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The authors examine one special focus of Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs), namely environmental, social and governance (ESG) related investments. The authors document the performance of SPACs with and without ESG focus.

The authors collect data, from several sources, on 1,737 SPAC IPOs formed between 2003 and 2022. A SPAC's focus on ESG is classified based on declared focus in Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings and in post-merger annual reports. The authors examine operational and financial performance of SPACs with and without ESG focus.

In the study's sample, only 50% of SPACs that announced an intention to acquire an ESG target ended up consummating a merger with an ESG private firm. ESG SPACs exhibit worse operating performance than non-ESG SPACs. Furthermore, they experience 11.6% lower 1-year post-merger excess returns than their non-ESG counterparts.

The study provides an examination of ESG firms that came to market via mergers with SPACs, which is an alternative method to traditional initial public offerings (IPOs). The study also provides a comparison of both operational and stock performance of ESG and non-ESG SPACs.

Alain Bouchard was born in 1949. He bought his first convenience store in 1978, when he was almost 30 years old. By then, he already had nearly 10 years of experience in the sector. He had already been involved in the start-up of more than 200 convenience stores. He understood that if he was to transform his newly acquired store into a chain and build something big, he needed to set up a team of people with complementary skills to help him make acquisitions.

In 2023, there are roughly 15,000 convenience stores operating under the Circle K/Ingo/Couche-Tard banners, employing 130,000 people in more than 30 countries. Annual sales are more than US$60 billion. Alain Bouchard officially retired from his position as President and CEO in 2014 and became Founder and Executive Chairman of the Board. He continues to be a major shareholder. He is still actively involved in strategic orientations and in identifying potential acquisitions. He has become a ‘Chief Culture Officer’ involved in executive leadership mentoring. He has never stopped communicating the importance of innovative, creative and intrapreneurial behaviour at all levels of the enterprise.

This case study presents Alain Bouchard, the man and the entrepreneur. It shows how he learned and mastered the craft of starting, acquiring, managing and developing convenience stores. It looks at how he encouraged the people around him to act as facilitators and intrapreneurs. It describes his values, how he works and learned to live with risk.

This study aims to examine the relationship between the fear index and initial public offering (IPO) aftermarket liquidity in ASEAN during the bearish time, the COVID-19 pandemic.

This study uses random effect panel regression analysis using two proxies of IPO aftermarket liquidity, namely, volume and turnover, on data of 90 IPO companies in the ASEAN-5 countries over four study periods: 30, 60, 90 and 100 days, after their IPOs.

The results indicate that the COVID-19 fear index significantly affects liquidity for all periods. The fear index decreases the stock aftermarket liquidity of ASEAN-5 IPO companies. The findings are consistent with additional tests.

This study initiates research during the COVID-19 pandemic in ASEAN-5 countries. Furthermore, while the other studies examine the stock performance of existing listed companies, this study focuses exclusively on the liquidity of companies that went public through IPOs in 2020.

Existing studies suggest that negative impacts emanating from corporate fraud revelations may diffuse to other firms through lower trust and lower market participation. Extending this literature stream, the authors examine whether corporate fraud revelations are associated with higher costs of raising capital through initial public offerings (IPOs) for industry peers.

The authors employ several analysis techniques including univariate analysis, multivariate regressions, propensity score matching methodology, and probit estimation. The sample consists of 3,015 US IPO firms for the 1996–2021 period.

By adopting US private securities class action lawsuits as a proxy for the presence of corporate fraud, the authors find that fraud revelations are associated with higher IPO underpricing, higher post-IPO stock return volatility and increased likelihood of withdrawal from the offering for industry peers. The findings are robust to alternative industry definitions and litigation proxies and to the inclusion of a battery of controls, including industry, state and year fixed effects.

This study presents private firms with an additional industry litigation factor to consider when assessing the marginal costs of going public.

This paper examines the relationship between poison pills, real earnings management and initial public offering (IPO) failure.

The authors sampled 2,997 IPO firms that went public during 1993-2015.

The authors find that IPO firms manipulate earnings upward using real earnings management. The authors also find that IPO firms exhibiting a higher level of real earnings management have a higher probability of IPO failure. In addition, the authors find that weak shareholders' governance is positively associated with IPO failure.

These results suggest that poor governance structures in failed firms open the door to manipulating real activities and increasing operational risk.

The study findings are of most significant interest to potential investors and other stakeholders affiliated with a firm going public, an auditor, an underwriter, the lawyers who consult with the firm and employees or executives who might consider joining that firm.

Understanding the determinants of a corporate initial public offering (IPO) success is essential for reducing investors' valuation uncertainty when participating in share offerings. In this sense, this study contributes to the existing debate by examining IPO prospectus readability. The authors specifically investigate how clear and more informative insights into pure corporate key financial numbers can lead to a higher valuation for the company after the listing process.

Through a sample of European IPOs, the authors employ a cross-sectional regression to test the relationship between prospectus readability through the Flesch reading ease (FRE) score and companies' market-to-book ratio at the period end date after the listing process.

