Spring, 2008

Tracking Stocks or Spin-off? Determinants of Choice
Anna Danielova, McMaster University

I examine the roles of valuable internal capital markets, cross-subsidization, and insider ownership as determinants of choice between tracking stock and spin-offs in corporate equity restructuring. I show that conglomerates are more likely to choose tracking stock if they want to obtain some of the benefits offered by a spin-off, without loosing the potential for valuable internal capital markets. My results suggest that the market rewards firms with valuable internal capital markets that opt for tracking stocks, and penalizes the possibility of consolidated tax treatments. The market also reacts more favorably to unanticipated tracking-stock announcements.

We study two alternative means to move assets from private to public ownership: through the acquisition of private companies by firms that are public (sellouts) or through initial public share offerings (IPOs). We consider firm-specific characteristics for 1,074 IPO and 735 sellout firms to identify differences in growth, capital constraints, and asymmetric information between the two types of transactions. Our results suggest that firms move to public ownership through an IPO when they have greater growth opportunities, and face more capital constraints. We provide a better understanding of the firm-specific characteristics that lead firms to go public.

According to most research, firms benefit from being listed on the NYSE. Nevertheless, 224 of 640 firms that went public from 1993 through 2000 and were eligible for an NYSE listing chose to list their stock on Nasdaq. We hypothesize that this choice may be related to SEC Rule 144. The rule regulates the sale of restricted stock by limiting the amount of unregistered stock that can be sold by an individual. We investigate the determinants of post-IPO sales of restricted stock, examine IPO firms’ listing choices, and find evidence consistent with firms selecting Nasdaq to reduce the effect of the limits on selling restricted stock imposed by the SEC’s Rule 144. Venture capitalists play an important role in this listing decision.

In this paper, I use location as a proxy for the ability of a firm to issue equity. Numerous studies indicate that investors are better able to obtain information on nearby companies. I posit that costs in generating information will be higher for rural firms with few investors in their proximity, than for urban firms with many nearby investors. As predicted, I find that rural firms are less likely to conduct seasoned equity offerings than firms located in urban areas. Further, I find that when a rural firm issues equity, it uses a lower quality underwriter than otherwise similar urban firms.

We examine the individual and joint relation of discretionary accounting accruals, underwriter reputation, and venture capital backing with the long-run performance of IPOs. We find that although correlated to some extent, these variables do not manifest the same underlying phenomena in their relation to IPOs’ performance. The confluence of the variables is more important than using any one of them individually to identify IPOs that exhibit abnormal long-run stock returns. The combination of their negative aspects helps identify extreme underperformers. We also identify a set of winner IPOs by combining the positive aspects of the three variables.

We investigate the effect of ownership structure on IPO valuation in the Taiwanese market, in which many large shareholders exert control through pyramidal structures and cross-shareholdings with voting rights that are in excess of cash flow rights. Our analysis indicates that outside shareholders incorporate the effect of potential expropriation by entrenched large shareholders in valuing an IPO, since a deviating voting-cash structure is negatively associated with the valuation metric at both the offer and initial secondary market prices relative to the corresponding intrinsic value. We also show that a deviating voting-cash structure correlates negatively with IPO underpricing.

We analyze the effect of daily stock and bond abnormal returns around spin-off announcements. Over a three-day event window, we find statistically significant abnormal returns of 3.07% for stocks and 0.11% for straight bonds. Both stock and bond abnormal returns are higher for firms with lower interest and dividend payouts. Stock abnormal returns are also higher for firms with higher pre-spin-off leverage. Overall, we find that the firm value increase compensates for the wealth transfer effect and that bondholders’ wealth is not reduced as a result of spin-off.

Share Repurchase Offers and Liquidity: An Examination of Temporary and Permanent Effects
Nandkumar Nayar, Lehigh University
Ajai K. Singh, Case Western Reserve University
Allan A. Zebedee, Clarkson University

Open market repurchase programs do not allow for precise estimates of share buy-back intensity to measure liquidity effects. To circumvent the uncertainty surrounding the quantity and timing of shares truly acquired in repurchase programs and to measure their long-term impact, we examine Dutch auctions and fixed-price tender offers. We investigate both the temporary and permanent liquidity effects of share repurchase programs and find that the improvement in liquidity is transitory and limited to the tender period when the firm’s offer to repurchase shares is outstanding. Improvements in liquidity over longer intervals appear to be the result of an overall price improvement and a reduction in volatility, rather than due to structural change in market dynamics.

