IPO Waves, Product Market Competition, and the Going Public Decision: Theory and Evidence
March 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-07
Abstract
We develop a new rationale for IPO waves based on product market considerations. Two firms, with differing productivity levels, compete in an industry with a significant probability of a positive productivity shock. Going public, though costly, not only allows a firm to raise external capital cheaply, but also enables it to grab market share from its private competitors. We solve for the decision of each firm to go public versus remain private, and the optimal timing of going public. In equilibrium, even firms with sufficient internal capital to fund their new investment may go public, driven by the possibility of their product market competitors going public. IPO waves may arise in equilibrium even in industries which do not experience a productivity shock. Our model predicts that firms going public during an IPO wave will have lower productivity and post-IPO profitability but larger cash holdings than those going public off the wave; it makes similar predictions for firms going public later versus earlier in an IPO wave. We empirically test and find support for these predictions.
Document Tags and Keywords
Keywords
Keywords are automatically generated using KeyBERT, a powerful and innovative
keyword extraction tool that utilizes BERT embeddings to ensure high-quality and contextually relevant
keywords.
By analyzing the content of working papers, KeyBERT identifies terms and phrases that capture the essence of the
text, highlighting the most significant topics and trends. This approach not only enhances searchability but
provides connections that go beyond potentially domain-specific author-defined keywords.
:
profitability,
investment,
market,
investing,
investor,
shareholder,
competitiveness,
stock,
competitor,
incentive,
spillover,
equilibrium,
prospect,
public,
publicly
Tags
Tags are automatically generated using a pretrained language model from spaCy, which excels at
several tasks, including entity tagging.
The model is able to label words and phrases by part-of-speech,
including "organizations." By filtering for frequent words and phrases labeled as "organizations", papers are
identified to contain references to specific institutions, datasets, and other organizations.
:
Census of Manufactures,
Annual Survey of Manufactures,
Internal Revenue Service,
Standard Industrial Classification,
Bureau of Labor Statistics,
Longitudinal Research Database,
Center for Economic Studies,
Total Factor Productivity,
Bureau of Economic Analysis,
Business Services,
Center for Research in Security Prices,
Initial Public Offering,
Securities Data Company,
Boston Research Data Center,
Boston College,
Herfindahl Hirschman Index
Similar Working Papers
Similarity between working papers are determined by an unsupervised neural
network model
know as Doc2Vec.
Doc2Vec is a model that represents entire documents as fixed-length vectors, allowing for the
capture of semantic meaning in a way that relates to the context of words within the document. The model learns to
associate a unique vector with each document while simultaneously learning word vectors, enabling tasks such as
document classification, clustering, and similarity detection by preserving the order and structure of words. The
document vectors are compared using cosine similarity/distance to determine the most similar working papers.
Papers identified with 🔥 are in the top 20% of similarity.
The 10 most similar working papers to the working paper 'IPO Waves, Product Market Competition, and the Going Public Decision: Theory and Evidence' are listed below in order of similarity.
-
Working PaperHow is Value Created in Spin-Offs? A Look Inside the Black Box🔥
July 2005
Working Paper Number:
CES-05-09
Using a unique sample of plant level data from the Longitudinal Research Database (LRD), we identify (for the first time in the literature), how (the precise channel and mechanism), where (parent or subsidiary), and when (the dynamic pattern) performance improvements arise following corporate spinoffs. We identify the source of value improvements in spin-offs by comparing the magnitude of post-spinoff changes in the wages, employment, materials costs, rental and administrative expenses, sales, and capital expenditures in the plants belonging to firms undergoing spin-offs relative to the magnitude of such changes in a control group of plants belonging to firms not undergoing spin-offs. We show that the total factor productivity (TFP) of plants belonging to spin-off firms (parent or spun-off subsidiary) increase, on average, following the spin-off. This increase in overall productivity begins immediately, starting with the first year following the spin-off, and continuing in the years thereafter. This performance improvement can be attributed to a decrease in workers' wages, employment at the plant, decrease in the cost of materials purchased, as well as a decrease in rental and office expenditures, but not from improved product market performance by these plants. Further, such productivity improvements arise primarily in plants that remain with the parent; plants belonging to the spun-off subsidiary do not experience such productivity increases. However, contrary to speculation in the previous literature, plants that are spun-off do not underperform parent plants prior to the spin-off. Finally, in our split-sample study of plants that were acquired subsequent to the spin-off and those that were not, we find that productivity increases for both groups of plants: while such productivity increases start immediately after the spin-off for the nonacquired plants, for the acquired plants they occur only after being taken over by a better management team.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperThe Industry Life Cycle and Acquisitions and Investment: Does Firm Organization Matter?
