ipo pricing in hot market conditions who leaves money on the table this paper explores the impact of investor sentiment on ipo pricing using a model in which the aftermarket price of ipo shares depends on the information about the intrinsic value of the company and investor sentiment i show that ipos can be overpriced and still exhibit positive initial return a sample of recent french offerings with a fraction of the shares reserved for individual investors supports the predictions of the model individual investors demand is positively related to market conditions moreover large individual investors demand leads to high ipo prices large initial returns and poor long run performance the end of the nineties was one of the hottest ipo markets ever in this period both the number of initial public offerings and the level of initial returns have reached unprecedented peaks ritter documents that in 1999 and 2000 only 803 companies went public in the united states raising about 123 billion and leaving about 62 billion on the table in the form of initial returns periodically such periods of ipo euphoria occur these so called hot issue markets are characterized by high ipo volumes and high levels of initial return see ibbotson and jaffe 1975 and ritter 1984 as well as positive serial correlation of ipo initial returns and correlation between recent levels of initial return and current ipo volume surprisingly however pre ipo shareholders do not seem to be upset about leaving so much money on the table loughran and ritter 2002 explain this phenomenon by the fact that insiders of ipo companies consider not only the shares they sell in the ipo but also those they retain which benefit from the large initial price run up ljungqvist and wilhelm 2003 show that during the 1999 to 2000 period ipo companies were significantly different from usual

discounting and underpricing in seasoned equity offers abstract expected discounting in seasoned equity offers is a cost of uncertainty about firm value marketing new shares and acquiring information that raises the offer price stockholders incorporate predictable discounting in stock prices when equity offers are first announced the surprise component of discounting reflecting the lead bank s final adjustment to the offer price releases information that often causes economically large price swings on the offer day disparities between the issuer s closing price and the price suggested in the lead bank s final order book are a primary source of information the discount surprise appears to be used by lead banks to update capital suppliers with that eleventh hour information before they commit their funds

regulatory reform and productivity growth in the uk s public utilities the reforms in the regulation of the uk nationalised industries over the last decade are examined and the extent to which they have been successful in achieving one of their declared aims that of increasing the efficiency of the enterprises operations is considered to achieve this the productivity performance of nine of the largest enterprises over the last twenty years was analysed the results show that the rate of productivity growth has been significantly higher during the 1980s compared with the preceeding decade it is concluded that a large part of the observed upturn in productivity is a result of changes in efficiency

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

declining volatility in the u s automobile industry dramatic changes in the volatility of output occurred in the u s auto industry in the early 1980s namely output volatility declined the covariance of inventory investment and sales grew more negative and adjustments to production schedules which in earlier decades stemmed primarily from plants hiring and laying off workers were more often accomplished with changes in average hours per worker after the mid 1980s using a linear quadratic inventory model with intensive and extensive labor adjustments we show how all of these changes could have stemmed from one underlying factor a decline in the persistence of motor vehicle sales jel g31 l25 l62 m11

ipo first day returns offer price revisions volatility and form s 1 language abstract form s 1 is the first sec filing in the initial public offering ipo process the tone of the s 1 in terms of its definitiveness in characterizing the firm s business strategy and operations should affect investors ability to value the ipo we find that ipos with high levels of uncertain text have higher first day returns absolute offer price revisions and subsequent volatility our findings provide empirical evidence for the theoretical models of uncertainty bookbuilding and prospect theory

issuer surplus and the partial adjustment of ipo prices to public information abstract this study develops a model in which rational issuers maximize the expected surplus from going public by choosing an offer price that weighs the benefit of higher proceeds if the offer is completed against the cost of foregone surplus if the offer fails increases in the market valuation of comparable firms during the waiting period imply higher surplus associated with going public issuers respond with a partial revision in the offer price to elevate the probability of completion the model offers insights into many facts associated with initial public offering pricing including partial adjustment to market returns the inverse relation between withdrawal and market returns the asymmetric price adjustment to up versus down market returns hot issue markets and unconditional underpricing

