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Why Wait? A Century of Life Before IPO
Abstract
Firms that entered the stock market in the 1990s were younger than any earlier cohort since World War I. Surprisingly, however, firms that IPO'd at the close of the 19th century were just as young as the companies that are entering today. We argue here that the electrification-era and the IT-era firms came in young because the technologies that they brought in were too productive to be kept out very long. The model assumes that the stage before IPO is a learning period during which the firm refines the idea before committing to it at the IPO stage. The better the idea, the higher is the opportunity cost of a delay in its implementation, and the earlier the firm will have its IPO.
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Citations
Cited by
Jovanovic, B., & Rousseau, P. L. (2005) · Handbook of Economic Growth · doi:10.1016/s1574-0684(05)01018-x · Cited by 708
Self-citationJovanovic, B., & Rousseau, P. L. (2002) · American Economic Review · doi:10.1257/000282802320189249 · Cited by 623
Self-citationReal effects of climate policy: Financial constraints and spillovers
Bartram, S. M., Hou, K., & Kim, S. (2022) · Journal of Financial Economics · doi:10.1016/j.jfineco.2021.06.015 · Cited by 616
PÁSTOR, Ľ., & VERONESI, P. (2005) · The Journal of Finance · doi:10.1111/j.1540-6261.2005.00778.x · Cited by 420
Why Do Firms Use Private Equity to Opt Out of Public Markets?
Bharath, S. T., & Dittmar, A. K. (2010) · Review of Financial Studies · doi:10.1093/rfs/hhq016 · Cited by 247
Metadata
- Authors
- Jovanovic, B., & Rousseau, P. L.
- Venue
- American Economic Review
- Publisher
- American Economic Association
- Published
- 2001-05-01
- Volume
- 91
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 336-341
- ISSN
- 0002-8282 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2088763344
- Cited by
- 164
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 17.00
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
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