This study examines whether information about a firm's engagement in environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices is material to market participants. Evidence from a sample of 1856 initial public offerings (IPOs) by U.S. companies for the 2007–2018 period robustly documents that firms for which there is available ESG performance information prior to going public exhibit higher underpricing due to a positive market response. Such a reaction is validated by agency cost‐reducing practices that ESG‐rated firms follow prior to the IPO, the superior post‐IPO market performance they exhibit in terms of equity financing, and the higher share of financially sophisticated investors they attract compared to their ESG‐unrated peers. Overall, our results highlight that it pays off to do good and to have the right investors; however, firms’ good ESG practices need to be visible to the market, through rating practices, to reap the benefits.

We explore the effect of financial development on corporate capital structure and the tightness of financial constraints that firms face. We employ an econometric technique which allows us to explicitly test for convergence in capital structure. This technique increases the power of our statistical tests. In doing so, we identify a group of convergent firms. The driving force of convergence is financial development, which positively affects the firms' leverage ratio. We also identify a group of firms, whose leverage is not affected by financial development, because they are financially constrained.

We consistently show that in large equity markets, the dividend-price ratio is signi…-cantly related with the growth of future dividends. In order to uncover this relationship, we use monthly dividends and a mixed data sampling technique which allows us to cope with within-year seasonality. Our approach avoids the use of overlapping observations, and at the same time reduces the implications of the impact of price volatility on the dividend-price ratio. An empirical analysis using market level data from U.S., U.K., Canada and Japan strongly supports the dividend growth predictability hypothesis, suggesting that time-aggregation of dividends eliminates signi…cant information.

No abstract