Investment Banks and IPO Pricing Power

Krigman and Wendy have an interesting paper on how issuers pay for their investment banks’ past mistakes. Their conclusions are based on the IPOs that came to market after the the botched Facebook IPO of 2012 in which the stock fell below the IPO price and the investment banks had to buy shares in the market to stabilize the price. IPOs after this event were underpriced by an average of 20% compared to only 11% prior to the Facebook IPO. More interestingly:

We show that the entire increase in underpricing is concentrated in the IPOs of the Facebook lead underwriters. We find no statistical difference in underpricing pre and post-Facebook for non-Facebook underwriters. We argue that investment bank loyalty to their institutional investor client based propelled the Facebook underwriters to increase underpricing to compensate for the perceived losses on Facebook.

“Loyalty to investor client” sounds very nice in a scandal dominated era where we have to come to believe that bankers have no loyalty to anybody. Yet, it must be remembered that the alleged generosity to investor clients did not come out of the bankers’ profits; it came out of the pockets of another bunch of clients – the issuers. This raises a very disturbing question: what gives them the pricing power to underprice issues relative to what their competitors were doing? The first possibility that came to my mind is that these were deals that the bankers had already won and it was difficult for the clients to change their lead banks after they had already been chosen. However, the data seem to show that the effect lasted more than a year, and moreover there was a 41 day period following Facebook during which there were no IPOs at all. The other possibility is that this is not a competitive market at all and the investment banks have a lot of market power. Chen and Ritter wrote a famous paper about this at the turn of the century (“The seven percent solution.” The Journal of Finance 55.3 (2000): 1105-1131).

Posted at 4:44 pm IST on Sun, 6 Mar 2016         permanent link

Categories: corporate governance, equity markets

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