approximately half the mean, 71%, of the company that is retained by the original
entrepreneurs in the United States (see Jain and Kini, 1994). An alternative measure of
ownership retention would be to measure the change in management ownership from
before, to after, the IPO. In our entire sample, however, we find that management owns
100% of the firm prior to the IPO. That is, there are no ‘outside’ owners (e.g., venture
capitalist, etc.) among our pre-IPO firms, which is actually a common attribute for private
firms in most emerging markets. Thus, our alpha measure fully reflects the degree of
managerial ownership retention (or dispersion) that takes place at the IPO.
Operating performance is measured in two ways: operating returns on total assets
(EBIT/TA) and operating cash flow (CF=EBIT+Depreciation) divided by total assets (CF/
TA). Operating returns on assets provides a measure of the efficiency of asset utilization.
Operating cash flows is a useful alternative measure of operating performance because
operating cash flows are a primary component in net-present-value (NPV) calculations
used to value a firm. At the bottom of Table 1, we report the median operating
performance of our IPO firms and of the industry-median firms during the fiscal year
prior to the IPO (Year 1). The industry-median figures are used for the sake of
comparison and are drawn from the same industry and same year as the IPO firm. The
Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET) uses 30 industry classifications. For each industry of
the going-public firm, the PACAP database (which follows the same industry classifications)
is searched for publicly traded firms with the same industry code. However, some of
the industries do not have more than two publicly traded member firms. Therefore, in
order to obtain meaningful industry performance measures (i.e., the median performance
of the industry), we group some of the industries together. We execute a battery of
robustness checks (which we will describe shortly) to ensure that none of our findings and
subsequent findings are affected by the way we group some industries together. Our
industry classifications are reported in Appendix D.
We see that our firm performance measures are higher for IPO firms than for industrymedian
firms. The median return on assets is 12.57% and 10.52% for the IPO firms and
the industry-median firms, respectively, and a Z-statistic indicates that this difference is
statistically significant. The operating cash flow on assets is 13.88% and 12.32% for the
IPO and industry-median firms, respectively, albeit the Z-statistic does not reject equality.
We also see that our IPO firms have much lower overall sales, but somewhat similar salesto-
total assets ratios, when compared to public firms. Similarly, the lower capital
expenditures (measured as the change in capital investment from the prior year, adjusting
for depreciation) and bank debt of our going-public firms is also associated to firm size