Has There Always Been Underpricing and Long-Run Underperformance? - IPOs in Germany Before World War I

A Theory of IPO Underpricing, Issue Activity, and Long-Run Underperformance

We present a dynamic model of an IPO market in which firms go public to raise capital for investment. The original shareholders have inside information with respect to the quality of their firm’s investment opportunities, and they decide whether to go public, how much capital to raise and invest, and how to price the IPO. Outside investors are of one of two types: some investors know and unders...

Initial public offerings , subsequent seasoned equity offerings , and long - run performance : Evidence from IPOs in Germany

Underpricing of Privatised IPOs: The Australian Experience

We investigate the price performance of initial public o erings (IPOs) of formally state-owned companies in Australia. On average, privatised IPOs in Australia are underpriced by about 11%, which is not signi cantly di erent from the magnitude of underpricing of the privately-owned IPOs. This percentage is also similar to that of privatised share o erings in other OECD countries. In addition, c...

A market microstructure explanation of IPOs underpricing

In a typical IPO game with first-price auctions, we argue that risk-averse investors always underbid in equilibrium because of subjective interpretations of the firm’ communication about its actual value and resulting risk aversion about the likelihood of facing investors with higher valuations. We show that the noisier the investors’ inferences of the firm’ value (in the sense of first-order s...

The Long-Run Educational Cost of World War II

An important component of the long-run cost of a war is the loss of human capital suffered by school-age children who receive less education. Austrian and German individuals who were 10 years old during the conflict, or were more directly involved through their parents, received less education than comparable individuals from nonwar countries, such as Switzerland and Sweden. We also show that t...