This paper examines initial public offerings (IPOs) as funding rounds for high-tech companies and exit mechanisms for investors, as well as the stringent corporate governance requirements that apply to newly listed companies in the growth stages of their development. Current investment trends...

We examine how the legal protection of outside shareholders and the appropriative costs that they induce influence the incentives for private firms to go public. A higher degree of protection of shareholders can increase the appropriative costs associated with the conflict between managers and...

The contractual theory of the firm predicts that companies adopt charters that maximise firm value, regardless of the default rule. We test this proposition around an exogenous switch of the default from one share-one vote to tenure voting following a law reform in France. In initial public...

his study develops a rational expectations equilibrium model of IPO underpricing within which the distribution of underpricing is explicitly modeled, as opposed to assumed. Contrary to assumptions of prior studies, IPO quality is not inferred from IPO underpricing, is explicitly defined, and is...

Corporate liability may lead to insolvency. Prosecutors who are concerned with job losses following insolvency may reduce liability in order to limit collateral consequences. In this article I analyze firms' choices of financing and malfeasance when decision makers take collateral consequences...

The biotech cluster in San Diego is dominated by small firms, with approximately 73% of the firms employing between 1 to 49 employees. Among the main important sources of financing for the biotech companies are venture capital and initial public offerings. In spite of the aggregate increase in...

We conduct an event study to assess the stock market evaluation of public takeover announcements. Unlike the majority of previous research, we specifically focus on acquisitions targeted at newly public IPO-firms and show that the stock market positively evaluates these M&As as R&D. However,...

Is the decision to go public or private a stock market driven 'side-show' or does it have significant effects on investment and profitability‘ We address this issue using a comprehensive dataset of private and public companies in the UK during 1996-2006. Firms with high investment-financing...

This paper focuses on the relationship between corporate governance and corporate performance by initial public offerings (IPOs) of Kazakhstan state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the transition economies of Central Asia. It argues that privatization (i.e., IPO) has different effects depending on...