How do Acquirers Choose between Mergers and Tender Offers?

Tender offers provide the advantage of substantially faster completion times than mergers. However, a tender offer signals to the target higher demand for its shares and raises its reservation price. In equilibrium, bidders tradeoff speed and cost. Consistent with this theory, we show that deals in more competitive environments and deals with fewer external impediments on execution are more likely to be structured as tender offers. Tender offers also require higher premiums than mergers. Finally, the rivals of the bidding firm realize significantly lower announcement returns and subsequent operating performance in tender offers than in mergers

Why Do Firms Become Widely Held? An Analysis of the ynamics of Corporate Ownership

We consider IPO firms from 1970 to 2001 and examine the evolution of their insider ownership over time to understand better why and how U.S. firms that become widely held do so. In our sample, a majority of firms has insider ownership below 20% after ten years. We find that a firm's stock market performance and trading play an extremely important role in its insider ownership dynamics. Firms that experience large decreases in insider ownership and/or become widely held are firms with high valuations, good recent stock market performance, and liquid markets for their stocks. In contrast and surprisingly, variables suggested by agency theory have limited success in explaining the evolution of insider ownership.

Initial Public Offerings and the Firm Location

The firm geographic location matters in IPOs because investors have a strong preference for newly issued local stocks and provide abnormal demand in local offerings. Using equity holdings data for more than 53,000 households, we show the probability to participate to the stock market and the proportion of the equity wealth is abnormally increasing with the volume of the IPOs inside the investor region. Upon nearly the universe of the 167,515 going public and private domestic manufacturing firms, we provide consistent evidence that the isolated private firms have higher probability to go public, larger IPO underpricing cross-sectional average and volatility, and less pronounced long-run under-performance. Similar but opposite evidence holds for the local concentration of the investor wealth. These effects are economically relevant and robust to local delistings, IPO market timing, agglomeration economies, firm location endogeneity, self-selection bias, and information asymmetries, among others. Findings suggest IPO waves have a strong geographic component, highlight that underwriters significantly under-estimate the local demand component thus leaving unexpected money on the table, and support state-contingent but constant investor propensity for risk

Attitudes Toward Noncompliance and the Demand for External Financing

We study the link between the individual propensity to violate moral principles and the demand for finance based on two data sets: the World Values Survey and a data set with the legal records of U.S. chief executive officers (CEOs). We find that individuals who are more tolerant of moral principle violations are more likely to borrow. Corporate executives with legal records are also associated with larger mortgages. Reverse causality and attitudes toward risk are unlikely explanations for our findings. We contend that noncompliance relaxes participation constraints in capital markets by lowering the psychological costs of entering and breaking a contract

The Role Of Underwriter-Investor Relationships In The Ipo Process

We find that in allocating initial public offerings (IPOs), underwriters favor institutions they have previously worked with. Regular investors benefit more than casual investors in IPOs through greater participation in underpriced issues. Relationship participation is more important in the distribution of IPOs with stronger demand, IPOs of less liquid firms, and deals by less reputable underwriters. Overall, our results are consistent with book-building theories of IPOs. Interestingly, for 1999-2000 we find that regular investors receive even more underpriced IPOs relative to previous years while we do not find evidence that they provide additional services in IPOs. COPYRIGHT 2007, SCHOOL OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION, UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON,

Geographic Proximity And Price Discovery: Evidence From Nasdaq

We use the NASDAQ market making context to study the role of geographic proximity in the price discovery of a firm\u27s stock. We show that market makers closer to the firm\u27s headquarters spend more time at the inside bid and ask quotes, initiate larger changes in the quotes, and account for greater information share when compared to non-local market makers. Examining a sample of relocating firms, we also find that market makers moving farther away from the firm after relocation experience a reduction in their contributions to price discovery. Our results suggest that some (local) market makers possess superior information relative to other (non-local) market makers and they trade strategically on this information, a finding that challenges the traditional assumptions in market microstructure theory. © 2010 Elsevier B.V

Geographic proximity and price discovery: Evidence from NASDAQ

We use the NASDAQ market making context to study the role of geographic proximity in the price discovery of a firm's stock. We show that market makers closer to the firm's headquarters spend more time at the inside bid and ask quotes, initiate larger changes in the quotes, and account for greater information share when compared to non-local market makers. Examining a sample of relocating firms, we also find that market makers moving farther away from the firm after relocation experience a reduction in their contributions to price discovery. Our results suggest that some (local) market makers possess superior information relative to other (non-local) market makers and they trade strategically on this information, a finding that challenges the traditional assumptions in market microstructure theory.Price discovery Quote quality Geographic location Market microstructure