Security Design in Initial Public Offerings
35 Pages Posted: 26 Aug 2007
Date Written: June 5, 2007
Abstract
We investigate the security design problem in an initial public offering (IPO). In line with Rock~(1986), we consider a situation in which some investors are better informed than others about the prospects of the firm, resulting in a winner's curse problem. To raise capital, the owners of the firm must underprice the securities they issue in order to compensate the less informed investors for their willingness to participate in the issue. In this context, we first show that firms can sometimes lower the cost of going public by using unit IPOs, in which equity and warrants are combined into a non-divisible package. Because warrants are less sensitive to low cash flow realizations, unit IPOs tend to be valuable to firms that face large downside risks or whose uncertainty revolves around the eventual performance of their assets in place. Second, we show that firms may be able to completely eliminate the winner's curse problem by making the warrants callable. Such a first-best scenario is possible when a firm's growth potential is sizeable even in bad states of the world, as the callability feature of the warrant allows the firm to dynamically create payoffs that are insensitive to the investors' private information. Our theory is consistent with the prominent use of unit IPOs and produces empirical implications that differentiates it from existing theories.
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