a model of inventory and layoff behaviour under uncertainty this paper develops a model of firm behavior under uncertainty designed to study the interac tion of inventories and layoffs the model is a blend of a buffer sto ck model of inventory behavior and an implicit contract model of layo ffs the model creates a distinction between inventory biased and lay off biased firms each of which exhibits inherently different pattern s of response of inventories and temporary layoffs to demand shocks in addition the model implies that the inventory layoff interaction tends to strengthen weaken the response of price and the work force to changes in anticipated demand real interest rates copyright 1988 by royal economic society

taking stock a critical assessment of recent research on inventories empirical and theoretical aspects of inventory behavior became hot topics in the 1950s and early 1960s no one seemed to notice the tension that was developing between the emerging macroeconomic and microeconomic views of inventories macroeconomists routinely thought of inventories as a destabilizing factor yet the prevailing micro theory viewed inventories as a stabilizing factor it was a fascinating question that was barely explored instead somewhat inexplicably interest in inventories dried up as if inventories were of minor economic significance and little intrinsic interest by the early 1980s then economists once again knew something they had known in the 1950s that inventory investment is of first order importance in business cycles but they were also beginning to realize that the standard production smoothing buffer stock model of inventories was in deep trouble this paper focuses on developments since that realization

privatization liberalization wages and employment theory and evidence for the uk most agency based privatization models are of the owner manager relation and ignore the labour market yet in the 1980s there were profound changes in public sector and privatized firms to wages and employment we develop a bargaining model of the manager workforce relation that explains employment and wages when firms are privatized government objectives become more commercial and markets are liberalised using data on 14 uk companies 1972 1988 that were publicly owned in 1972 we find a employment fell following the change to more commercial objectives b wages were only slightly affected by this but fell if the firm lost market power

why is production more volatile than sales theory and evidence on the stockout avoidance motive for inventory holding this paper argues that the macroeconomically interesting features of inventory behavior are well captured by a model in which firms face only demand uncertainty with a nonnegativity constraint on inventories empirical implications of the stockout avoidance model of inventory behavior are derived and then tested on disaggregated automobile industry data the results largely support the model though they suggest a small role for production smoothing as well subsidiary evidence on the relative variance of demand and cost shocks suggests that demand shocks are indeed more important

discussion of why don t issuers get upset about leaving money on the table in ipos in this article loughran and ritter 2001 hereafter lr provide an interesting new theory and empirical analysis in this discussion i would like to elaborate on their analysis in several ways first in section 1 1 review microsoft s ipo process as documented in a 1986 fortune article and related this to the lr model and evidence in section 2 i briefly discuss the lr model and its implications and the empirical findings presented in lr that support the model in section 3 i present some additional empirical evidence suggesting that the lr prospect theory model can t fully explain the ipo puzzles section 4 proposes an alternative explanation for these data namely that the data are consistent with a bargaining game in which the issuers underwriters and investors bargaining power changes with business and industry cycles section 5 concludes

organizational debut on the public stage marketing myopia and initial public offerings successful initial public offerings ipos provide firms with access to valuable resources but also put pressure on firms to impress potential investors with evidence of their current well being and prospects for future growth to impress investors ipo firms might curtail their marketing budgets which appears to inflate current earnings and provide evidence of current well being however curtailing marketing budgets unexpectedly during an ipo may be a myopic practice in that the immediate benefits of these budget cuts are offset by their longer term adverse consequences on financial well being the extent of these adverse consequences in turn may be moderated by external firm factors including strategic alliances and key customer relationships and internal firm factors such as the strategic emphasis on value creation versus value appropriation a sample of 1 095 ipos during 2000 2011 reveals evidence of myopic marketing practices in more than 37 of the sample investors seem misled during ipos bu

interrelated demands for buffer stocks and productive inputs estimates for two digit manufacturing industries empirical estimates of interrelated factor demand equations for inventories labor inputs capital stocks and unfilled orders in selected two digit industries are provided this framework is more comprehensive than previous research as it disaggregates inventories by stage of fabrication accounts for production to stock and production to order and disaggregates capital and labor inputs all estimated decision rules display stock adjustment effects but there are asymmetries in the parameter estimates that are puzzling there is evidence that factor input prices have a role in explaining stock levels but own factor price effects are largely absent evidence is uncovered that stocks are sensitive to expectations errors attached to output demand copyright 1990 by mit press

