When firms go public in an IPO, they must choose a number of shares to offer and a price level for those shares. Given an estimated total value, this division would seem to have little economic significance. Casual empiricism and the evidence from stock splits, however, suggest that firms do not choose their IPO share price level arbitrarily. We ask whether IPO prices are informative, in the se...

We provide new insights into the determinants of acquirer announcement returns with a unique sample of targets that are acquired within three years of their IPOs. Existing studies of acquisitions of private and established public targets find positive relations between acquirer announcement returns and prior target valuation changes. In our sample of recently listed targets, we measure the prio...

This paper studies a market for new projects with endogenous information acquisition by experts (venture capitalists). It nds that the crowd-like behavior of experts is characteristic of investments in new elds where prospects of new projects are unknown but correlated and experts independently collect small bits of information: each expert acquires a signal about a project and invests when the...

This paper proposes an integrated framework to address three empirical findings of the literature on initial public offerings. (i) Why do investment banks earn positive profits in a competitive market? (ii) Why do banks receive lower gross spreads in venture capitalist (VC) backed IPOs? (iii) Why is underpricing more pronounced in VC than in non-VC backed IPOs? We model the IPO procedure as a t...

Using a sample of 155 IPOs that delist due to performance-related reasons shortly after going public, this paper sheds light on the motives of entrepreneurs and early investors in taking their firm public. I empirically examine the actions of insiders over the entire public life of the IPO firm in order to understand whether they knowingly sell overvalued equity. I examine the behavior and the ...