monitoring as a motivation for ipo underpricing brennan and franks 1997 and stoughton and zechner 1998 provide contrasting arguments for why monitoring considerations create incentives for managers to underprice their firms ipos initial public offerings like smart and zutter 2003 we examine these arguments using a sample of u s ipos however we find evidence that the determinants of initial returns institutional shareholdings and post ipo likelihood of acquisition are not consistent with these arguments thus we conclude that monitoring considerations are not important determinants of ipo underpricing evidence that the prices of unseasoned new issues of common stock ipos in early secondary market trading are substantially higher on average than their offer prices has evoked an extensive literature trying to explain such underpricing while prior literature has tended to focus on uncertainty asymmetric information stories for such underpricing e g rock 1986 and benveniste and spindt 1989 recent literature has suggested that post ipo ownership considerations are also important more specifically this literature has suggested that monitoring considerations create incentives for managers to underprice their firm s stock in its first public offering brennan and franks 1997 for example argue that insiders have an incentive to underprice the ipo of their firm s stock in order to ensure its wide distribution thereby reducing the likelihood of being monitored or removed by new shareholders particularly institutional shareholders brennan and franks call their hypothesis the reduced monitoring hypothesis consistent with their hypothesis for a sample of 69 u k ipos during 1986 to 1989 they find that 1 smaller applicants are allocated a larger share of oversubscribed underpriced issues and 2 the size and amount of subsequent outside large shareholdings are inversely related to the firm s degree of ipo underpricing 1

why initial public offerings are underpriced evidence from switzerland abstract the underpricing of initial public offerings is a well documented phenomenon for almost every equity market that has been examined in switzerland for a sample of 42 stocks that were issued in the market between 1983 and 1989 a 35 8 percent average initial return between the offering price and the closing price on the first trading day is found in switzerland the excess returns from offering price persist for at least three years however if the purchase is made at the first day s closing price then the three year returns are negative the paper discusses special institutional settings in the swiss stock market and provides some explanations implying that underpricing can be regarded as an equilibrium situation

the winner s curse problem interest costs and the underpricing of initial public offerings this paper provides the first direct test of the winner s curse problem proposed by k rock 1986 as an explanation to the underpricing of initial public offerings moreover it tests the proposition that the underpricing of initial public offerings in the united kingdom is due to the combined effect of the winner s curse problem and the particular nature of the settlement mechanism applicable in the british new issues market the evidence demonstrates that when these two factors winner s curse problems and interest rate costs are taken into consideration the emerging first day net returns are on average markedly lower than the level of actual underpricing consistently superior performance can only be achieved by predicting the market s response to the individual new issue the results however indicate that such predictive ability is largely unattainable copyright 1990 by royal economic society

the economics of investor protection isds versus national treatment abstract investor state dispute settlements isds are supposed to protect foreign investors against domestic policies causing unjustified harm this paper scrutinizes the effects of isds and national treatment provisions in a two period model where foreign investment is subject to a hold up problem it shows that isds may increase welfare but comes with additional regulatory distortions in the first period a national treatment provision avoids these regulatory distortions but implies entry distortions because it makes the hold up problem also apply to domestic firms if the domestic regulatory framework applies to many domestic firms a national treatment provision welfare dominates isds

ipo underpricing in supply and demand framework evidence from a market of retailers abstracthow do supply demand and allocation of shares on the underpricing of initial public offerings ipos affect the shape and steepness of supply and demand curves theoretical studies posit that subscribers flip in ipos immediately on the listing day to capture instantaneous profits consistent with this hypothesis we find that both curves of the market listing day of ipos are significantly negatively sloped with the supply curve being much steeper and above the demand curve the excess demand that occurs during the subscription period becomes excess supply once the shares start to float on the listing day overall we establish a strong empirical link between the underpricing puzzle and the aftermarket interaction of ipos

ipos signalling effects for speculative stock detection evidence from the stock exchange of thailand abstractusing a unique data set from the thai stock market about the so called turnover list tol of speculative stocks spanning the period 2004 2012 we investigate and provide new evidence on the relationship between ipos pricing effects and subsequent classification as speculative investments to be more specific we examine the signalling effects for the detection of speculative stocks in relation to the degree of their prior ipos underpricing we also employ the market feedback hypothesis to investigate this signalling process our results reveal a significant positive relationship between the magnitudes of the ipo underpricing and the probability of an ipo firm being classified officially as speculative on the tol furthermore we find that a 6 month abnormal return after going public increases the probability of speculative dealing in the ipos next we consider all listed firms in the thai stock market and highlight the role of both abnormal return and trading volume in the transmission of pr

opportunism corruption and the multinational firm s mode of entry abstract the paper develops a theoretical approach to the boundaries of the multi national firm in the context of institutional constraints in host countries focusing especially on corruption the model incorporates two types of corruption petty bureaucratic corruption and high level political corruption the model predicts that in the absence of corruption multinational firms will prefer fdi internal expansion with strong control rights to debt arm s length expansion with loose control rights the weaker the host country s ability to commit however both types of corruption shift the trade off marginally toward debt cross country panel empirical evidence supports these conclusions corruption has a second order marginal effect and matters mostly through its interaction with political risk

litigation risk and ipo underpricing abstract we examine the relation between 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 litigation costs deterrence effect to adjust for the endogeneity bias in previous studies we use a simultaneous equation framework evidence provides support for both aspects of the litigation risk hypothesis

what a difference a month makes stock analyst valuations following initial public offerings we examine how analysts establish target prices for ipo firms and whether comparable firms used to support target prices are helpful in explaining ipo offer prices during the bubble period of 1999 to 2000 the average offer price was set at a discount relative to comparable firm valuations in contrast the average offer price was set at a small premium relative to comparables in the pre bubble period this shift appears to hold even after controlling for the differences in the types of firms going public during the bubble period moreover target prices of ipo firms were set at a higher premium relative to comparables during the bubble period while our results suggest that underwriters systematically dis counted offer prices during the bubble period an alternative explanation is that the shift arose because underwriters and analysts faced different incentives and legal exposures dur ing the bubble period

technology agglomeration and regional competition for investment competition for firms by region has a long standing history and the academic literature has debated whether such competition is efficient we develop a model that explores technology development by firms facing regional competition for their invest ment and examine the endogenous determination of region policy firm technology and agglomeration externalities we find a new source of inefficiency regional competition leads firms to inefficiently distort their development and selection of production tech nology to improve their standing in the regional competition for their investment we show that these inefficient firm decisions on technology and location can also weaken agglomeration externalities jel classification h71 l2

allocation of initial public offerings and flipping activity abstract there is a general perception that the large trading volume in initial public offerings is mostly due to flippers that are allocated shares in the offering and immediately resell them on average however flipping accounts for only 19 of trading volume and 15 of shares offered during the first two days of trading institutions do more flipping than retail customers and hot ipos are flipped much more than cold ipos institutions do not quickly flip cold ipos to take advantage of price support activities by the underwriter explicit penalty bids are rarely assessed against flippers