This paper derives a tax-adjusted discount rate formula with a constant proportion leverage policy, investor taxes, and risky debt. The result depends on an assumption about the treatment of tax losses in default. We identify the assumption that justifies the textbook approach of discounting interest tax shields at the cost of debt. We contrast this with an alternative assumption that leads to the Sick (1990) result that these should be discounted at the riskless rate. These two approaches represent polar cases. Each generates its results by using a different simplifying assumption, and we explain what determines the correct treatment in practice. We also discuss implementation of the valuation procedure using the CAPM.

We examine whether abnormal analyst coverage influences the external financing and investment decisions of the firm. Controlling for self-selection bias in analysts’ excessive coverage, we find that firms with high (low) analyst coverage consistently engage in higher (lower) external financing than do their industry peers of similar size. Our evidence also demonstrates that firms with excessive analyst coverage overinvest and realize lower future returns than do firms with low analyst coverage. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that analysts favor the coverage of firms that have the potential to engage in profitable investment-banking business.

We investigate the wealth impact for Japanese and U.S. firms that announce non-equity strategic alliances. We find that on average, both Japanese and U.S. shareholders benefit from the formation of international alliances. We also find that shareholders earn larger abnormal returns in these alliances when the partnering firms are relatively small in size, have higher growth opportunities, or are less profitable. We show that both Japanese and U.S. partnering firms display significant improvements in operating performance over the three-year period subsequent to the formation of international alliances.

We examine the long-run return performance of over 1,600 firms with reverse stock splits. These stocks record statistically significant negative abnormal returns over the three-year period following the month of the reverse split. The sample firms experience poor operating performances over the four years that include and follow the year of the reverse split, which suggests informational inefficiencies. Because these stocks have unique financial characteristics, we also show that they would be very difficult to sell short. Thus, arbitrageurs would be restricted in their ability to earn abnormal profits, even if they correctly anticipated a price decline.

We study the capital structure decisions of listed firms in China, 1992-2001. The Chinese market exhibits high information asymmetry, phenomenal growth, highly concentrated ownership, and a lack of external market for corporate control. We find that Chinese firms use little long-term debt, which is positively (negatively) related to firm size and tangibility (profitability and growth options), respectively. These results are robust to the degree of seasoning after the IPO and private versus State ownership. Although industry membership is important, the development and growth of the stock market did not affect the long-term debt ratios over the years.

In Switzerland, the existence of a mandatory minimum par value inhib-ited many companies from splitting their stocks as they already traded at their minimum par value. These Swiss companies could split their stocks only after the legal minimum par value was lowered in July of 1992 and again in May of 2001. These two events provide rare oppor-tunities to distinguish between stock splits that signal a permanent in-crease in stock price and splits that are merely a reaction to a regula-tory change and thus have other motives. The significant return differ-ences between the two samples are in line with the hypothesis that splits are a means to send positive signals to the stock market. Fur-thermore, while trading volumes remained largely unaffected after stock splits, relative tick sizes generally increased after a stock split, and bid-ask spreads often increased after a stock split.

We examine whether institutional investors are able to avoid future litigation. Our results show that institutions provide a fiduciary role by decreasing or eliminating their positions in sued firms well before litigation begins. We also find that institutional groups with high monitoring ability (independent investment advisors and mutual funds) are more proactive in their trading behavior than are institutions with low monitoring ability (banks, insurance companies, and unclassified institutions such as endowments, foundations, and self-managed pension funds). We find that percentage changes in institutional ownership are correlated with public information available more than two quarters before litigation.

Forthcoming Articles

How Preussag became TUI: A Clinical Study of Institutional Blockholders and Restructuring in Europe
Ingolf Dittmann, Erasmus University Rotterdam
Ernst Maug, University of Mannheim, Germany
Christoph Schneider, University of Mannheim, Germany

Between 1997 and 2004, Preussag, a diversified German conglomerate of "old economy" businesses, transformed itself into TUI, a company focused almost entirely on tourism and logistics. We analyze how Preussag executed this change, and how the change contributed to Preussag’s underperformance in the stock market. We find that only the divestitures created value, that the strategy to invest in tourism destroyed value, and that the acquisition premiums Preussag paid were mostly unjustified. The case shows how divestiture programs increase the liquid resources available to management and casts doubt on the positive governance role of institutional blockholders.

