Search results

The purpose of this paper is to examine the capital structure determinants and speed of adjustment (SOA) toward the target capital structure of firms.

The study has used the generalized method of moments (GMM) model and two-stage least squares (TSLS) to the panel data of 3,310 Indian firms, from January 2000 to March 2018, to determine the adjustment speed toward target capital structure. Further, the study employed a fully modified ordinary least square technique to shed light on the dynamic nature of the adjustment process.

The results of the GMM estimations indicate that Indian firms are adjusting their capital structure toward the target rate of 10.38 percent per year. Similarly, the findings of TSLS estimate specify a SOA of 15.49 percent per year. The low adjustment speed suggests the prevalence of higher adjustment costs of Indian firms.

Future research can be undertaken by including certain macroeconomic factors such as GDP, inflation and the interest rate, which also affect the SOA since firms are pretentious by market conditions while designing capital structure for firms.

In the current financial and regulatory set-up when there are frequent perturbations in the capital market, the study will be valuable for regulators, firms and academicians. The work would enable the concerned stakeholders to manage their scare resources and capital effectively by a better way to make informed decisions. It will facilitate managers of young companies to identify and regulate the factors that are more pertinent for them to make flexible financial decisions concerning the capital structure.

The study amplifies on previous studies and provides new insights on the speed of the adjustment process of Indian firms, helping to modify and refine their capital structures toward the optimum capital structure. This will not only enhance the financial flexibility in the capital structure of Indian corporates but also be of great value to the policymakers and other stakeholders.

The unique regulatory design of India provides us with the opportunity to disaggregate traditional initial public offering (IPO) underpricing into three categories: voluntary, pre-market and post-market. The presence of anchor investors in India makes it a compelling case to study. These individuals were introduced to bring transparency in the book building process, but their impact on pre-market and post-market underpricing was not foreseen. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to evaluate the impact of anchor investors on the IPO underpricing after disaggregation and on the long-run performance of an IPO.

A sample covering 232 IPOs from a period of 2009–2018 is included. The empirical analysis explores the impact of various firm-specific as well as market-specific variables on IPO underpricing. The financial data for the empirical analysis are extracted from Prime database and websites of National Stock Exchange and Bombay Stock Exchange. To deal with the outliers effectively, this paper deploys “robust-regression.”

The study finds that investor’s subscription rate and voluntary underpricing impacts the pre-market but do not have any impact on the post-market while the age of the firm has a different impact on both the markets and the number of anchor investors have the same impact in both markets. Anchor investors’ participation increases the pre-market as well as post-market underpricing. Lastly, the long-term performance of IPOs backed by the anchor investors is high relative to the IPOs not subscribed to by the anchor investors.

This paper is believed to be the first attempt to study the impact of anchor investors on the disaggregated IPO underpricing. The findings of this study will have a great insight for the investors.