tax competition when governments lack commitment excess capacity as a countervailing threat consider a multinational firm that can produce for the world market from two countries in each country the firm has to make a costly ex ante investment in capacity after which each government chooses a tax rate and then the firm determines output levels if there were only one country there would be the standard timeinconsistency problem the government would set a confiscatory tax ex post the firm would realize this ex ante and no investment would be made the interesting point of this paper is that the situation is very different when there are two countries the firm invests in both countries so as to gain leverage ex post if the firm holds more capacity than is needed to meet world demand then this induces tax competition for capacity utilization among governments ex post because the firm can threaten to serve the market at least partially from a plant in a different country competition leads to low enough tax rates to justify the initial investment in excess capacity when capacity costs are sufficiently low when capacity costs are too high the firm will not invest at all as the standard timeinconsistency problem suggests thus the paper generates and combines tax competition and lack of government commitment within a single framework the above logic provides also a novel argument for becoming a multinational firm there is some evidence in support of the strategic use of excess capacity for example general motors gm announced it will build almost identical plants in several risky countries which allows gm to shift production easily at the same time the newly established capacity will probably exceed gm s sales another application is the problem of how multinationals export oil from the caspian sea the caspian sea is surrounded by politically unstable countries multinationals started to build and lobby for multiple pipelines through several countries in order to keep transit fees low these and other applications are discussed in more detail in section v the paper sheds new light on the relationship between multinational firms and host governments on the one hand a multinational firm can be viewed as the powerful agent in the relationship because the firm decides in which country to invest eager governments often offer substantial tax benefits in order to attract investment this view is underlying the literature on tax competition see for example john d wilson 1986 dan a black and william h hoyt 1989 ian king et al 1993 on the other hand and in a separate literature multinational firms are portrayed as the potential victims of host governments who may renege on tax promises after the firm has made a sunk investment and has become partially immobile see for example eric w bond and larry samuelson 1989 chris doyle and sweder van wijnbergen 1994 jonathan thomas and tim worrall 1994 hence the host government is the powerful agent and this may lead to underinvestment if anticipated by the firm 2 while both views capture elements of truth it is unsatisfactory that our understanding of the relationship seems to department of economics university of colorado boulder co 80309 e mail janeba colorado edu this research was undertaken while i was at indiana university in bloomington i am grateful to mike baye susanne janeba dave schmidt greg shaffer jay wilson and two anonymous referees as well as participants at the stanford institute for theoretical economics 1998 and workshop participants at the universities of bonn colorado indiana michigan munich pennsylvania state and toronto for very helpful comments the usual disclaimer applies l in a different context patrick j kehoe 1989 considers also tax competition after a private sector decision is made in his model however atomistic individuals decide on savings and cannot influence the degree of tax competition 2 it should be noted that in the second literature strand tax holidays are sometimes derived endogenously in an infinite horizon game tax holidays help overcome lack of commitment see for instance doyle and van wijnbergen 1994

speculative prices and popular models t he rational expectations revolution in economics was born of the recognition that the expectations people hold for future economic variables are fundamental to their behavior thus our economists economic models require their those who make up the economy economic models models which they use to generate their expectations the key idea of rational expectations models is to collapse the two models into one to assume that people know or behave as if they know the true model that describes the economy this idea allows economists to construct simple and elegant models of the economy models that are appealing theoretically and that can be studied without collecting any data about the models in the minds of economic actors the problem with the rational expectations models is that collapsing the two kinds of models into one is a gross oversimplification obviously the popular models the models that are used by the broad masses of economic actors to form their expectations are not the same as those held by economists once one accepts the difference economic modelling cannot proceed without collecting data on the popular models themselves this paper reports on such a data collection effort on popular models using questionnaire survey methods with the purpose of understanding speculative markets i will report here on my research to understand the u s stock market crash of october 1987 research fumiko konya yoshiro tsutsui and i undertook to understand the japanese stock market crash of october 1987 research karl case and i undertook to understand recent real estate booms and research john pound and i undertook to understand the periodic hot markets for initial public offerings ipo s of common stock

the choice of equity selling mechanisms abstract this paper examines the impact of information asymmetry and monitoring of managers on the choice between public offerings and private placements three key findings emerge first private placement firms have higher information asymmetry than public offering firms second private placement investors do not engage in more monitoring than public offering investors finally discounts for private placements sold to managers are higher than discounts for private placements in which managers do not participate the final two findings cast doubts on the widely held view that private placements are motivated by a demand for enhanced monitoring

getting off to a good start the effects of upper echelon affiliations on underwriter prestige the initial public offering ipo is one of the most critical events in the lifetime of a young firm prior research has shown that firms tend to have successful ipos if they go public with the endorsement of a prestigious lead underwriter this paper examines the antecedents to receiving endorsement by a prestigious underwriter and links this to the experience base of a firm s upper echelon we theorize that the amount and type of upper echelon experience serve as important symbols of a young firm s legitimacy to critical outsiders we introduce a typology of upper echelon experience that distinguishes between upper echelon upstream horizontal and downstream employment based affiliations and suggest that these different types of upper echelon affiliations allay different types of endorser concerns regarding firm legitimacy affecting the endorsement process further we theorize that the relationships between upper echelon experience and investment bank prestige will be moderated by technological uncertainty we test our assertions on a comprehensive sample of public and private biotechnology firms that were founded between 1961 and 1994 and that went public between 1979 and 1996 analyses of the five year career histories of the over 3 200 executives and directors that make up the upper echelons of these firms show that firms with upper echelons with affiliations with prominent downstream organizations i e pharmaceutical and or healthcare companies and with prominent horizontal organizations i e biotechnology companies are more likely to attract the endorsement of a prestigious investment bank we also find that the greater the range of upper echelon affiliations across the categories of upstream horizontal and downstream affiliations the more prestigious the firm s lead underwriter we also find that these latter results are moderated by technological uncertainty the present research has implications for the study of organizational legitimacy interorganizational endorsements and entrepreneurship

on the nature of competition with differentiated products there is an old debate going back to bertrand 1883 and edgeworth 1925 about the fragility of market equilibrium when competition arises among a few sellers it was hotelling s belief that price instability vanishes when products are differentiated hotelling 1929 recently attention was drawn to the fact that even if product differentiation can weaken the forces leading to price instability it cannot eliminate completely the possibility of price cycles d aspremont et al 1979 the purpose of this paper is to show that vertical and horizontal product differentiation do not operate in the same manner a stable market outcome including an endogenous product specification arises more frequently with the former than with the latter horizontal product differentiation is rooted in taste differences more precisely the potential customers have heterogeneous preferences about the proportion in which the attributes of the product should be combined a wide range of substitute products can then survive in the same market simply because each of them combines the various attributes of the product in a proportion suitable to a particular segment of customers between two products in the range the level of some attributes is augmented while that of others is lowered each variety has its own circle of customers exactly as the inhabitants located around a particular shop form its potential market none the less competitors can raid these privileged market shares by adequate price cuts by contrast vertical product differentiation refers to a class of products which cohabit simultaneously on a given market even though customers agree on a unanimous ranking between them between two products in the range the level of all attributes is augmented or lowered the survival of a low quality product then rests on the seller s ability to sell it at a reduced price compensating thereby for the higher a priori attractiveness of a more desirable quality the seller of a low quality product will specialise in the segment of customers whose propensity to spend on the corresponding range of products is low either because they have relatively lower income or relatively less intensive preferences than other customers at the same time the seller of a high quality product will enjoy an absolute advantage over his competitor 2 interestingly it turns out that price and product competition does not lead to the same results in these two situations regarding the stability of the market equilibrium to stress the differences we have chosen to concentrate on two

