Post-issue stock underperformance is driven, at least in part, by the contemporary decline in idiosyncratic risk (proxied by idiosyncratic volatility) exposure for seasoned equity offerings (SEO) firms. As young firms dominate the SEO market, they generally face higher uncertainty of mean...

Using forward-looking information in the options market, we introduce a new method for better identifying systematic market risk as a predictor for the cross-section of stock returns. Empirical results show that there is a significantly positive relation between our option-implied beta and...