Investment without Risk: An Empirical Investigation of IPO Underpricing in China

Abstract

China enjoys the highest level of initial returns of initial public offerings (IPOs) in the world, with an average market-adjusted initial return of 132.49%, using data on 354 new issues in China from 1 January 1999 to 31 December 2002. This paper advances an explanation of this phenomenon. It proposes some possible reasons for the high returns and finds that most of the hypotheses based on information asymmetry, such as the winner's curse, signaling, market feedback and the bandwagon hypothesis, fail to fully explain the phenomenon of underpricing. The paper finds only weak evidence for the winner's curse hypothesis. Only the IPO size has a statistically significant positive relationship with the level of the market-adjusted initial returns. The paper argues that the underpricing of IPOs is the result of the interactive process between the offer price and the trading price on the secondary market, while the information asymmetry hypotheses only focus on the determination of the offer price. A new explanation focusing on the interplay of supply and demand in both primary and secondary markets is advanced and tested using the sample data. The results show that IPO underpricing in China is the result of overpriced secondary market shares under the condition of de facto segmented markets. IPO underpricing is positively related to the trading price in the secondary market, i.e., the higher the P/E ratio of the market (used as a proxy for trading price level in the secondary market), the more underpricing that occurred in the IPO. China's primary and secondary markets are in practice segmented, i.e., in general money from one does not flow to the other. Under these conditions, the returns in the two markets show little tendency to converge. This theory suggests that secondary market reform is essential to mature the primary market. Among all the reform measures, making non-tradable shares tradable and introducing shortselling or a day-trading mechanism are most important to lowering secondary market prices to more reasonable levels.