going public and the enrichment of a supportive network some evidence from italian initial public offerings past research on initial public offerings suggests that the reputation of a company positively affects the success of the offering success is usually measured in financial terms as if the essence of the operation lay only in the short term inflow of money in this paper we investigate important albeit often neglected implications of going public by combining evidence from a series of preliminary case studies taken from the results of a survey of 57 italian initial public offerings evidence from our research suggests that besides providing an important inflow of capital going public may actually improve the reputational and social capital of a company by increasing its visibility prestige and perceived trustworthiness therefore going public may be an important way to support entrepreneurial activity as it may expand and reinforce the network of relationships that offer access to external resources complementary skills and investment opportunities

ownership dynamics and asset pricing with a large shareholder we analyze the optimal trading and ownership policy of a large shareholder who must trade off diversification and monitoring incentives without commitment the problem is similar to durable goods monopoly the share price today depends on expected future trades we show that the large shareholder ultimately trades to the competitive price taking allocation even though it entails inefficient monitoring with continuous trading the large shareholder trades immediately to this allocation if moral hazard is weak enough that her private valuation of a share is decreasing in her stake otherwise the large shareholder adjusts her stake gradually we consider implications for asset pricing ipo underpricing and lockup provisions

seasonal darkness and ipo abstract this paper analyses the possible relationship between a particular natural phenomenon the shortening of light hours in autumn and a financial issue the level of underpricing recorded on the first day of listing by the companies subject to initial public offering ipo it analyses a sample of 3102 ipos in 32 countries in the period between january 1 2006 and december 31 2016 the empirical evidence supports the assumption that seasonal darkness when there is a lack of light has a positive impact on the raw initial returns of the ipos made during this period the results obtained confirm the previous studies aimed at investigating the phenomenon suggest a possible behavioral interpretation and in conclusion make a positive contribution deriving from the large sample size the consideration of different latitudes and the assumed perspective

product differentiation cost reducing mergers and consumer welfare cost synergies are an explicitly recognized justification for a two firm merger and empirical techniques are now widely used to assess the impact of cost reducing mergers on prices and welfare in the post merger market we show that if the merger occurs in a vertically product differentiated market then the merger will lead to a reduction in product offerings that limits the usefulness of pre merger empirical estimates indeed we further show that in such markets two firm mergers will typically lead to higher prices regardless of the merger s cost savings jel classifica tion l10 l41 differentiation des produits fusions pour reduire les couts et bien etre du consommateur les synergies de couts sont une justification explicitement reconnue pour la fusion de deux firmes et il existe des techniques empiriques vastement utilisees pour mesurer l impact des fusions visant areduire les couts sur les prix et le niveau de bien etre dans le marcheapres la fusion on montre que si la fusion se produit dans un marchede produit differencieintegreverticalement alors la fusion reduit l even tail de produits ce qui limite l utilitedes estimations empiriques faites avant la fusion de plus on montre que dans de tels marches les fusions de deux firmes finissent par engendrer des prix plus eleves quelles que soient les reductions de couts auxquelles on en arrive

price stabilization as a bonding mechanism in new equity issues abstract underwriters have an incentive to overstate investor interest in order to persuade some investors to purchase shares at a price in excess of their initial estimate of the fair value we show that this incentive is eliminated when the underwriter commits to secondary market price stabilization destroying the underwriter s incentive to overstate interest reduces the total surplus captured by initial investors in initial public offerings further efficiency gains are associated with penalty bid systems that permit the underwriter to make the stabilization commitment selectively price stabilization can thus be viewed as a bonding mechanism that improves the efficiency of the primary equity market

who leaves money on the table the role of founder identity in hong kong abstractthis study investigates the effect of corporate governance factors on the underpricing of initial public offerings ipos in hong kong and the results show that this effect is significant ipos are categorized into four subgroups based on the role of the founder 1 no founder firms companies with no specific founder 2 pure founder firms companies whose founder is neither the company s chairman of the board nor its ceo 3 founder chairman ceo firms companies whose founder is either the company s chairman of the board or its ceo and 4 founder chairman ceo firms companies whose founder is the chairman and ceo the results demonstrate a significant descending pattern for the underpricing level of the four subgroups which can be explained by the varying incentive and behaviour mechanisms that result from the various founder identities

the optimal spread and offering price for underwritten securities abstract the paper develops the net proceeds maximization theory explaining how the spread and offering price are determined in all underwritten offerings in the u s the theory yields solutions for the optimal spread and offering price for all underwritten securities and it yields comparative statics that explain the cross sectional variation in actual spreads and initial returns across different types of underwritten securities the theory also suggests two alternative explanations to the ones offered by chen and ritter j finance 55 2000 1105 for the clustering of unseasoned equity offerings spreads at 7

foreign direct investment with unemployment and endogenous taxes and tariffs it is well known that high tariffs can induce foreign direct investment or tariff jumping this paper analyzes tariff jumping in the context of a host government which can set specific tariffs and taxes subject to the credibility constraint that the chosen levels be optimal once capital is irreversibly in place the foreign multinational is assumed to choose its location and level of investment strategically taking into account the induced tax and tariff levels in the presence of unemployment the optimal tariff exceeds the optimal tax for any given level of capital investment leading to foreign direct investment

a theory of expropriation and deviations from perfect capital mobility there are many reasons why commodity trade fails to equate the rewards to factors of production in different countries consequently there is an incentive for factor movements between countries while movements of factors especially capital are important in the world economy they have not been sufficient to equate factor returns among countries the failure of capital flows to equate returns to capital is frequently attributed to political risks and left outside the sphere of economic analysis specifically investments abroad especially in ldc s are said to be more subject to the risk of expropriation or at least to unpredictable changes in the tax and exchange control regime adopted by the host country fears of foreign investors have often been realised williams i975 estimates that about 20 of the value of foreign investments carried into or made during i956 72 in ldc s was expropriated without compensation in this period in the past researchers in disciplines other than economics have been responsible for most of the analysis of expropriations we argue that an important set of economic considerations affect the nature of these impediments to capital mobility and this paper provides a theory of expropriation based on maximising behaviour by host countries and investors we use this theory to identify industry and national characteristics increasing the threat of expropriation and implying large deviations from equal returns on capital and to examine host country and home country policies minimising distortions from the threat of expropriation three broad conclusions follow from the analysis first the threat of expropriation can significantly distort the international allocation of capital even if the act of expropriation is relatively rare in the extreme acts of expropriation would never occur in a world of perfect foresight and rational decision making yet actions by investors to ensure that countries do not expropriate would be distorting second the ability of a country s government to expropriate foreign investments may actually reduce its welfare furthermore a host may be better off if home governments can retaliate against an expropriating country indeed an increase in the penalty imposed on an expropriating country may increase its welfare a government s power to expropriate after investments are made may alasdair smith and an associate editor made numerous valuable suggestions we would also like to thank g m grossman r w jones l a sjaastad n h stern and j e stiglitz for comments much of eaton s work on this paper was completed while he was a visitor at the graduate institute for international studies geneva an earlier version of this paper appeared under the same title as rpds

