Sharia compliance status & investor demand for IPOs: Evidence from Saudi Arabia

Faisal Alqahtani and Zakaria Boulanouar ()

Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, 2017, vol. 46, issue PB, 258-268

Abstract: Using a sample of 80 IPOs in the Saudi Arabian market between 2004 and 2011, in this paper we empirically investigate the effect of sharia compliance status on investor (individuals and institutions) demand for new shares offered in initial public offerings (IPOs). After controlling for some pre-listing information including size, age of the firm, offer risk, offer price, block-holding, market condition and the effect of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), we find that Sharia compliance status significantly alters the demand for new issues when measured by two different proxies, the ratio of oversubscription and the number of subscribers. We also find that market condition and block-holding, offer risk, age and size of firms can significantly explain some of the variations in the demand. Pivotally, institutional investors were found to emphasize profit-maximization over considerations of Sharia-compliance, whereas for individual investors (the majority here) the opposite was true. We conclude that sharia compliance status should be taken into account by issuers with a greater emphasis on privatization IPOs where the government aim is to distribute wealth among its citizens.

Keywords: IPO; Oversubscription; Investor demand; Sharia compliance; Saudi Arabia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G1 G3 P43 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0927538X16302980
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:pacfin:v:46:y:2017:i:pb:p:258-268

DOI: 10.1016/j.pacfin.2017.09.012

Access Statistics for this article

Pacific-Basin Finance Journal is currently edited by K. Chan and S. Ghon Rhee

More articles in Pacific-Basin Finance Journal from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().