To what extent are investment bank-differentiating factors relevant for firms floating moderate-sized IPOs?

One explanation provided for the relatively high and increasingly stable spreads for moderate-sized IPOs ($20-$80 million) documented in Chen and Ritter (2000) is that issuing firms focus less on price and more on a combination of investment bank-differentiating factors (such as underwriter prestige, analyst coverage, industry expertise, under-pricing, price stabilization activities, liquidity provision, and so on,) and banks use industry-based differentiation as a source of market power. Using a new approach developed in a model of firm location choice due to Ellison and Glaeser (1997), this paper presents some evidence on the combined relevance of such bank-differentiating factors, over and above bank size, for firms choosing investment banks for floating IPOs. For moderate-sized IPOs, there is a little, but not much evidence that such factors are a good explanation for high and increasingly stable spreads. Other than in a few of the largest industries, bank-differentiating factors are not significantly relevant for a large proportion of industries. Moreover, one aggregate measure of differentiation is declining over time.