share issue privatizations as financial means to political and economic ends abstract this study examines how political and economic factors affect the offer price share allocation and other terms governments choose when they privatize state owned enterprises via a public share offering using a 59 country sample of 630 share issue privatizations sips with total proceeds of over 446 billion during the period 1977 1997 we find that governments consistently underprice sip offers tilt their share allocation patterns to favour domestic investors impose control restrictions on privatized firms and typically use fixed price offers rather than book building or competitive tender offers all to further political and economic policy objectives

host country policy transfer pricing and ownership distribution in international joint ventures a theoretical analysis abstract this paper develops a simple model of an international joint venture in which the ownership shares are endogenously determined as the outcome of nash bargaining between a multinational firm and a host firm it shows how tax subsidy policy by the host country s government and transfer pricing of inputs by the multinational firm may influence the equity distribution of the joint venture insofar as the optimal level of these policies is dependent on the primitives the model generates empirical hypotheses regarding the impact of the primitives on the equity distribution

the winner s curse legal liability and the long run price performance of initial public offerings in finland abstract rationing data for initial public offerings ipos in the finnish market make possible a test of rock s 1986 winner s curse hypothesis the evidence from 80 ipos issued between 1984 and 1989 confirms the presence of the winner s curse average returns adjusted for the bias in allocation are lower than average unadjusted returns but the initial returns of these ipos appear unrelated to lawsuit avoidance as the sample firms seem unlikely to incur legal liabilities in the long run consistent with the evidence in the united states the ipo firms substantially underperform the helsinki stock exchange value weighted index

ownership structure speculation and shareholder intervention an institution holding shares in a firm can use information about the firm both for trading speculation and for deciding whether to intervene to improve firm performance intervention increases the value of the institution s existing shareholdings but intervention only increases the institution s trading profits if it enhances the precision of the institution s information relative to that of uninformed traders thus the ability to speculate can increase or decrease institutional intervention we examine key factors that affect the intervention decision the usefulness of short swing provisions and restricted shares in encouraging institutional intervention and implications for ownership structure across different firms institutional investors hold an ever greater fraction of corporate america s equity traditionally these institutions were stock pickers who tried to beat the market through trading if a firm whose stock they held seemed headed for trouble these investors headed for the door the wall street rule more recently some of these institutions have been using the ownership rights attached to their shares to pressure firms to act in the shareholders interest some have even argued that there is a synergy between gathering information for use in trading shares speculation and intelligently pressuring firms to improve performance intervention we argue that these motives can also conflict analyzing these motives allows us to predict which firms are most likely to attract institutional intervention which in turn has crosssectional implications for firm ownership structure recent examples suggest that institutional investors with large stakes sometimes intervene and sometimes follow the wall street rule so that there is indeed a choice to be studied in the early 1990s there was a wave of activism by a variety of large institutional investors among them calpers the california public employees pension fund putnam management a mutual fund manager and j p morgan a bank holding company these institu

large block transactions the speed of response and temporary and permanent stock price effects abstract the paper investigates how quickly prices attain new equilibrium levels after large block transactions and measures the associated temporary and permanent price effects we find that prices adjust within at most three trades with most of the adjustment occurring in the first trade the temporary price effect for seller initiated transactions is related to block size but the temporary price effect observed for buyer initiated transactions is no larger than that observed in 100 share trades most of the price effect associated with block trades is permanent and is related to block size regardless of the initiating party

why do ipo underwriters allocate extra shares when they expect to buy them back i argue that overallocation is used as a marketing strategy to increase the offer price and aftermarket price of an initial public offering ipo i show that when there is weak demand it can be optimal for the underwriter to oversell an issue and take a naked short position the issuing firm benefits from a higher expected offer price this is in spite of the fact that in equilibrium allocating more shares when there is weak demand requires greater underpricing when there is strong demand

mergers with differentiated products the case of the ready to eat cereal industry traditional merger analysis is difficult to implement when evaluating mergers in industries with differentiated products i discuss an alternative which consists of demand estimation and the use of a model of postmerger conduct to simulate the competitive effects of a merger i estimate a brand level demand system for ready to eat cereal using supermarket scanner data and use the estimates to 1 recover marginal costs 2 simulate postmerger price equilibria and 3 compute welfare effects under a variety of assumptions the methodology is applied to five mergers two of which occurred and for which i compare predicted to actual outcomes

conservatism and international ipo underpricing we study the impact of country level accounting conservatism on international ipo underpricing examining 13 285 ipos from 36 countries we find that ipos are underpriced less in countries in which existing public firms practice more accounting conservatism the link between conservatism and underpricing is robust to alternative measures of conservatism country mean regressions sample country exclusions and endogenous treatment models consistent with the hypothesis that conservatism reduces underpricing by mitigating the impact of information asymmetries we find that higher country level conservatism is associated with lower country level pin values and that the negative relation between conservatism and underpricing is strongest for ipos involving small firms in which information asymmetries are likely to be high lastly we find evidence that legal origin a factor linked to the practice of conservatism influences the relations between underpricing and conservatism

state ownership and market liberalization evidence from china s domestic m a market abstract we study how state ownership affects the post merger performance of chinese acquirers and find that state owned acquirers soes experience a significantly larger long term performance improvement following mergers compared to their non state owned nsoe counterparts when partitioning the sample period into acquisitions made prior to and following china s split share reform of 2005 we find that the post merger performance improvement of soe acquirers is largely attributed to the post reform period in which controlling shareholders converted their non tradable shares into tradable status our results are consistent with the interpretation that state intervention in the form of capital market liberalization and alleviation of governance problems combined with political connections and privileged access to financing may have a positive effect on m a performance that outweighs the inefficiency cost of state ownership in china

signalling and the pricing of new issues this paper develops a signalling model with two signals two attributes and a continuum of signal levels and attribute types to explain new issue underpricing both the fraction of the new issue retained by the issuer and its offering price convey to investors the unobservable intrinsic value of the firm and the variance of its cash flows many of the model s comparative statics results are novel empirically testable and consistent with the existing empirical evidence on new issues in particular the degree of underpricing which can be inferred from observable variables is positively related to the firm s post issue share price