output fluctuations at the plant level this paper examines the short run dynamics of manufacturing costs by detailing how plants in the u s automobile industry change output weekly data show a variety of margins on which firms adjust production these margins which are distinct from the usual factor demand choices differ in their lumpiness their adjustment costs and their variable costs the existence of these margins explains several empirical puzzles of output fluctuations using a theory of the short run dynamic cost function we are able to infer some of the characteristics of the underlying cost function from the dynamic behavior of the different margins

joint production quasi fixed factors of production and investment in finished goods inventories inventory investment has long been an important area of inquiry for empirical work in macroeconomics this is due in large measure to the fact that inventory investment is a major source of fluctuations in aggregate output empirical work on inventories however has been dominated by the use of simple univariate flexible accelerators 1 the major objective of this paper is to propose and test a multivariate flexible accelerator model for inventory investment the model is tested with data on finished goods inventories from the manufacturing sector of the u s economy there are two reasons for undertaking such a task first at a theoretical level a univariate flexible accelerator model asserts that investment in say finished goods inventories is proportional to the gap between the desired and actual stocks of finished goods such a model presumes that decisions by firms on finished goods inventories are made independently of decisions on other stocks but theory suggests that when firms make simultaneous decisions on a variety of stocks which includes not only finished goods but also goods in process inventories the size of the work force etc decisions on finished goods will interact with decisions on

is the ipo pricing process efficient this paper investigates underwriters treatment of public information throughout the ipo pricing process two key findings emerge first public information is not fully incorporated into the initial price range while the economic magnitude of the bias is small it is puzzling because it is not clear who benefits from it further it indicates that the filing range midpoint is not an unbiased predictor of the offer price as prior literature has assumed second while public information is similarly not fully incorporated into the final offer price the small economic significance of this relation indicates that the ipo pricing process is almost efficient

the resurgence of inventory research what have we learned abstract recent empirical and theoretical research on business inventories is surveyed and critically evaluated while most inventory research has had macroeconomic motivations we focus on its microtheoretic basis and on potential conflicts between theory and evidence the paper asks two principal questions first how can inventories which are allegedly used by firms to stabilize production nonetheless be a destabilizing factor at the macroeconomic level second why if firms are following the production smoothing model is production more variable than sales in many industries we suggest that the so called s s model may help answer both questions

bookbuilding how informative is the order book we examine the institutional bids submitted under the bookbuilding procedure for a sample of international equity issues we find that information in bids which include a limit price especially those of large and frequent bidders affects the issue price oversubscription has a smaller but significant effect for ipos public information affects the issue price to the extent that it is reflected in the bids oversubscription and demand elasticity are positively correlated with the first day aftermarket return and demand elasticity is negatively correlated with aftermarket volatility our results support the view that bookbuilding is designed to extract information from investors

inventories and the volatility of production a stylized fact associated with inventory behavior is that the variance of production exceeds the variance of sales this paper presents a model of production decisions with demand uncertainty that incorporates no nnegativity constraints on inventories even with no productivity shocks optimal behavior by the firm is consistent with this stylized fact either if demand exhibits positive serial correlation or if the firm can backlog excess demand the reason is that a demand shock affects both the actual inventory level given unchanged production and the desired level production must replenish the stock and adjust to the new desired level copyright 1987 by american economic association

