We model underpricing as being endogenous to the wealth loss minimization problem encountered in a stock market flotation. The benefits of reducing underpricing depend on the entrepreneur's participation in the offering, via the secondary shares he sells, as well as the magnitude of the dilution...

Shareholder agreements govern the relations among shareholders in privately-held firms, such as joint ventures or venture capital-backed firms. We provide an explanation for the use of put and call options, tag-along rights, drag-along rights, demand rights, piggy-back rights, and catch-up...

We provide a direct estimate of the magnitude of agency costs in publicly-held corporations. We compute an explicit performance benchmark that compares a firm's actual Tobin's Q to the Q* of a hypothetical value-maximizing firm having the same inputs and characteristics as the original firm. The...

Shareholder agreements govern the relations among shareholders in privately-held companies, such as joint ventures or venture capital-backed firms. We provide an economic explanation for the use of put and call options, pre-emption rights, catch-up clauses, drag-along rights, demand rights, and...

We model owners as solving a multidimensional problem when taking their firms public. Owners can affect the level of underpricing through the choices they make in promoting an issue, such as which underwriter to hire or what exchange to list on. The benefits of reducing underpricing in this way...

We model owners as solving a multidimensional problem when taking their firms public. Owners can affect the level of underpricing through the choices they make in promoting an issue, such as which underwriter to hire or what exchange to list on. The benefits of reducing underpricing in this way...

This paper uses clinical evidence to show how the German system of corporate control and governance is both more active and more hostile than has previously been suggested. It provides a complete breakdown of ownership and takeover defence patterns in German listed companies and finds highly...

By 1999, close to 80% of non-U.S. IPOs were marketed using bookbuilding methods. We study whether the recent introduction of this technology by U.S. banks and their inclusion in non-U.S. IPO syndicates has promoted efficiency in primary equity markets. We analyze both direct and indirect costs...

We provide evidence that firms attempting IPOs condition offer terms and the decision whether to carry through with an offering on the experience of their primary market contemporaries. Moreover, while initial returns and IPO volume are positively correlated in the aggregate, the correlation is...

Lower underpricing amongst venture-backed IPOs has been attributed to a certification role for venture capitalists. We argue that differences in underpricing per se are uninformative and possibly misleading when not controlling for differences in entrepreneurs’ incentives to control...