Using a sample that comprises more than 14,000 new issues of corporate debt for the period 1970-2001, we examine the relation between debt issues and the level of interest rates relative to historical levels. Consistent with recent survey evidence, we find that companies issue more debt, more debt relative to investment spending, and more debt compared to equity when interest rates are low relative to historical rates. The effects continue to hold when we control for other variables that influence debt issuance and when we account for refinancing.

This paper examines the association between a mutual fund manager’s personal fund investment and mutual fund performance. From a dataset of newly released managerial ownership disclosures, I find that fund ownership levels are diverse and, in many instances, quite large. Mutual fund returns are increasing in the level of managerial investment, consistent with personal ownership realigning decision-maker and shareholder interests. Also consistent with the reduction of agency costs, I find that managerial ownership is inversely related to fund turnover. However, there is no evidence of an association between managerial ownership and a mutual fund’s tax burden.

The relationship between innovativeness and pay-performance sensitivity is theoretically ambiguous because innovative activities simultaneously enhance the productivity of executives in creating shareholder value (productivity effect) and increase the volatility of the firm’s performance (volatility effect). The empirical findings from the pooled sample suggest that innovativeness and executive pay-performance sensitivity are inversely related. The extent to which the volatility effect outweighed the productivity effect was especially pronounced during the 2000-2003 market crash period. While the productivity effect is stronger than the volatility effect in both the CEO and low-free-cash-flow sub-samples, the volatility effect is stronger than the productivity effect in both the non-CEO and high-free-cash-flow sub-samples.

This paper finds that standard asset pricing models fail to explain the significantly negative delta hedging errors that occur as a result of the purchase of options on foreign exchange futures. Foreign exchange volatility does influence stock returns, however. The volatility of the JPY/USD exchange rate predicts the time series of stock returns and is priced in the cross section of stock returns.

We examine how informational asymmetries affect firms’ dividend policies. We find that firms that are more subject to information asymmetry are less likely to pay, initiate, or increase dividends, and disburse smaller amounts. We show that our main results are not driven by our sample, and that our results persist after accounting for the changing composition of payout over the sample period, the increasing importance of institutional shareholdings, and catering incentives. We conclude that there is a negative relation between asymmetric information and dividend policy. Our results do not support the signaling theory of dividends.

We document that acquiring firms are more likely than non-acquiring firms to split their stocks before making acquisition announcements, especially when acquisitions are financed by stock and when the deals are large. Our findings support the hypothesis that some acquiring firms use stock splits to manipulate their equity values prior to acquisition announcements. Using earnings quality as a proxy for firms’ intention to manipulate, we find that acquirers with low earnings quality (i.e., acquirers that are more likely to use stock splits to manipulate their stock values) have lower long-run stock returns compared with their benchmarks, especially when the deals are financed with stock. In contrast, acquirers with high earnings quality do not show that pattern. Our evidence complements and extends the findings in the literature that some acquirers manipulate their stock prices before stock-swap acquisitions. This study suggests that target shareholders should use information such as earnings quality and stock splits to discriminate among acquirers and ensure that exchanges are conducted on fair terms.

Firms commonly incorporate make-whole call provisions in their newly issued debt, presumably to improve their ability to retire debt early if circumstances require. In return for increased financial flexibility, firms must compensate bondholders with additional (incremental) yield. To estimate theoretical incremental yields, we use and calibrate a structural model for a large sample of callable and non-callable US corporate bonds issued between 1995 and 2004. In a frictionless model where calls occur only when they are in-the-money, theoretical incremental yields average approximately 2 basis points (bp). In an extended model that incorporates taxes, transactions costs, and randomly occurring exogenous events requiring early bond retirement, incremental yields average approximately 5 bp. Empirical analysis, however, indicates that observed incremental yields are significantly greater than model-generated values, averaging between 13 and 24 bp. In the later years of our sample period, however, observed incremental yields begin to converge to model-generated values.

The impact of past syndicate alliances on the consolidation of financial institutions is examined. The odds of two lenders combining increases with the intensity and exclusivity of their prior syndicated loan alliances. The impact is higher for international M&As and for prior syndicate co-relationships where the acquirer and target were participant and lead, respectively. The odds of a particular lender being a target decreases as its ROE and E/P ratios increase and as its size and growth opportunities decrease. The intensity and exclusivity of the syndicated loan alliances leading up to M&A announcements are significantly higher for non-U.S. versus U.S. M&As. The significantly lower short- and long-term performances for both acquirers and targets with prior syndicate co-involvements disappear in the presence of control variables that account for the less frequent use of cash payments; the greater incidence of divestitures; and the higher percentage of shares acquired through their M&As. Acquirers with versus those without past syndicate target co-involvements exhibit greater outperformance for control-firm benchmarked ROEs and lower underperformance for control-firm and prior-to-M&A benchmarked ROEs.

