From 52,649 accounts and 10,615,117 transaction records obtained from a renowned brokerage house in Taiwan we find that individual investors purchase 73.4% and sell 64.5% of their stock portfolios each month. This is more than ten times the statistics for their U.S. counterparts. In general,...

We investigate how investment banks determine the gross spreads paid by American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) from 1980 to 2004. We begin by comparing the gross spreads of ADR IPOs and ADR SEOs to those of matching US IPOs and US SEOs. We document clustering at the 7% level for our ADR IPO sample...

As bookbuilding is less costly in terms of underpricing and has become the dominant underwriting method in initial public offerings (IPOs) (see Sherman, 2005), we examine whether the pattern still holds in seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) and find that only 15% (93 out of 610 sample firms) of...

Using American Depositary Receipt (ADR) IPOs from 34 countries during 1980-2004, we find that, on average, the enforcement of insider trading laws reduces the underwriter gross spread by 49-61 basis points, which is about 10-12% of the average gross spread for ADR IPOs. This relation is present...