Did the COVID-19 pandemic (really) positively impact the IPO Market? An Analysis of information uncertainty

Ahmed S. Baig and Mengxi Chen

Finance Research Letters, 2022, vol. 46, issue PB

Abstract: Anecdotal evidence seems to suggest that the initial public offering (IPO) market performed remarkably well through the COVID-19 pandemic. To further understand this peculiar observation, we carry out a comprehensive analysis of IPOs during the pandemic vis-a-vis IPOs before the pandemic. Our findings imply that IPOs during the pandemic experience greater information uncertainty compared to those before the pandemic, and this greater uncertainty is mainly driven by the IPOs from the high-technology and the healthcare sectors. Furthermore, we find that an average IPO firm experiences larger underpricing and more post-IPO return volatility as the pandemic and the associated government responses increase in severity before the offering. Overall, our study indicates that the COVID-19 pandemic had an adverse impact on the IPO market.

Keywords: COVID-19; Interventions; Information uncertainty; IPOs; Underpricing; Volatility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1544612321003743
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:finlet:v:46:y:2022:i:pb:s1544612321003743

DOI: 10.1016/j.frl.2021.102372

Access Statistics for this article

Finance Research Letters is currently edited by R. Gençay

More articles in Finance Research Letters from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().