October 2005
Working Paper Number:
CES-05-29
We examine the effect of financial dependence on the acquisition and investment of single segment and conglomerate firms for different long-run changes in industry conditions. Conglomerates and single-segment firms differ in the investments they make. The main differences are in the investment in acquisitions rather than in the level of capital expenditure. Financial dependence, a deficit in a segment's internal financing, decreases the likelihood of acquisitions and opening new plants, especially for single-segment firms. These effects are mitigated for conglomerates in growth industries and also for firms that are publicly traded. In declining industries, plants of segments that are financially dependent are less likely to be closed by conglomerate firms. These findings persist after controlling for firm size and segment productivity. We also find that plants acquired by conglomerate firms in growth industries increase in productivity post-acquisition. The results are consistent with the comparative advantages of different firm organizations differing across long-run industry conditions.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperLeasing, Ability to Repossess, and Debt Capacity
June 2007
Working Paper Number:
CES-07-19
This paper studies the financing role of leasing and secured lending. We argue that the benefit of leasing is that repossession of a leased asset is easier than foreclosure on the collateral of a secured loan, which implies that leasing has higher debt capacity than secured lending. However, leasing involves agency costs due to the separation of ownership and control. More financially constrained firms value the additional debt capacity more and hence lease more of their capital than less constrained firms. We provide empirical evidence consistent with this prediction. Our theory is consistent with the explanation of leasing by practitioners, namely that leasing "preserves capital," which the academic literature considers a fallacy.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperThe Cross-Section of Labor Leverage and Equity Returns*
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-70
We study labor-induced operating leverage. Theoretically, we show that if labor markets are frictionless, two sufficient conditions for the existence of labor leverage are (a) relatively smooth wages and (b) a capital-labor elasticity of substitution strictly less than one. Our model provides theoretical support for the use of labor share'the ratio of labor expenses to value added'as a measure of labor leverage. We provide evidence for conditions (a) and (b), and we demonstrate the economic significance of labor leverage: High labor-share firms have operating profits that are more sensitive to economic shocks and have higher expected returns.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperEvidence for the Effects of Mergers on Market Power and Efficiency
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-43
Study of the impact of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) on productivity and market power has been complicated by the difficulty of separating these two effects. We use newly-developed techniques to separately estimate productivity and markups across a wide range of industries using confidential data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Employing a difference-in-differences framework, we find that M&As are associated with increases in average markups, but find little evidence for effects on plant-level productivity. We also examine whether M&As increase efficiency through reallocation of production to more efficient plants or through reductions in administrative operations, but again find little evidence for these channels, on average. The results are robust to a range of approaches to address the endogeneity of firms' merger decisions.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperThe Going Public Decision and the Product Market
July 2008
Working Paper Number:
CES-08-20
At what point in a firm's life should it go public? How do a firm's ex ante product market characteristics relate to its going public decision? Further, what are the implications of a firm going public on its post-IPO operating and product market performance? In this paper, we answer the above questions by conducting the first large sample study of the going public decisions of U.S. firms in the literature. We use the Longitudinal Research Database (LRD) of the U.S. Census Bureau, which covers the entire universe of private and public U.S. manufacturing firms. Our findings can be summarized as follows. First, a private firm's product market characteristics (market share, competition, capital intensity, cash flow riskiness) significantly affect its likelihood of going public. Second, private firms facing less information asymmetry and those with projects that are cheaper for outsiders to evaluate are more likely to go public (consistent with Chemmanur and Fulghieri (1999)). Third, IPOs of firms occur at the peak of their productivity cycle (consistent with Clementi (2002)): the dynamics of total factor productivity (TFP) and sales growth exhibit an inverted U-shaped pattern. Finally, sales, capital expenditures, and other performance variables exhibit a consistently increasing pattern over the years before and after the IPO. The last two findings are consistent with the widely documented post-IPO operating underperformance of firms being due to the real investment effects of a firm going public, and inconsistent with underperformance being solely due to earnings management immediately prior to the IPO.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperInformation and Industry Dynamics
