Earnings Management and the Long-Run Performance of Spanish Initial Public Offerings

Abstract

The poor stock price performance of firms conducting initial public offerings is one of the recent puzzles in financial literature. We detect this market anomaly for Spanish IPO firms and we investigate whether earnings management around the time of the offering can explain these results. Consistent with this explanation, we notice that issuing firms make use of discretionary accruals to report higher earnings in the IPO year. Moreover, firms with higher level of discretionary accruals experience more negative long-run abnormal returns. Thus, this evidence suggests that opportunistic earnings management explains, at least partially, the IPO anomaly in Spain.