gradualism in tax treaties with irreversible foreign direct investment bilateral international tax treaties govern the host country taxation for the vast majority of the world s foreign direct investment fdi of particular interest is the fact that the tax rates used under these treaties are gradually falling although the treaties themselves do not specify any such reductions since there is no outside governing agency to redress treaty violations such reductions must be both mutually beneficial and self enforcing furthermore the optimal tax rates must be less than those initially set otherwise no reductions would be necessary to explain such behavior we model a two country setting with two way capital flows in particular only part of fdi is immediately reversible as the extent of irreversibility increases the likelihood of pareto optimal tax rates obtaining as a self enforcing outcome in the initial period is reduced more modest tax reductions from the non treaty levels are still possible these limited tax reductions generate an increase in bilateral fdi as countries increase the stock of capital in one another further reductions in taxes become self enforcing depending on the extent of irreversibility and asymmetry pareto optimal tax rates may be obtainable in the long run thus the amount of inbound investment a country can attract may be related to the commitment to which its outbound investment binds it this final insight provides an additional rationale for the observed pattern of capital flows in which those countries with the greatest outbound capital flows are also those with the highest inbound flows

unions taxes and the structure of multinational enterprises abstract this note analyzes how a firm s relationship with unions or tax authorities influences its basic structure in particular it is shown that the prospect of capture by unions or tax authorities of part of the rents associated with the firm s investments leads it to open more plants than is technologically efficient thus unions and taxes are an independent reason for a firm s expansion nationally and for foreign direct investment

how much can marketability affect security values how marketability affects security prices is one of the most important issues in finance we derive a simple analytical upper bound on the value of marketability using option pricing theory we show that discounts for lack of marketability can potentially be large even when the illiquidity period is very short this analysis also provides a benchmark for assessing the potential costs of exchange rules and regulatory requirements restricting the ability of investors to trade when desired furthermore these results provide new insights into the relation between discounts for lack of marketability and the length of the marketability restriction

the effect of capital gains taxes on the initial pricing and underpricing of ipos we investigate the extent to which capitalization of expected capital gains taxes and the lock in effect induced by the capital gains tax rate differential simultaneously impact the pricing and underpricing of initial public offerings ipos using a large sample of ipos from 1987 to 2010 we estimate regressions of offer prices and first day underpricing on tax rates supporting tax capitalization ipo offer prices decrease in long term capital gains taxes supporting lock in ipo underpricing increases in the long term and short term tax rate differential these effects are consistent with capital gains taxes simultaneously reducing ipo proceeds and exacerbating ipo underpricing

a direct test of rock s model of the pricing of unseasoned issues unique data availability and institutional arrangements for new issues in singapore allow a direct test of the empirical implications of rock s model of pricing unseasoned new issues our empirical results are consistent with the model specifically we find that the unseasoned new issues anomaly disappears when the rationing associated with new issues is incorporated into the analysis the winner s curse is evident in allocation patterns used in singapore

a model of expropriation with asymmetric information abstract incomplete information about a multinational enterprise s mne s technology may induce a host country to expropriate the mne s subsidiary even if other policy instruments are available the threat of expropriation does not always deter foreign direct investment so that expropriation may actually occur with nonzero probability perfect sequential equilibria are derived for vertically and for horizontally integrated mnes the model provides predictions regarding the probability of expropriation based on observable mne and host country characteristics countries would be better off if they could commit never to expropriate mnes

social surplus and profitability under different spatial pricing policies one of the most controversial parts of the u s antitrust laws is the robinson patman act posner has argued it should be discarded entirely 34 bork has called it the misshapen progeny of intolerable draughtsmanship coupled to wholly mistaken economic theory 10 382 the robinson patman act is an amendment passed in 1936 to section 2 of the clayton act in the words of its co sponsor its purpose was to prevent discrimination between competing customers of a seller so that any price differentials should be limited to the sound economic differences in costs 33 5 because of its concern with price discrimination it is the robinson patman act that is relevant to the spatial pricing policies of firms however the precise limitations the law imposes on spatial prices are not exactly well defined one point is relatively clear that no question of unlawful price discrimination would arise so long as the f o b price is 1 uniform and 2 available to all customers on a nondiscriminatory basis no legal requirement exists that the alternative f o b price be of any particular amount or computed in any particular way 85 f t c 1174 1176 1 49 while f o b mill pricing is legally unassailable the legal status of uniform delivered pricing where firms charge the same price at all points of sale is somewhat ambivalent see dunn 16 for a discussion what is certain is that firms charging neither mill nor uniform prices may be open to successful prosecution especially if they set price schedules which have bumpdip changes for example in the utah pie case see breit and elzinga 12 for more details firms were found guilty of price discrimination since their delivered prices were lower in the local utah market than at points closer to their plants

the gains from merger or collusion in product differentiated industries a merger in an industry with differentiated products increases the market power of the merging firms to the extent that their products are close substitutes and that other firms produce only more distant substitutes such a merger makes the residual demand curve of each partner steeper by shifting each in the direction of the industry demand curve 2 the extent of this increase in market power depends upon the own elasticity of demand for each merging firm s product as well as the cross elasticity of demand for each with all other firms products as a result evaluating the effect of a merger between two firms with n 2 other competitors would seem to require the estimation of at least n2 parameters all of the price elasticities of demand a formidable task that extremely difficult estimation task is unnecessary however the necessary information is contained in the slopes of the two single firm residual demand curves before the merger and the extent to which the merged firm will face a steeper demand curve for example suppose a merger between two u s brewing firms say pabst and anheuser busch were proposed it is not particularly important to determine whether it is competition from miller or competition from stroh or from heileman or which puts the most effective brake on anheuser busch s pricing only the total effect of these other firms and the particular effect of competition from pabst are of interest this paper proposes econometric procedures for estimating the demand system that merger partners will face based only on pre merger data the key to the procedures is that the effects of all other firms in the industry are summed together formally we start with a model of an n firm product differentiated industry manipulation of the model removes the prices and quantities of all but two firms this reduces the dimensionality of the problem to manageable size rather than an n firm demand system we estimate a two firm residual demand system in this way the technique extends our econometric method for

primary versus secondary pricing of high yield bonds previous research has found systematic underpricing of newly floated securities vis a vis secondary market levels this conclusion is based on the observation that primary issues provide superior risk adjusted returns in the period immediately following issuance those returns however are not known at the time of pricing to gauge whether a new issue is offered at a premium or a concession to the secondary market investors must use standard valuation benchmarks in the case of high yield bonds an analysis based on agency ratings and yields to maturity indicates that new issues are priced richer than seasoned issues in some periods and cheaper in other periods using regression analysis the authors model the magnitude of the premium or concession prevailing in a given period the regressions explain 64 percent of the variance in the primary secondary yield spread through proxies for supply demand and liquidity of the high yield sector