empirical estimates of beta when investors face estimation risk we examine empirical implications of models of differential information that formalize the following intuition securities for which there is relatively little information are perceived as relatively more risky because of the greater uncertainty surrounding the exact parameters of their return distributions the implication that beta risk for low information firms should decline as information increases is confirmed with several data sets we find such a decline over the first geveral periods subsequent to initial public offerings and initial listings there is also an abrupt risk decline at the first annual earnings announcement this paper examines several empirical implications of security return models involving differential information these models formalize the following intuition securities for which there is relatively little information are perceived as relatively more risky because of the greater uncertainty surrounding the exact parameters of their return distributions the research relates to two streams of literature the first revolves around the new issues and new listings market it begins with ibbotson 1975 and includes for example ritter 1984 beatty and ritter 1986 mcconnell and sanger 1987 and muscarella and vetsuypens 1989 the second is the literature dealing with the effects of differential information on the risk assessment of low information firms this second literature is exemplified by the work of klein and bawa 1976 1977 and barry and brown 1984 1985 in our examination we focus on how increased risk associated with low information firms henceforth called estimation risk manifests itself in observed return data we explore how observed security returns to low information firms appear to researchers in relation to how they appear ex ante to investors who base their predictive distribution of security returns on incomplete information about the parameters of the return generating process we also examine data on new listings and new issues to exemplify some of the relationships the data support the most obvious and direct implication of the differential information model that the expected systematic risk of low information firms decreases as time passes and information increases our evidence as in ibbotson that risk declines with seasoning rejects a restrictive null hypothesis that information risk is diversifiable and the under

employment adjustment in uk manufacturing this analysis differs from previous studies of labor demand in its explicit inclusion of the costs to the firm of adju sting its workforce these costs include institutional factors such a s employment protection legislation and unions and market factors su ch as the degree of slack in the labor market two questions are addr essed what is the quantitative impact of these forces and does their inclusion improve the fit of a labor demand function the results sh owed these factors to have a strong influence on the rate of hiring f iring and to improve significantly on conventional labor demand funct ions copyright 1988 by royal economic society

the dynamics of markups and inventories in retailing firms this paper is concerned with the interaction between price and inventory decisions in retailing firms and its implications for the dynamics of markups and the existence of sales pro motions we consider a model where a monopolistically competitive retailer decides price and inventories and assumes lump sum costs when placing orders or changing nominal prices tn this model the existence of stockout probabilities and fixed ordering costs generate a cyclical price behaviour characterized by long periods without nominal price changes and short periods with very low prices i e sales promotions we estimate this model using a unique longitudinal dataset with information about retail and wholesale prices inventories orders and sales for several brands in a supermarket chain based on the estimated model we perform several counterfactual experi ments that show the important role that inventories and fixed ordering costs play in the dynamics of retail prices and the frequency of sales promotions in this dataset

public information ipo price formation and long run returns japanese evidence the price formation process of jasdaq ipos is more transparent than in the united states the transparency facilitates analysis of important issues in the ipo literature why offer prices only partially adjust to public information and adjust more fully to negative information and why adjustments are related to initial returns the evidence indicates that early price information conveys the underwriter s commitment to compensate investors for acquiring and or disclosing information offer prices reflect pre ipo market values of public companies and implicit agreements between underwriters and issuers that originate well before the offering underadjustment of offer prices is substantially reversed in the aftermarket copyright c 2009 the american finance association

why don t issuers get upset about leaving money on the table in ipos one of the puzzles regarding initial public offerings ipos is that issuers rarely get upset about leaving substantial amounts of money on the table defined as the number of shares sold times the difference between the first day closing market price and the offer price the average ipo leaves 9 1 million on the table this number is approximately twice as large as the fees paid to investment bankers and represents a substantial indirect cost to the issuing firm we present a prospect theory model that focuses on the covariance of the money left on the table and wealth changes our reasoning also provides an explanation for a second puzzling pattern much more money is left on the table following recent market rises than after market falls this results in an explanation of hot issue markets we also offer a new explanation for why ipos are underpriced copyright 2002 oxford university press

