Many firms deploy takeover defenses when they go public. IPO managers tend to deploy defenses when their compensation is high, shareholdings are small, and oversight from nonmanagerial shareholders is weak. The presence of a defense is negatively related to subsequent acquisition likelihood, yet...

This paper supports and extension of the negotiation hypothesis begun in Harris (1991) and calls into question the evidence of implicit collusion developed in Christie and Schultz (1994). This paper documents the distribution of prices per share for initial public offerings, mergers and...

In April 2012, the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (JOBS Act) was enacted to help revitalize the initial public offering (IPO) market, especially for small firms. During the year ending March 2014, IPO volume and the proportion of small firm issuers was the largest since 2000. Controlling...

Little is known about the price firms pay for stock repurchases. Using a data set of all U.S. repurchases from 2004 to 2011, we compare the actual average price paid monthly in a repurchase with the average market price for the same stock over various horizons. We find that firms repurchase...

Consistent with institutions having an advantage over individuals, we find that newly public firms with the highest levels of institutional investment significantly outperform those with the lowest levels. While prior literature has attributed much of institutions’ higher returns around...

We examine 1,948 share lockup agreements that prevent insiders from selling their shares in the period immediately after the IPO (typically 180 days). While lockups are in effect, there is little selling by insiders. When lockups expire, we find a permanent 40 percent increase in average trading...

We test the hypothesis that insider trading impairs market liquidity by analyzing intraday trades and quotes around 1,497 IPO lockup expirations in the period 1995–1999. We find that, while lockup expirations are associated with considerable insider trading for some IPO firms, they have little...