Act of 1933 governs the going public process and the accompanying registration statement submissions to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The Jumpstart Our Business Start-ups (JOBS) Act of 2012 created several accommodations under the SEC securities laws for a new...

The initial public offering (IPO) market is characterized by large, periodic swings in new issue volume, commonly referred to as hot and cold markets. We compare IPO assurance fees over these cycles controlling for factors that are potentially associated with hot IPO markets. We find that...

In the mid-2000s, the European Union (EU) adopted a number of regulatory reforms intended to increase transparency and disclosure for IPO firms, including mandating the use of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). The reforms also included (1) adoption of the Prospectus Directive...

Using a sample of up to 2,503 IPOs in 32 countries in the years 2011-2017, we predict and find that higher levels of country-level accounting enforcement are associated with less underpricing. We show that accounting enforcement matters for the cost of going public: Countries with a relatively...

This paper empirically analyzes the short run performance of Tunisian initial public offerings (IPO). It sheds light on the determinants of IPO's in a context of a frontier market characterized by high information asymmetry, low information efficiency, thin trading and the presence of...

We find that the degree of expected idiosyncratic skewness in seasoned equity issuers' stock returns is an important determinant of flotation costs and subsequent abnormal stock performance. High skewness issuers incur significantly greater offer price discounts, particularly when institutional...