Habiba Mrissa Bouden
Published: 2015
Total Pages: 165
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This thesis contains three articles examining the impact of risk on three anomalies associated with the IPO market. These anomalies are: (1) the phenomenon of "hot-issue market", (2) the underpricing and (3) the long-run underperformance. We use a new approach that decomposes the total risk at the firm as well as the IPO market levels into: (1) a systematic risk component associated with common risk factors of the market and (2) an idiosyncratic risk component tied with firm specific risk factors and used as a proxy for the information asymmetry level. In addition, we use market implied volatility to assess the impact of market-wide uncertainty on IPO activity. Our objective is to reveal which risk component is involved in the IPO cycles (Paper 1), the short-run (Paper 2) as well as the long-run (Paper 3) IPO pricing process. The first paper characterizes the role of risk in IPO cycles. We aim to study IPO cycles not only in terms of IPO volume and initial returns but also in terms of issuing firm's risks with both systematic and idiosyncratic components. We show the important role of the market-wide risk to anticipate IPO's waves and the level of the idiosyncratic risk of future issues. Moreover, we show that systematic risk is positively correlated across issuing firms. The predictability of IPO waves and the specific risk level of future new issues helps: (1) regulators to improve rules accordingly, (2) investors to make better IPO investment's decisions and (3) issuers to align their IPO timing with market receptivity. The second paper evaluates the impact of both risk components (systematic and idiosyncratic) at the issuing firm as well as the IPO market levels on the IPO pricing by the underwriters during the period of registration on the one hand and by the investors in the early aftermarket stage on the other hand. Our results show that underwriters tend to undervalue IPOs compared to similar non-IPOs equities (controlling for the industry, sales, profitability and growth), when considering the idiosyncratic risk at the IPO market level during the registration period. For post-IPO valuation, we find that idiosyncratic risk of the issuing firm is not incorporated into the market price of overvalued IPOs only. We conclude that IPO mispricing is mainly attributed to the non-incorporation of the idiosyncratic risk component into IPO prices. The third paper examines the long-run abnormal performance of IPOs versus comparable non-IPOs equities by using a new perspective that distinguishes between the systematic and idiosyncratic risk components of the firm. Our findings show that IPOs exhibit higher levels of systematic and idiosyncratic risks than their matched peers. Unlike non-issuing firms, we show a significant downward trend in IPO idiosyncratic risk during the first three years of seasoning. However, the IPO systematic risk component exhibits a slight upward trend over time. We also show that the apparent IPO underperformance is just a reflection of a lower risk volatility exposure for IPOs relative to similar non-issuing firms. Moreover, we find more pronounced long-run underperformance, especially for IPOs with high idiosyncratic risk, technology firms and hot-IPOs. This thesis contributes to the IPO literature by highlighting the relevance of our approach that adopts the decomposition of risk in order to understand some mixed findings in the literature about the three anomalies of the IPO's market.