A SPAC divides the process of a private firm going public into two stages: SPAC IPO and its merger with the firm. This division enables us to disentangle the effect of information- and agency-related frictions on security issuance. To this end, we distinguish “premium” from “non-premium”...

In an earlier series of articles published in this journal, one of the three authors of this article predicted the rise of auction IPOs, possibly to the point of displacing the traditional bookbuilding process for pricing and allocating IPOs, only to find himself forced to explain in later...