We test the hypothesis that the 2003 dividend tax cut boosted U.S. stock prices and thus lowered the cost of equity. Using an event-study methodology, we attempt to identify an aggregate stock market effect by comparing the behavior of U.S. common stock prices with that of foreign equities and real estate investment trusts. We also examine the relative cross-sectional response of prices of high- and low-dividend paying stocks. We do not find any imprint of the dividend tax cut news on the value of the aggregate U.S. stock market. On the other hand, high-dividend stocks outperformed low-dividend stocks by a few percentage points over the event windows, suggesting that the tax cut may have induced asset reallocation within equity portfolios. Finally, the positive abnormal returns on non-dividend paying U.S. stocks in 2003 do not appear to be tied to tax-cut news.

We examine the cross-sectional relation between conditional betas and expected stock returns for a sample period of July 1963 to December 2004. Our portfolio-level analyses and the firm-level cross-sectional regressions indicate a positive, significant relation between conditional betas and the cross-section of expected returns. The average return difference between high- and low-beta portfolios ranges between 0.89% and 1.01% per month, depending on the time-varying specification of conditional beta. After controlling for size, book-to-market, liquidity and momentum, the positive relation between market beta and expected returns remains economically and statistically significant.

We survey 328 financial executives to determine the effects of the May 2003 dividend tax cut. We find that the tax cut led to initiations and dividend increases at some firms. However, executives say that among the factors that affect dividend policy, the tax rate reduction is less important than the stability of future cash flows, cash holdings, and the historic level of dividends. Tax effects have roughly the same importance as attracting institutional investors and the availability of profitable investments. We also find that press releases only occasionally mention the dividend tax cut as the reason for an initiation.

This paper examines liquidity and how it affects the behavior of mutual fund portfolio managers, who account for a significant portion of trading in many assets. We define an asset to be perfectly liquid if a portfolio manager can trade the quantity she desires when she desires at a price not worse than the uninformed expected value. A portfolio manager is limited by both what she needs to attain and the ease with which she can attain it, making her sensitive to three dimensions of liquidity: price, timing, and quantity. Deviations from perfect liquidity in any of these dimensions impose shadow costs on the portfolio manager. By focusing on the trade-off between sacrificing on price and quantity instead of the canonical price-time trade-off, the model yields several novel empirical implications. Understanding a portfolio manager's liquidity considerations provides important insights into the liquidity of assets and asset classes.

Theory predicts that nonfinancial corporations might use derivatives to lower financial distress costs, coordinate cash flows with investment, or resolve agency conflicts between managers and owners. Using a new database, we find that traditional tests of these theories have little power to explain the determinants of corporate derivatives usage. Instead, we show that derivative usage is determined endogenously with other financial and operating decisions in ways that are intuitive but not related to specific theories for why firms hedge. For example, derivative usage helps determine the level and maturity of debt, dividend policy, holdings of liquid assets, and international operating hedging.

This paper examines whether the prohibition of selective disclosures to equity research analysts mandated by Regulation FD alters the amount of information and the manner in which it is revealed to the market. We demonstrate that equity research analysts are more responsive to information contained in company-initiated disclosures after Reg. FD, suggesting that regulation has affected the importance of various channels of communication. We also present evidence consistent with the notion that managers use earnings guidance as a substitute for selective disclosure following the passage of Reg FD.

We examine the corporate governance ratings provided by three premier U.S. rating agencies and find that summary scores are generally poor predictors of primary and secondary measures of future firm performance. However, some component sub-ratings that focus on the eight key dimensions of dynamic governance structures provide more positive and reliable evidence of their information content in predicting the multiple dimensions of firm performance. These results reflect the recent observations by academic researchers and money managers that it is extremely difficult to distill all of the complex governance mechanisms into a single integrated, yet informative overall score.

According to theory, comovement in stock prices reflects comovement in the fundamental factors underlying the values of stocks. Recent theory contends that stock price comovement can be driven by information markets or the informational opacity of the firm. To the extent that voluntary disclosure reduces information acquisition cost and enhances firm transparency, we predict that enhanced voluntary disclosure reduces stock price comovement. We provide evidence in support of this prediction using analyst evaluation of firm disclosure policy. Overall, our evidence supports the effectiveness of firm disclosure policy in increasing the amount of firm-specific information contained in stock returns.