anatomy of initial public offerings of common stock initial public offerings of common stocks ipos are typically underpriced in this paper the author develops and tests the hypothesis that underpricing serves as a form of insurance against legal liability and the associated damages to the reputations of investment bankers the empirical results based on samples of ipos that were brought to the market before and after the securities act of 1933 provide considerable support for the implicit insurance hypothesis specifically gross underpricing and market segmentation between prestigious and fringe investment bankers in originating unseasoned new issues appear to be peculiar to the post 1933 era a number of studies have documented that unseasoned common stocks typically garner large positive abnormal returns during a short period following the initial offering in his recent review of the empirical evidence on the initial returns of common stock offerings smith 36 concluded that the returns from offer price to after market price have exceeded fifteen percent his calculations did not include some of the earlier results obtained by mcdonald and fisher 23 and logue 20 when their samples are combined with those in smith s review the initial returns of unseasoned equity offerings appear even larger over seventeen percent these results imply that underwriters consistently offer the securities at substantial discounts from their values that are set in the after market in other words initial public offerings ipos appear to be underpriced what is even more puzzling is the fact that in some time periods underpricing appears to be systematically larger than in other periods ibbotson and jaffe 15 and ritter 29 have documented that during the postwar era there have been a number of periods in which the initial returns of common stocks have been extremely high ritter for example reported that the average return from the offer price to the first after market price was over forty eight percent for ipos in 1980 and 1981 1 similarly the initial returns of unseasoned issues of common stock brought to the market in 1950 1951 1961 and 1968 were unusually large these periods in which ipos were grossly underpriced are referred to as the hotissue markets why do investment bankers underprice ipos why do issuers

investment bank reputation information production and financial intermediation we model reputation acquisition by investment banks in the equity market entrepreneurs sell shares in an asymmetrically informed equity market either directly or using an investment bank investment banks who interact repeatedly with the equity market evaluate entrepreneurs projects and report to investors in return for a fee setting strict evaluation standards unobservable to investors is costly for investment banks inducing moral hazard investment banks credibility therefore depends on their equity marketing history investment banks evaluation standards their reputations underwriter compensation the market value of equity sold and entrepreneurs choice between underwritten and nonunderwritten equity issues emerge endogenously

predation reputation and entry deterrence abstract economists often argue that predatory practices are irrational since there exist cheaper or more certain means to gain or maintain a monopoly our gametheoretic equilibrium analysis suggests that if a firm is threatened by several potential entrants then predation may be rational against early entrants even if it is costly when viewed in isolation because it yields a reputation which deters other entrants asymmetric information plays a crucial role in our analysis since it provides the rationale for entrants to base their expectations of the firm s future behavior on its past actions the analysis also suggests methods to treat general reputational phenomena

vertical product differentiation with entry abstract this paper examines the non cooperative behaviour of established firms that compete in product quality and prices while foreseeing the effects of their rivalry on the decisions made by the later entrants we prove an existence and uniqueness of the equilibrium and show that the dominant firms engage in maximal product differentiation i e select the highest and lowest technologically feasible qualities later entrant however always selects an intermediate quality moreover we show that the equilibrium configuration is identical to that generated by perfect foresight equilibrium in a model of sequential entry furthermore the profits earned by each firm are ranked in the same order as the qualities implifying that the later entrant despite being the last mover ends up with higher profits and larger market share than one of the incumbents

pricing initial public offerings evidence on the pricing of initial public offerings is presented for germany a data set of 92 going publics over the years 1961 1987 is analyzed on average the initial return from the offer price to the first day of trading adjusted for market movements is more than 15 o tests of several hypotheses indicate that underpricing is related to ex ante uncertainty about the value of the shares

testing for deliberate underpricing in the ipo premarket a stochastic frontier approach we re evaluate the ipo underpricing phenomenon using the stochastic frontier methodology the advantage of the stochastic frontier is that it can be used to measure the level of deliberate underpricing in the premarket without using after market information this is accomplished through the estimation of a systematic one sided error term that measures inefficiency or the difference between the maximum predicted offer price and the actual offer price data for the analysis are comprised of 1 035 ipos of common stock issued by firm commitment between 1975 and 1984 ipos appear to be deliberately underpriced in the premarket in both hot market and nonhot market periods moreover the determinants of the maximum ipo price have different effects in the two time periods article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

ipo mechanisms monitoring and ownership structure1 this paper analyzes the e ect of di erent ipo mechanisms on the structure of share ownership and explores the role of underpricing and rationing in determining investors shareholdings we focus on the agency problem that results when large institutions are the only investors capable of monitoring the firm whereas small shareholders free ride on these activities the major conclusion is that some well known aspects of ipos may be explained as rational responses by the issuer to the existence of regulatory constraints in public capital markets there is a two stage o ering mechanism in which the investment banker acting in the interests of the issuer optimally rations the allotment of shares to small investors in order to capture the benefits associated with better monitoring by institutions importantly in our model the existence of underpricing and oversubscription is an indication that the issuer has received a higher ex ante price than would have been obtained through a competitive walrasian type o ering process 1998 elsevier science s a all rights reserved jel classification g24 g32 g38

signalling by underpricing in the ipo market abstract empirical evidence suggests the existence of hot issue markets for initial public offerings in certain periods and in certain industries new issues are underpriced and rationing occurs this paper develops a model consistent with this observation which assumes the firm itself best knows its prospects in certain circumstances firms with the most favorable prospects find it optimal to signal their type by underpricing their initial issue of shares and investors know that only the best can recoup the cost of this signal from subsequent issues

investment banker reputation and two stage combination carve outs and spin offs abstract this study examines whether investment banker reputation impacts the initial period returns of two stage combinations carve outs followed by spin offs all prior literature regarding investment banker reputation is based on single stage events ipos an analysis is conducted of all completed two stage carve outs spin offs from 1981 to 2002 findings indicate that underwriters for two stage combinations retain their reputation in contrast with the single stage findings of carter et al carter r b dark f h piwowar m s 2002 ipos and underwriter reputation redeeming the value of reputation working paper iowa state university that investment bankers redeemed cashed in their reputation also this study finds that the carter et al reputation factors dominate the loughran and ritter loughran t ritter j r 2002 why don t issuers get upset about leaving money on the table in ipos the review of financial studies 15 2 413 443 reputation factors

underwriter price support and the ipo underpricing puzzle abstract this paper reassesses the apparent systematic underpricing of initial public offerings ipos investigation of the distribution of initial returns following ipos shows that positive mean initial returns may reflect the existence of a partially unobserved left negative tail moreover most ipos with zero one day returns subsequently fall in price suggesting that underwriter price support may account for the skewed distribution and hence the phenomenon of positive average initial ipo returns even if offering prices are set at expected market value this paper thus challenges the presumption underlying previous research that positive average initial ipo returns result primarily from deliberate underpricing

