We examine whether irrational behavior among small (retail) investors drives post-IPO prices. We use prices from the grey market (the when-issued market that precedes European IPOs) to proxy for small investors' valuations. High grey market prices (indicating overoptimism) are a very good predictor of first-day aftermarket prices, while low grey market prices (indicating excessive pessimism) are not. Moreover, we find long-run price reversal only following high grey market prices. This asymmetry occurs because larger (institutional) investors can choose between keeping the shares they are allocated in the IPO, and reselling them when small investors are overoptimistic. Copyright 2006 by The American Finance Association.

In the bookbuilding procedure, an investment banker solicits bids for shares from institutional investors prior to pricing an equity issue. The banker then prices the issue and allocates shares at his discretion to the investors. We examine the books for 39 international equity issues. We find that the investment banker awards more shares to bidders who provide information in their bids. Regular investors receive favorable allocations, especially when the issue is heavily oversubscribed. The investment banker also favors revised bids and domestic investors.

This paper examines the price differences between very liquid on-the-run U.S. Treasury securities and less liquid off-the-run securities over the on/off cycle. Comparing pairs of securities in time-series regressions allows us to disregard any fixed cross-sectional differences between securities. Also, since the liquidity of Treasury notes varies predictably over time, we can distinguish between current and future liquidity. We compare a variety of (microstructure-based) direct measures of liquidity to compare their effects on prices. We show that the liquidity premium depends primarily on the amount of remaining future liquidity.

Abstract.When using a formal bookbuilding procedure, underwriters observe the demand curves of investors as stated in the "book" prior to pricing shares in an equity issue. The purpose of this paper is to examine how the investment bank uses the information in the book when setting the issue price and whether this information can help predict subsequent secondary aftermarket prices. We examine the details of the institutional bids for shares for a sample of 63 international equity issues. We find that the issue price primarily reflects the information in the price contingent bids of certain bidders such as large bidders and frequent bidders. The oversubscription has a smaller but significant effect and is positively correlated with aftermarket returns in IPOs, suggesting that the investment bank does not fully internalize in the issue price all the quantity information. Finally, the elasticity of the demand is also positively correlated with aftermarket returns. * We are grateful to

No abstract