We examine how the price-earnings relation varies with the uncertainty about and the quality of a firm's investments. We develop a real option valuation framework to capture investment and abandonment options in the research-intensive biotechnology industry. We hypothesize that the price-earnings relation will be V-shaped and change over the firm life cycle. We also show how nonfinancial information affects the pricing of earnings. Our empirical findings are based on a sample of 301 biotechnology firms that made IPOs between 1980 and 2000, and are generally consistent with our predictions.

This paper studies the trade receivables policy of distressed firms as the trade off between the firm’s willingness to gain sales and the firm’s need for cash. We find that firms increase trade receivables when they have profitability problems, but reduce trade receivables when they have cash flow problems. We also find that a firm that significantly cuts its trade receivables when in financial distress will experience an additional drop of at least 13% in sales and stock returns over the previously documented 20% average drop for financially troubled firms. Moreover, the performance decline of a firm in financial distress is significantly higher if the firm cuts trade receivables than if it does not.

We show that multifactor performance estimates for mutual funds suffer from systematic biases, and argue that these biases are a result of miscalculating the factor premiums. Because the factor proxies are based on hypothetical stock portfolios and do not incorporate transaction costs, trade impact, and trading restrictions, the factor premiums are either over- or underestimated. We argue that factor proxies based on mutual fund returns rather than stock returns provide better benchmarks to evaluate professional money managers.

We examine how IPO valuation has changed over time by focusing on three time periods: 1986-1990, January 1997-March 2000 (designated as the Boom period), and April 2000-December 2001 (designated as the Crash period). Using a sample of 1,655 IPOs, we find that firms with more negative earnings have higher valuations than do firms with less negative earnings and firms with more positive earnings have higher valuations than firms with less positive earnings. Our results suggest that negative earnings are a proxy for growth opportunities for internet firms and that such growth options are a significant component of IPO firm value.

I classify firms into groups of high, low, and negative sensitivity. I find that investment-cash flow sensitivity is non-monotonic with respect to financial constraints, cash flows, and growth opportunities. Firms classified as negative cash flow sensitive have the lowest cash flows, highest growth opportunities, and appear the most financially constrained. Cash flow insensitive firms have the highest cash flows, lowest growth opportunities, and appear the least financially constrained. To a large extent, the negative relationship between cash flow and investment is driven by the opposite trends followed by investment and cash flow, as firms grow through stages of their lifecycle.

This paper brings together the evidence on two asset pricing anomalies – continuation of prior returns (momentum) and the market mispricing of distressed firms, using UK data. Our analysis demonstrates both these effects are driven by market under reaction to financial distress risk. In particular, we find momentum is proxying for distress risk, and is largely subsumed by our distress risk factor. We also find, as with U.S. studies, no evidence that size and B/M effects in stock returns are linked to financial distress.

We examine the local effects of equity ownership by investors who are classified as qualified foreign institutional investors in Taiwan. Our empirical analyses reveal a pronounced foreign ownership effect, whereby stocks with high foreign ownership outperform stocks with low foreign ownership. The valuation effect is present even after controlling for firm export, size, or transparency levels. We pursue a performance-based explanation for this effect and find that foreign ownership is strongly and positively associated with firm R&D expenditures and contemporaneous and subsequent firm performances. Our evidence is consistent with foreign investors who enjoy a long-run information advantage over domestic investors.

As documented by a vast empirical literature, IPOs are characterized by underpricing. A number of papers have shown that underpricing is directly related to the amount of ex-ante uncertainty concerning the IPOs valuation. Recent theoretical papers propose that not all value uncertainty is resolved prior to the start of trading, but rather continues to be resolved in the beginning of the after market. We term this type of uncertainty as ex-post value uncertainty and develop proxies for it. We find strong support for the existence of ex-post value uncertainty and find that including a proxy for it more than doubles the explanatory power of previous models.

Using short-sale transactions data, we examine the relation between short selling and the weekend effect. We do not find that short selling is more abundant on Monday than on Friday, even for stocks that have higher Friday returns. We find that short sellers execute more short sale volume during the middle of the week, and that the positive correlation between short selling and returns on Monday is greater, on average, than the correlation on the other days of the week. Our results are robust to subsamples of stocks with larger weekend effects and stocks that do not have listed options.

