The decision to go public and the IPO underpricing with locally biased investors

We provide new evidence that local investors are peculiarly biased towards local IPO stocks. Taking the well-known investor preference for local stocks a step further, we contribute by showing that local IPOs boost stock market participation far more intensely than local listed firms. Interestingly, the effect is driven by individuals born and raised in the region, having zero effect for those who have moved to the area. Consistent with underwriters significantly under-estimating the local investors’ demand in local IPOs, the probability of a private firm to go public, the IPO underpricing and the cross-sectional volatility of IPO initial returns, increase in remote firms where the local investors’ demand in local IPOs is particularly high. Overall, our results suggest that local investors are crucial for the IPO decision

Delay Management in Public Transportation: Service Regularity Issues and Crew Re-scheduling

In this paper, we propose a decision support tool to assist a local public transportation company in tackling service delays and small disruptions. We discuss different ways to assess and improve the regularity of the service, and we propose a simulation based optimization system that can be effectively used in a real-time environment taking into account both vehicle and driver shifts. In particular, we describe a tabu-search procedure for the online vehicle scheduling optimizing the regularity of the service and a column generation approach for the consequential crew re-scheduling minimizing the driver extra-time. As a case study, we analyze the management of urban surface lines of Azienda Trasporti Milanese (ATM) of Milan. In the last part of the paper we report a detailed analysis of the experimental phase showing the effectiveness of the proposed approach

High Himalayan Discontinuity: a key structure driving the earlier exhumation of the Greater Himalayan Sequence in Central Himalayas

Abstract HKT-ISTP 2013 A