IPOs, the level of private equity engagement and stock performance matters: Empirical evidence from Germany

Abstract

Research on IPOs commonly focuses on the relation between firms’ pre IPO ownership structure and subsequent stock performance. We extend the literature by additionally focusing on companies’ post IPO ownership structure, in particular, private equity capital engagement, to analyse IPOs stock performance matters. For this purpose, we employ a unique dataset on German IPOs from 2004 to 2014 that allows us to identify companies’ ownership structures before and after the IPO. We compute stocks’ market-adjusted returns and information ratios for the first 200 trading days to answer two research questions. First, do stocks of companies that were (partially) owned by private equity investors prior the IPO show a different performance after the IPO than stocks of companies without prior investments of private equity investors? Second, does the extent of private equity investors’ involvement at the IPO (i.e. their pre and post IPO shareholdings) influence the stock performance following the IPO? We do not find evidence that stocks of companies, which had private equity investors as shareholders prior to the IPO, outperform stocks of companies without private equity investors per se. However, for the subsample of companies that had private equity investors as shareholders, we document that the stronger the private equity investors reduce their engagement the stronger is the performance of the issued stock.