evidence on price stabilization and underpricing in early ipo returns using data on 560 firm commitment initial public offerings of common stock for the 1982 1983 period we find that the cross sectional distribution of one day returns is modeled better as a mixture of two distributions with the parameter estimates of one distribution being consistent with underpricing and the other with price stabilization further the evidence that early ipo returns are drawn from a mixture distribution persists for at least four weeks the implications of these results for the analysis of ipo returns are illustrated by examining the influence of a measure of ex ante price uncertainty on ipo pricing

tax competition with imperfectly mobile capital abstract this paper considers interjurisdictional tax competition in a two period model with imperfectly mobile capital in the first period capital is perfectly mobile in the second period however capital cannot move perfectly because of transactions costs once employed in a jurisdiction in the first period this imperfect mobility of capital may lead to the overprovision rather than the underprovision of public goods in the second period and may make jurisdictions compete more aggressively for capital in the first period

auctions vs bookbuilding and the control of underpricing in hot ipo markets market returns before the offer price is set affect the amount and variability of initial public offering ipo underpricing thus an important question is what ipo procedure is best adapted for controlling underpricing in hot versus cold market conditions the french stock market offers a unique arena for empirical research on this topic since three substantially different issuing mechanisms auctions bookbuilding and fixed price are used there using 1992 1998 data we find that the auction mechanism is associated with less underpricing and lower variance of underpricing we show that the auction procedure s ability to incorporate more information from recent market conditions into the ipo price is an important reason copyright 2003 oxford university press

the economics of repeated extortion we provide a simple model of repeated extortion in particular we ask whether corrupt government officials opportunism to demand more once entrepreneurs have made sunk investments entails further distortion in resource allocations if the choice of technology is left to the entrepreneurs the dynamic path of demand schedules will induce entrepreneurs to pursue a fly by night strategy by adopting a technology with an inefficiently low sunk cost component the unique equilibrium is characterized by a mixed strategy of the government official in future demand our model thus explains why arbitrariness is such a central feature of extortion we also investigate implications of the stability of corrupt regimes for dynamic extortion and discuss alternative applications for our framework

differential information and security market equilibrium we propose a simple model of equilibrium asset pricing in which there are differences in the amounts of information available for developing inferences about the returns parame ters of alternative securities in contrast with earlier work we show that parameter uncer tainty or estimation risk can have an effect upon market equilibrium under reasonable conditions securities for which there is relatively little information are shown to have relatively higher systematic risk when that risk is properly measured ceteris paribus the initially very limited model is shown to be robust with respect to relaxation of a number of its principal assumptions we provide theoretical support for the empirical examination of at least three proxies for relative information period of listing number of security returns observations available and divergence of analyst opinion

evaluating the costs of raising capital through an initial public offering abstract this article provides an empirical analysis of the costs of going public based on a sample of 1852 offerings during 1977 1987 the sample includes 1556 firm commitment issues and 296 best efforts issues three components of the cost of going public are examined 1 direct cash expenses such as legal and accounting costs 2 investment bank s commission and 3 costs resulting from the investment bank practice of pricing initial public offerings below their market values all of the cost components are significantly higher for best efforts offerings than for firm commitments in fact best efforts offerings are more than three times as expensive on a percentage basis than are firm commitments in addition there are marked economies of scale in the process of going public the total costs of going public were 40 of gross proceeds for the smallest firm commitment issues but only 15 for the largest in dollar terms we estimate that a typical small firm commitment offering of 2 5 million will cost approximately 800 000 32 of gross proceeds whereas a large issue of 25 million will cost approximately 4 million 16 of gross proceeds the issuing firm s earnings as well as the type of investment bank underwriting the issue were also important cost determinants the primary implication of our results for entrepreneurs is that it is quite expensive to attempt a public offering prematurely the marginal issuer with a small capital requirement and a poor earnings history will be at a large cost disadvantage to more established firms more specifically we advise that the firm have capital requirements of at least 10 million and positive operating income before attempting a public offering postponing a public offering until the issue will be well received by investors and investment banks is likely to be worth the wait until that time alternative sources of funds will be more cost effective

a simple test of baron s model of ipo underpricing abstract this paper tests baron s 1982 model of initial public offering ipo underpricing that model relies on information asymmetries between issuers and underwriters and predicts that offer prices will be lower than would prevail in the absence of asymmetric information we examine the initial public offerings of 38 investment banks that went public in the period 1970 1987 and participated in the distribution of their own securities we find that contrary to the implication of baron s model such self marketed offerings are characterized by statistically significant underpricing comparable to that of other ipos

which ties matter when the contingent effects of interorganizational partnerships on ipo success this paper investigates the contingent value of interorganizational relationships at the time of a young firm s initial public offering ipo we compare the signaling value to young firms of having ties with two types of interorganizational partnerships endorsement relationships such as those with venture capital firms and investment banks and strategic alliance partnerships we propose that under different equity market conditions potential investors in an issuing firm attend to different types of uncertainty attention to these different types of uncertainty affects investors perceptions of the relative value of a young firm s different kinds of endorsements and partnerships and hence ipo success results from a sample of young biotechnology firms show that ties to prominent venture capital firms are particularly beneficial to ipo success during cold markets while ties to prominent investment banks are particularly beneficial to ipo success during hot markets a firm s strategic alliances with major pharmaceutical health care firms did not have such contingent effects implications for understanding the contingent value of interorganizational ties are discussed copyright 2003 john wiley sons ltd

political connections and the process of going public evidence from china abstract we examine how political connections impact the process of going public specifically we test how political connections impact the pricing of the newly offered shares the magnitude of underpricing and the fixed cost of going public based on the experience of the newly public firms from chinese security markets and using multiple measures of political connections we find robust evidence that the issuing firms with political connections reap significant preferential benefits in the process of going public to be specific we find that firms irrespective of their ownership status with greater political connections have relatively higher offering price lower underpricing and lower fixed costs during the going public process

you are known by the directors you keep reputable directors as a signaling mechanism for young firms in this paper we develop an analytical model of outside directors signaling role a role that is especially important for entrepreneurial firms we formally demonstrate that in the face of a market failure in which stakeholders refuse to align themselves with new firms high quality new ventures may be able to credibly signal their type by appointing reputable directors to their boards however this option is not universally feasible both directors reputations and the quality of their information determine the effectiveness of this strategy in contrast to earlier adverse selection models we demonstrate that when the middlemen directors have incomplete information on firm quality bad and good firms can coexist in equilibrium in this equilibrium the quality of the directors information determines the mix of good and bad firms in the population of surviving firms avenues for future research and normative implications for practitioners are discussed

initial public offering discount and competition abstract lacking examples of initial public offering ipo mechanisms that are open to the public and priced competitively previous studies could not determine what size discount if any is economically efficient we compare two pricing regimes on the tel aviv stock exchange an investor driven dutch auction limited by a binding maximum price replaced by one that is free of that constraint our evidence shows that rationing and herding disappear improving the access of uninformed investors to strong issues and alleviating their exposure to losses attached to weak issues pricing quality increases by the elimination of the underpricing bias decreased price dispersion and increased price sensitivity to ipo unique factors underwriter services do not deteriorate but garner moderately higher fees apparently to compensate for a higher risk consistently there is no deterioration in ipo efficiency as a screen from weak issues our evidence does not support the view that underpricing is competitive or eff