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

inventories layoffs and the short run demand for labor this paper presents a theoretical and empirical analysis of the short run employment layoff and inventory strategies of firms on average more than two thirds of all layoffs in american manufacturing end in a rehire by the employer of origin martin feldstein 1975 david lilien 1980 these temporary layoffs have recently accounted for about half of all ongoing employer initiated spells of unemployment in that sector see table 1 and have led to a revised interpretation both of the involuntary nature of these separations costas azariadis 1975 feldstein 1976 martin baily 1977 and of the durability of employment relationships evidently a significant proportion of unemployed workers know that the conditions that generated their separations are temporary and so they expect to be recalled within some reasonable time the point of departure for this paper is in interpreting these findings as evidence of a privately and socially efficient stock of excess capacity held against contingent future demands that is as an inventory of a productive input this view leads to empirically refutable hypotheses regarding both the role of temporary layoffs and the circumstances under which they will be important in particular both excess capacity idle resources and inventories are devices by which firms may economize on the costs of rapid adjustments when faced with unstable market conditions george stigler 1939 in such an environment the demands for layoffs and for other buffer stocks are jointly determined elements of long run technology the choice among alternative stocks will depend on relative profitabilities and firms may choose to hold stocks of inputs as a substitute for inventory accumulation especially if the costs of varying capacity or of storage are important this reasoning implies that i the structure of short run employment and layoff decisions will vary across firms and industries and ii differences in these structures will be systematically related to the role of inventories in firms dynamic strategies some perspective is warranted at least since charles holt et al 1960 economists have recognized the production smoothing role of inventories and the necessity of predicting future demand in making current decisions david belsley 1969 gerald childs 1967 michael ward 1978 similarly one of the contributions of recent work on implicit labor contracts is in viewing the exchange of labor services as a bilateral and durable commitment both these lines of analysis are concerned with the methods firms use to respond to fluctuating demand yet the underlying interrelated nature of employment and inventory decisions has rarely been recognized roger miller 1968 m ishaq nadiri and sherwin rosen 1973 r g crawford 1979 robert hall 1972 this paper aims to provide a framework for evaluating these decisions and in so doing to explain some interesting features of observed labor markets the notion of substitution between inventories of human and physical capital suggests a more disaggregated look at the data table 2 shows the importance of temporary layoffs in the distribution of unemployment among manufacturing industries it reports layoff and total unemployment rates for twelve representative industries over the period 197376 and average layoff rates and recall frequencies for 1958 76 among all 21 twodigit manufacturing industries the correlation between layoff and rehire rates is 6 and the table illustrates this evidently industries with larger than normal layoff rates also tend to have larger rehire frequencies from firm initiated spells of unemployment this university of chicago i am indebted to gary becker robert cotterman sherwin rosen jose scheinkman michael ward finis welch the managing editor and an anonymous referee for discussions and comments at various stages the usual disclaimer applies

unemployment insurance in the united states layoff incentives and cross subsidies we survey unemployment insurance ui in the united states and provide new evidence on the ui payroll tax most ui receipt is due to firms that pay part of the ui costs of their layoffs but weak experience rating leads most firms to pay considerably less than the full costs industries consistently receiving subsidies from the ui system are construction manufacturing and mining finally a large fraction of layoffs resulting in payment of ui are made by firms that are not charged for the costs of the claim because they have employed the individual for less than 2 quarters

the underpricing of private targets abstract we examine acquisitions of private firms with valuation histories and find a positive relation between acquirer announcement returns and target valuation revisions similar to other studies acquirer announcement returns are positive on average however positive acquirer announcement returns are mainly driven by targets that are acquired for more than their prior valuation this relation is consistent with pricing effects associated with target valuation uncertainty and behavioral biases in negotiation outcomes

the response of prices sales and output to temporary changes in demand we determine empirically how the big three automakers accommodate shocks to demand they have the capability to change prices alter labor inputs through temporary layoffs and overtime or adjust inventories these adjustments are interrelated non convex and dynamic in nature combining weekly plant level data on production schedules and output with monthly data on sales and transaction prices we estimate a dynamic profit maximization model of the firm using impulse response functions we demonstrate that when an automaker is hit with a demand shock sales respond immediately prices respond gradually and production responds only after a delay the size of the immediate sales response is linear in the size of the shock but the delayed production response is non convex in the size of the shock for sufficiently large shocks the cumulative production response over the product cycle is an order of magnitude larger than the cumulative price response we examine two recent demand shocks the ford explorer firestone tire recall of 2000 and the september 11 2001 terrorist attacks