The contributions of this paper are twofold. It contributions to the IPO literature with analyses of firm and offer characteristics. Furthermore, it contributes to the literature related to corporate governance and equity ownership issues by different investors after controlling for domiciles.
We examine in detail whether domestic and foreign investors have different views and take different actions related to IPOs. Badrinath and Wahal (2002) and Sias et al. (2006) provide empirical support for the notion that stock ownership as well as breadth of ownership (defined as the fraction of investors holding the stock to all investors in the market) reflects' confidence in firms. In other words, given that institutional investors firms in detail and thereby possess superior information (e.g., Cohen et al., 2002 ; Gibson et atl., 2004), we posit these investors should be able to identify underprice IPO and thereby "pick the cherries".
We are in a position to examine the "nepotism hypothesis" by Ritter and Zhang (2007), which is when investment banks allocate underprice IPOs to affiliated funds. We test hypothesis by examining holdings for three investor investor categories following an IPO: (a) domestic institutional investors, (b) foreign investors and (c) domestic individual investors. Given the conventional wisdom that institutional investors have better insights into monitoring firms, we posit stock holdings by domestic individual investors will be lower (higher) in underprice (overpriced) IPO.