August 2010
Working Paper Number:
CES-10-16R
This paper develops a dynamic industry model in which firms compete to acquire customers over time by disseminating information about themselves under the presence of random shocks to their efficiency. The properties of the model's stationary equilibrium are related to empirical regularities on firm and industry dynamics. As an application of the model, the effects of a decline in the cost of information dissemination on firm and industry dynamics are explored.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperThe Disappearing IPO Puzzle: New Insights from Proprietary U.S. Census Data on Private Firms
June 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-20
The U.S. equity markets have experienced a remarkable decline in IPOs since 2000, both in terms of smaller IPO volume and entrepreneurial firms' greater tendency to exit through acquisitions rather than IPOs. Using proprietary U.S. Census data on private firms, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of the above two notable trends and provide several new insights. First, we find that the dramatic reduction in U.S. IPOs is not due to a weaker economy that is unable to produce enough 'exit eligible' private firms: in fact, the average total factor productivity (TFP) of private firms is slightly higher post-2000 compared to pre-2000. Second, we do not find evidence supporting the conventional wisdom that the disappearing IPO puzzle is mainly driven by the decline in IPO propensity among small private firms. Third, we do not find a significant change in the characteristics of private firms exiting through acquisitions from pre- to post-2000. Fourth, the decline in IPO propensity persists even after we account for the changing characteristics of private firms over time. Fifth, we show that the difference in TFP between IPO firms and acquired firms (and between IPO firms and firms remaining private) went up considerably post-2000 compared to pre-2000. Finally, venture-capital-backed (VC-backed) IPO firms have significantly lower postexit long-term TFP than matched VC-backed private firms in the post-2000 era relative to the pre- 2000 era, while this pattern is absent among IPO and matched private firms without VC backing. Overall, our results strongly support the explanations based on standalone public firms' greater sensitivity to product market competition and entrepreneurial firms' access to more abundant private equity financing in the post-2000 era. We find mixed evidence regarding the explanations based on the smaller net financial benefits of being standalone public firms or the increased need for confidentiality after 2000.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperDo Cash Windfalls Affect Wages? Evidence from R&D Grants to Small Firms
February 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-06
This paper examines how employee earnings at small firms respond to a cash flow shock in the form of a government R&D grant. We use ranking data on applicant firms, which we link to IRS W2 earnings and other U.S. Census Bureau datasets. In a regression discontinuity design, we find that the grant increases average earnings with a rent-sharing elasticity of 0.07 (0.21) at the employee (firm) level. The beneficiaries are incumbent employees who were present at the firm before the award. Among incumbent employees, the effect increases with worker tenure. The grant also leads to higher employment and revenue, but productivity growth cannot fully explain the immediate effect on earnings. Instead, the data and a grantee survey are consistent with a backloaded wage contract channel, in which employees of financially constrained firms initially accept relatively low wages and are paid more when cash is available.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperInvestment Behavior of U.S. Firms Over Heterogenous Capital Goods: A Snapshot
December 2004
Working Paper Number:
CES-04-19
Recent research has indicated that investment in certain capital types, such as computers, has fostered accelerated productivity growth and enabled a fundamental reorganization of the workplace. However, remarkably little is known about the composition of investment at the micro level. This paper takes an important first step in filling this knowledge gap by looking at the newly available micro data from the 1998 Annual Capital Expenditure Survey (ACES), a sample of roughly 30,000 firms drawn from the private, nonfarm economy. The paper establishes a number of stylized facts. Among other things, I find that in contrast to aggregate data the typical firm tends to concentrate its capital expenditures in a very limited number of capital types, though which types are chosen varies greatly from firm to firm. In addition, computers account for a significantly larger share of firms' incremental investment than they do of lumpy investment.View Full Paper PDF
