This article provides a survey of China’s initial public offering (IPO) market, focusing on IPO pricing, bids and allocation, and aftermarket trading. We show that strict regulations result in suppressed IPO offer prices and high initial returns, causing a high cost of going public. Investors treat IPOs as lotteries with extremely high short-term returns, with little attention to the long term. The auction selling method, however, works in the way it is supposed to. Mutual funds bid in a more informative way than other investors, and their advantages are unlikely to be due to underwriters’ preferential treatment. We also discuss the latest registration-system reform.

We show that chief executive officers (CEOs) exhibit a hometown bias in acquisitions. Firms are over twice as likely to acquire targets located in the states of their CEOs’ childhood homes than similar targets domiciled elsewhere. Small, private home-state deals underperform other small, private deals, and the bias is stronger when acquirer governance is lax, suggesting that CEOs acquire private home-state targets for their own benefits. In contrast, large, public home-state acquisitions are value enhancing. CEOs create value in public home-state acquisitions by avoiding extremely poor deals and through deals with higher synergies. Thus, both agency issues and hometown advantages drive home-state acquisitions.

We document that return anomalies related to management discretions are mitigated for firms followed by more experienced analysts. Nonetheless, only experience directly covering the firm matters while experience covering other firms is not associated with greater price efficiency. Focusing on the accrual anomaly, we then examine research and monitoring as possible channels through which experience mitigates mispricing. For firms followed by more experienced analysts, we find that forecast revisions and stock prices respond more positively to the accrual component of earnings. We further find that accrual quality is higher in firms followed by more experienced analysts, which holds after using both propensity score matching and exogenous events of brokerage closures and mergers to control for endogeneity. Collectively, our results are consistent with monitoring being the primary mechanism by which experienced analysts reduce accrual mispricing.

We perform transaction-level analyses of entrusted loans, one of the largest components of shadow banking in China. Entrusted loans involve firms with privileged access to cheap capital channeling funds to less privileged firms, and the increase when credit is tight. Nonaffiliated loans have much higher interest rates than both affiliated loans and official bank loans, and they largely flow into real estate. The pricing of entrusted loans, especially of nonaffiliated loans, incorporates fundamental and informational risks. Stock market reactions suggest that both affiliated and nonaffiliated loans are fairly compensated investments.

Using a unique dataset of complete bid information for every IPO auction in Taiwan during 1995--2000, we examine the behaviors and returns of two groups--institutional and retail investors--in a setting in which underwriters do not have pricing or allocation discretion. We find that the bids of institutional investors are generally consistent with the predictions of IPO auction theory for informed bidders, while those of individual investors are not. Specifically, returns are higher when more institutional investors enter the auction or bid higher prices, suggesting institutional investors are informed and are also able to shave bids adequately. However, individual investors as a group exhibit return-chasing behavior, are uninformed, and systematically overbid. The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press [on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies]. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]., Oxford University Press.

We document that a firm’s culture, specifically, its religiosity, affects its cost of debt. Firms in higher-religiosity counties have higher credit ratings and lower debt costs. The impact of religiosity is stronger for firms with greater information asymmetry and during recessions. Further, religiosity has additional explanatory power for the cost of bank loans (but not the cost of public bonds) beyond its impact through ratings. This supports the argument that banks have superior abilities in pricing soft information, such as corporate culture. Finally, the impact of religiosity is stronger when the lender is a small bank.

Studying the only mandatory pre-IPO market in the world—Taiwan’s Emerging Stock Market (ESM)—we document that pre-market prices are very informative about post-market prices and that informativeness increases with a stock’s liquidity. The ESM price-earnings ratio shortly before an initial public offering explains about 90% of the variation in the offer price-earnings ratio. However, the average IPO underpricing level remains high, at 55%, suggesting that agency problems between underwriters and issuers can lead to excessive underpricing, even with little valuation uncertainty. Also, regulations impact the relative bargaining power of players and therefore IPO pricing.

We examine how experience affects the decisions of individual investors and institutions in IPO auctions to bid in subsequent auctions, and their bidding returns. We track bidding histories for all 31, 476 individual investors and 1, 232 institutional investors across all 84 IPO auctions during the period from 1995 to 2000 in Taiwan. For individual bidders, (1) high returns in previous IPO auctions increase the likelihood of participating in future auctions; (2) bidders' returns decrease as they participate in more auctions; (3) auction selection ability deteriorates with experience; and (4) those with greater experience bid more aggressively. These findings are consistent with naïve reinforcement learning wherein individuals become unduly optimistic after receiving good returns. In sharp contrast, there is little sign that institutional investors exhibit such behavior. The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]., Oxford University Press.

Implicit guarantees provided by financial intermediaries are a key component of China's shadow banking sector. We show theoretically that project screening by intermediaries, accompanied by their implicit guarantees to investors, can be the second-best arrangement and mitigate capital misallocation that favors state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Using a dataset of trusts’ investment products, we find, consistent with our model, that ex ante expected yields reflect borrower risks and implicit guarantee strength, and risk sensitivity is reduced by strong guarantees. Regulations in 2018 restricting implicit guarantees lead to a weaker relationship between yield spread and guarantee strength, and more credit rationing of non-SOEs.