bargaining with commitment choice of techniques and direct foreign investment abstract once a firm has installed a plant in a host country the country will have an incentive to reopen negotiations concerning tax rates this paper examines the incentives for the country to commit to not reopening negotiations a commitment deters the firm from inefficiently reducing the capital intensity of its investment but apparently surrenders tax revenues by not exploiting the country s post entry bargaining power we show that commitment will be optimal as long as the tax system does not place too distortionary a burden on capital and the country has access to capital markets

a model of the demand for investment banking advising and distribution services for new issues this paper presents a theory of the demand for investment banking advising and distribution services for the case in which the investment banker is better informed about the capital market than is the issuer and the issuer cannot observe the distribution effort expended by the banker the optimal contract under which the offer price decision is delegated to the better informed banker in order to deal with the adverse selection and moral hazard problems resulting from the informational asymmetry and the observability problem is characterized the model demonstrates a positive demand for investment banking advising and distribution services and provides an explanation of the underpricing of new issues an investment banker performs three functions which may be of value to an issuer of new securities underwriting advising and distribution this paper presents a theory of the demand for investment banking advising and distribution services based on an informational asymmetry between an issuer of new securities and an investment banker ultimately a theory of the organization of the financial intermediary industry is required that would predict which firms would use which types of financial intermediaries for which purposes and which firms would raise capital without engaging the services of a financial intermediary only a limited set of such predictions are developed here in the context of a model of a fixedprice offering under a negotiated contract in which the investment banker is

foreign direct investment under oligopoly profit shifting or profit capturing abstract in this paper a model of taxation of foreign source corporate income is developed when the output market is not perfectly competitive profit shifting policies similar to those in the new trade literature are also present in the case of foreign direct investment fdi there are however important differences to the new trade theory since in case of fdi i corporate taxation and double taxation relief are the policy instruments rather than output or revenue taxes ii countries are not symmetric in the sense that the host country has the first right to tax the multinational s profit and the home country reacts by providing double taxation relief and iii output but not corporate taxation is specific to imperfectly competitive industries it is argued that a variants of a tax credit are analogous to export subsidies b when the home country operates a tax credit system the host country s incentive to capture the multinational s profit is bounded under imperfect competition c when the host country offers a tax holiday the home country should imitate this policy and d in the presence of perfect competitive industries double taxation relief is a good instrument to target imperfectly competitive industries

preferential trade agreements and tax competition for foreign direct investment abstract this paper examines how free trade agreements and customs unions affect the location of foreign direct investment fdi and social welfare taking into account that governments may adjust taxes and external tariffs to compete for fdi conditions are identified under which a free trade agreement leads to fdi and under which this improves welfare the welfare effect is shown to depend on the relative size of efficiency gains in production and government revenue losses due to tax competition a free trade agreement may fail to induce welfare improving fdi creating a role for a customs union

litigation risk intermediation and the underpricing of initial public offerings we formally examine the role of litigation risk in initial public offering ipo pricing the underwriter s pricing decision trades off current revenue against expected future litigation costs both of which are increasing in the ipo price given a time consistency constraint and rational expectations on the part of investors however the standard litigation risk argument does not lead to equilibrium underpricing we develop a richer model that provides sufficient conditions under which there is equilibrium underpricing the issuer s choice of employing an underwriter versus floating the ipo on its own is examined and various testable implications of the model are developed article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

equity issue specific versus broad regulatory protections against expropriation risk international evidence from seos abstract we compare non issue specific broad investor protections against expropriation by firm s insiders with regulations that specifically protect investors of new equity issues issue specific since in nation regulations rarely change and are homogenous for all firms it is difficult to compare issue and non issue specific investor protection mechanisms in country specific studies we utilize cross country differences in regulations to study the relative importance of issue specific and broad regulatory protections using data on seasoned equity offerings seo we find that seo underpricing is related to broad protections in particular seo underpricing is negatively positively related with the strength of ex post ex ante anti self dealing laws independent of broad protections seo underpricing is unaffected by issue specific investor protections that is neither by disclosure requirements imposed on equity issuers nor by equity issue specific liability rights conferred on investors interactions between broad protections and issue specific protections indicate issue specific protections reduce seo underpricing only in countries with strong broad protections

the costs of going public abstract this paper presents evidence regarding the two quantifiable components of the costs of going public direct expenses and underpricing together these costs average 21 22 of the realized market value of the securities issued for firm commitment offers and 31 87 for best efforts offers for a given size offer the direct expenses are of the same order of magnitude for both contract types but the underpricing is greater for best efforts offers an explanation of why some firms choose to use best efforts offers in spite of their apparent higher total costs is given

global corporations and local politics income redistribution vs fdi subsidies abstract income inequality has been used empirically to explain the mixed performance of developing countries in attracting fdi this paper sets up a theoretical model that links the skewness of the income distribution to a host government s willingness to subsidize fdi large skewness makes government subsidies less likely because the median income person prefers redistribution little skewness however does not guarantee fdi in addition host governments may switch from positive to no subsidies if a shift in economic variables changes how the policymaker trades off the fdi benefits and income redistribution thereby offering an alternative to the conventional hold up story

the pricing of initial public offerings a dynamic model with information production this paper presents an information theoretic model of ipo pricing in which insiders sell stock in both the ipo and the secondary market have private information about their firm s prospects and outsiders may engage in costly information production about the firm high value firms knowing they are going to pool with low value firms induce outsiders to engage in information production by underpricing which compensates outsiders for the cost of producing information the information is reflected in the secondary market price of equity giving a higher expected stock price for high value firms

technology agglomeration and regional competition for investment technology agglomeration the active courting of firms by municipalities regions and even nations has a long standing history and the competition for firm location through a wide variety of incentives seems to have escalated to new heights in recent years we develop a model that explores technology development by firms that face regional competition for their investment and examine the endogenous determination of regions policies firm technology and agglomeration externalities in particular we find that regional competition leads firms to inefficiently distort their research and development efforts in hopes of improving their standing in the competition amongst regions for their investment this loss in efficiency is aggravated by the agglomeration externalities that are inherently present in many industries we offer several case studies that provide evidence consistent with our theoretical conclusions

initial performance of new issues of shares in malaysia this paper presents the levels of under pricing for new issues in a developing country malaysia over a more recent period january 1990 december 1998 than reported in prior studies three types of new issues were examined namely public issue offer for sale and combination or hybrid of offer for sale and public issue comparisons of initial return between types of new issues and between different board of listing were made the results of independent t tests for difference in mean initial returns indicate that in general there are significant differences in mean initial returns between types of new issues and between boards of listing the results of step wise regression reveal that on average only over subscription ratio contributes significantly to the initial returns however caution should be taken when interpreting the models formed because the durbin watson rest indicate that some models are not free from problem of auto correlation of the residuals