This paper takes an asset pricing perspective to investigate the equity market co-movement and contagion at the sector level during the period 1990-2004 across the regions of Europe, Asia, and Latin America. It examines whether unexpected shocks from a particular market, or group of markets, are propagated to the sectors in other countries. The results confirm the sector heterogeneity of contagion. This implies that there are sectors which can still provide a channel for achieving the benefits of international diversification during crises despite the prevailing contagion at the market level. In addition, the results lend support to the importance of financial links in the propagation of contagion.

This study undertakes firm-level analysis of investment opportunities and free cash flow in an attempt to explain the source of the wealth effect of financial liberalization for fourteen emerging countries. We find that the market’s responses to stock market liberalization announcements are more favorable for high growth firms than for low growth firms, a result which is consistent with the investment opportunities hypothesis. We also demonstrate that firms with high cash flow experience lower announcement period returns associated with stock market liberalization than do firms with low cash flow. Our findings suggest that the free cash flow hypothesis dominates the corporate governance hypothesis in terms of the net effect of stock market liberalization on a firm’s stock returns. We further document similar evidence with regard to banking liberalization. Finally, we demonstrate that stock market liberalization leads to the more efficient allocation of capital.

We examine whether, and to what extent, shareholder voting rights affect institutional investment decisions. We find that institutional ownership in dual-class firms is significantly lower than it is in single-class firms after controlling for other determinants of institutional investment. Although institutions of all types hold less shares of dual-class firms, this avoidance is more pronounced for long-term investors with strong fiduciary responsibilities than for short-term investors with weak fiduciary duties. Following the unification of dual-class shares into a single-class, institutional investors increase their shareholdings in the unifying firm. Overall, our results suggest that voting rights are an important determinant of institutional investment decisions.

This paper investigates the governance implications of a firm’s capital structure and managerial incentive compensation in controlling the free cash flow agency problem. The results suggest: debt and executive stock options act as substitutes in attenuating a firm’s free cash flow problem; failure to incorporate the substitutability and endogeneity leads to under estimates of the magnitude and economic implication of the disciplinary role of both mechanisms; firm characteristics differ across the prevalence of debt usage versus option usage, suggesting the heterogeneity in the costs and benefits of the monitoring devices; and, all the above effects are more pronounced in firms that tend to have more severe agency problem.

Many researchers apparently believe that some institutional investors prefer dividend-paying stocks because they are subject to the “prudent man” standard of fiduciary responsibility, under which dividend payments provide prima facie evidence that an investment is prudent. Although this was once accurate for many institutions, during the 1990s most states replaced the prudent man standard with the less-stringent “prudent investor” rule, which evaluates the appropriateness of each investment in a portfolio context. Controlling for the general decline in dividend-paying stocks, we find that institutions reduced their holdings of dividend-paying stocks by 2 to 3 percent as the prudent investor standard spread during the 1990s. Studies of asset pricing and corporate governance should no longer consider dividend payments when evaluating the actions of institutional investors.

Managing the different companies in which they invest while at the same time performing portfolio optimization for themselves, venture capitalists position themselves as a pure-play or diversified conglomerate through their cumulative portfolios. I examine the effects of two investment strategies of venture capitalists: 1) a specialist “pure-play” strategy that maximizes venture capital involvement, and 2) a more generalist strategy of diversification at the “firm” level that minimizes portfolio risk. I find that neither strategy optimizes both venture capital growth and time to entrepreneurial exit, which highlights a need for institutional investors to clarify fund objectives at the time a fund is established.

Previous literature documents that insurance IPOs are less underpriced than those of non-insurance firms. This difference is usually attributed to lower information asymmetry for regulated firms. We find, however, that, once one controls for the file price adjustment, insurance IPOs, both stock and mutual, are no less underpriced than other non-insurance offerings suggesting the book-building process resolves any such information asymmetries. We also find that mutual IPOs appear more underpriced than stock insurance IPOs, but this difference is related to the differences in pre-issue managerial ownership.

This study examines for evidence of peer effects in the trading decisions of individual investors from Mainland China, a country whose cultural and social structures are vastly different from those of Western countries. Cultural differences, as widely documented, play a significant role in social interactions and word-of-mouth behavior. In contrast to U.S. studies, we find robust evidence that the trading decisions of Chinese investors are influenced, via word-of-mouth, by those of their peers who maintain brokerage accounts at the same branch, but not by those whose accounts are maintained at another branch located in the same city.