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Open AccessJournal ArticleDOI

Where Have All the IPOs Gone

TLDR
In this article, the authors propose an alternative explanation for the decline in the number of initial public offerings in the United States: the advantages of selling out to a larger organization, which can speed a product to market and realize economies of scope, have increased relative to the benefits of operating as an independent firm.
Abstract
During 1980–2000, an average of 310 companies per year went public in the United States. Since 2000, the average has been only 99 initial public offerings (IPOs) per year, with the drop especially precipitous among small firms. Many have blamed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 and the 2003 Global Settlement’s effects on analyst coverage for the decline in IPO activity. We find very little support for the conventional wisdom, and we offer an alternative explanation. Our economies of scope hypothesis posits that the advantages of selling out to a larger organization, which can speed a product to market and realize economies of scope, have increased relative to the benefits of operating as an independent firm.

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Journal ArticleDOI

Equity retention and social network theory in equity crowdfunding

TL;DR: In this article, the authors compare the regulation around the world and discuss how this impacts the development of markets and investigate the signaling role played toward external investors by equity retention and social capital.
ReportDOI

The Rise of Market Power and the Macroeconomic Implications

TL;DR: This article studied the evolution of market power based on firm-level data for the U.S. economy since 1955 and measured both markups and profitability, and discussed the macroeconomic implications of an increase in average market power, which can account for a number of secular trends in the past four decades.
Journal ArticleDOI

Where has all the skewness gone? The decline in high-growth (young) firms in the U.S.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors show that the shape of the firm employment growth distribution changes substantially in the post-2000 period and the overall decline reflects a sharp drop in the 90th percentile of the growth rate distribution accounted for by the declining share of young firms and the declining propensity for young firms to be high-growth firms.
Journal ArticleDOI

Using 10-K Text to Gauge Financial Constraints

TL;DR: The authors parse 10-K disclosures filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) using a unique lexicon based on constraining words and find that the frequency of these words exhibits very low correlation with traditional measures of financial constraints and predicts subsequent liquidity events, such as dividend omissions or increases, equity recycling, and underfunded pensions.
Journal ArticleDOI

Local underwriter oligopolies and IPO underpricing

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors develop a theory of initial public offering (IPO) underpricing based on differentiated underwriting services and localized competition, and test their model implications on all-star analyst coverage, industry expertise, and other non-price dimensions.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI

Can Investors Profit from the Prophets? Security Analyst Recommendations and Stock Returns

TL;DR: In this paper, it was shown that purchasing short stocks with the most favorable consensus recommendations, in conjunction with daily portfolio rebalancing and a timely response to recommendation changes, yield annual abnormal gross returns greater than four percent.
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Initial Public Offerings: An Analysis of Theory and Practice

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors survey 336 chief financial officers (CFOs) to compare practice to theory in the areas of initial public offering (IPO) motivation, timing, underwriter selection, underpricing, signaling, and the decision to remain private.
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Sources and Financial Consequences of Radical Innovation: Insights from Pharmaceuticals

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors use theoretical arguments on the risk associated with radical innovations, and the resources needed for them, to answer the following questions on the sources and financial consequences of radical innovation: (1) Who introduces a greater number of radical innovations: dominant or non-dominant firms? (2) How great are the financial rewards to radical innovations and how do these rewards vary across dominant and nondominant firms? and (3) Is it only a firm's resources in the aggregate or also its focus and leverage of resources that make its innovations more financially valuable?
Journal ArticleDOI

Ipo market cycles: bubbles or sequential learning?

TL;DR: This article found that the level of average initial returns at the time of filing contains no information about that company's eventual underpricing and that more companies tend to go public following periods of high initial returns.
Journal ArticleDOI

Are dividends disappearing? Dividend concentration and the consolidation of earnings☆

TL;DR: For example, the 25 firms that paid the largest dividends in 2000 account for a majority of the aggregate dividends and earnings of industrial firms as discussed by the authors, while the vast majority of firms have at best a modest collective impact on aggregate earnings and dividends.