This study examines the influence of specialist CEOs on the probability of failure and survivability of initial public offering (IPO) firms. We construct a generalist skills index based on CEOs' past employment history in order to classify CEOs into specialist and generalist ones. Specialist CEOs pursue a career in particular functional roles, firms and industry sectors, as opposed to generalist CEOs who accumulate their work experience through various positions, firms and industries. We uncover strong evidence that IPO firms with a specialist CEO have a lower probability of failure and a longer time to survive in subsequent periods following the offering. The findings suggest that specialist managerial ability has significant implications for post-issue performance of newly listed firms. Additionally, specialist CEOs may have incentives that are more aligned with those of the firm and its shareholders; thus, they are more likely to enhance the viability of IPO firms for a longer period of time.

It is a commonly held view that gold protects investors’ wealth in the event of negative economic conditions. In this study, we test whether other metals offer similar or better investment opportunities in periods of market turmoil. Using a sample of 13 sovereign bonds, we show that other precious metals, palladium in particular, offer investors greater compensation for their bond market losses than gold. We also find that industrial metals, especially copper, tend to outperform gold and other precious metals as hedging vehicles and safe haven assets against losses in sovereign bonds. However, the outcome of the hedge and safe haven properties is not always consistent across the different bonds. Finally, our analysis suggests that copper is the best performing metal in the period immediately after negative bond price shocks.

This study explores the effect of directors' political contributions on IPOs' valuation and firm survival. We find that individual contributions by directors bring significant benefits to the IPO firms. Specifically, we show that political contributions of board members, particularly those of CEOs and founders, increase the IPO premium and the survivability of IPO firms. We find that the relationship between directors' political contributions and IPO premium is particularly strong among non-venture-backed firms, while the link between directors' political contributions and firm survival is more pronounced for venture-backed firms with strong corporate governance. Our findings are robust to endogeneity concerns and to alternative measures of political donations and IPO performance. Our results confirm the relevance of signaling and resource dependence theories.

This study analyses the effect of political money contributions on U.S. banks’ IPOs. We employ unbalanced panel data of 367 U.S. banks’ IPOs for the period January 1998 to December 2019. Our findings reveal that investors perceive Political Money Contributions (PMC) by U.S. banks as a proxy for political reach and connectedness. We document an inverse relationship between total PMC and the level of underpricing, which implies that both lobbying and PAC expenditure pay off on issue day as donors incur less underpricing. Initial returns decrease with PAC contributions to House of Representatives candidates, whereas the returns relate to the partisan identity of the candidates receiving PAC contributions. We document that those individual contributions by directors bring significant benefits to the IPO banks. Finally, we show that the political contributions of board members, particularly those of CEOs and founders, are associated with better returns in the long term.

Using credit ratings as an uncertainty-reducing mechanism, we provide evidence of the beneficial impact of multiple credit ratings on reducing IPO underpricing and filing price revision. We find that the acquisition of multiple ratings in the pre-IPO period mitigates uncertainty more than the acquisition of a single rating. Multi-rated firms also have higher probabilities of survival than those with a single rating, whereas credit rating levels matter only for IPOs with more than one rating. The IPOs that are awarded the first rating on the borderline between investment and non-investment grades are more likely to seek an additional rating.

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Greater partisan alignment among lawmakers enhances their ability to respond rapidly to adverse shocks, but it also undermines the quality of checks and balances and encourages excessive governmental intervention in local areas aligned with the ruling party. We investigate how this form of local policy risk affects IPO underpricing. One standard-deviation increase in political alignment between local politicians and the federal government translates into an extra $1.58 million being left on the table, which corresponds to 5.39% of the average valuation discount. This effect is concentrated in firms that are vulnerable to legislative interventions and has important long-term implications. Our robustness analysis also shows that our baseline results are not sensitive to the inclusion/exclusion of influential states and years with high IPO activity.

This study tests the proposition that higher tournament incentives play a major role in lowering the failure risk of Initial Public Offerings (IPOs). Measuring tournament incentives as the pay gap between the CEO and its subordinate executives, we find that an interquartile change in the distribution of the CEO pay gap translates into a decline in failure risk probability by approximately 27%. The results are driven by the long-term rather than the short-term component of exective pay. Our results hold in an instrumental-variable setting that exploits exogenous variation in the likelihood of employing intra-firm, tournament-based, promotion incentives. Cross-sectional tests indicate that the negative link between tournament incentives and IPO failure is more pronounced when internal promotion contests are more likely to occur. Finally, we document that CEO pay gap is associated with superior long-run operating performance and greater investment efficiency.

We investigate systemic risk and how financial contagion propagates within the euro area banking system by employing the Maximum Entropy method. The study captures multiple snapshots of a dynamic financial network and uses counterfactual simulations to propagate shocks emerging from three sources of systemic risk: interbank, asset price, and sovereign credit risk markets. As conditions deteriorate, these channels trigger severe direct and indirect losses and cascades of defaults, whilst the dominance of the sovereign credit risk channel amplifies, as the primary source of financial contagion in the banking network. Systemic risk within the northern euro area banking system is less apparent, while the southern euro area banking system is more prone and susceptible to bank failures provoked by financial contagion. By modelling the contagion path the results demonstrate that the euro area banking system insists to be markedly vulnerable and conducive to systemic risks.