The study findings show a positive impact of higher readability on the post-IPO market-to-book ratio. Thus, clear and more informative communication results in stocks being traded at a premium to their book value. This study presents a concrete call for firms to increase corporate documents’ readability to mitigate the risk of withdrawing or spoiling corporate market access. Specifically, enhanced clarity and transparency increase investors' confidence, facilitating a better understanding of companies' intrinsic value and the overall IPO process. The authors conducted several tests to validate the results.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is among the first works to explore the relationship between the readability of corporate prospectus and the sustained IPO success in the European context.

The purpose of this study is to assess how the information disclosed in prospectuses impacted the initial public offering (IPO) underpricing at a time of high government interference amid the ongoing pandemic.

The design of this study has several tracks, namely, a macro-level track, which is represented by the government measures to halt the pandemic; a micro-level track, which is followed by textual analysis of IPO prospectuses; and, finally, a machine learning track, in which the authors use state-of-the-art tools to improve their linear regression model.

The authors found that strict government anti-COVID-19 measures indeed contribute to the reduction of the IPO underpricing. Interestingly, the mere fact of such measures taking place is enough to take effect on financial markets, regardless of the resulting efficiency of such measures. At the micro-level, the authors show that prospectus sentiments and their significance differ across prospectus sections. Using linear regression and machine learning models, the authors find robust evidence that such sections as “Risk factors”, “Prospectus summary”, “Financial Information” and “Business” play a crucial role in explaining the underpricing. Their effect is different, namely, it turns out that the more negative “Risk factors” and “Financial Information” sentiment, the higher the resulting underpricing. Conversely, the more positive “Prospectus summary” and “Business” sentiments appear, the lower the resulting underpricing is. In addition, we used machine learning methods. Consisting of more than 580 IPO prospectuses, the study sample required modern and powerful machine learning tools like Isolation Forest for pre-processing or Random Forest Regressor and Light Gradient Boosting Model for modelling purposes, which enabled the authors to gain better results compared to the classic linear regression model.

At the micro level, this study is not confined to 2020, but also embraces 2021, the year of the record number of IPOs held. Moreover, in this paper, these were prospectuses that served as a source of management sentiment. In addition, the authors used a tailor-made government stringency index. At the micro level, basing the study on behavioural finance hypotheses, the authors conducted both separate and holistic analysis of prospectuses to assess investors’ reaction to different aspects of IPO companies as well as to the characteristics of the IPOs themselves. Lastly, the authors introduced a few innovations to the research methodology. Textual analysis was conducted on a corpus of prospectuses included in a study sample. However, the authors did not use pre-trained dictionaries, but instead opted for FLAIR, a modern open-source framework for natural language processing.

Building on the venture capital (VC) literature, this paper aims to study the impact of the value added by corporate venture capitalists (CVCs) on their funded companies by comparing its IPO valuation with its independent venture capitalists (IVCs) peers.

This study uses a sample of 3,719 VC-backed ventures, between the years 1998 and 2020. The empirical analysis focuses on the propensity score matching approach, pairing ventures based on their probability of being funded by CVCs, and consequently, interpret the results derived from the valuation multiple ratios between the “nearest neighbors.”

This study finds that companies funded by CVCs can achieve higher valuations at their IPO compared to IVC-backed companies. Moreover, CVC-backed companies outperformance is mainly driven by startups which hold a technological fit with their CVC investor, with higher technological overlaps being translated into more significant valuations.

This study presents systematic evidence to the subject concerning ventures’ type of investors and its effect on the startups’ IPO valuations.

This paper contributes to the enrichment of the industry’s literacy while also easing entrepreneurs’ decisions when choosing a funding partner. CVCs offer a variety of services and support that fits the specific needs of their funded companies.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is among the first to examine the role of CVCs as a tool to help venture growth.

Driven by the anticipated global stagflation, this straightforward yet novel study examines the cost of inflation as a macroeconomic factor by investigating its influence on stock market growth. Thus, this paper aims to examine the impact of inflation on the probability of initial public offering (IPO) withdrawal decision.

The paper employs a large dataset that covers the period January 1995–December 2019 and comprises 33,536 successful or withdrawn IPOs from 22 nations with various legal and cultural systems. This study applies a probit model utilizing version 15 of Stata statistical software.

This study finds that inflation is substantially and positively correlated with the likelihood of IPO withdrawal. Results of this study show that the IPO withdrawal decision increases up to 90% when the inflation rate climbs by 10%. Multiple robustness tests provide consistent findings.

This study's implications are important for researchers, investment banks, underwriters, issuers, regulators and stock exchanges. When processing IPO proposals, investment banks, underwriters and issuers must consider inflation projections to avoid negative effects, as demonstrated by the findings. In addition, regulators and stock exchanges must be aware of the detrimental impact of inflation on competitiveness in attracting new listings.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to present convincing evidence of a major relationship between IPO withdrawal decision and inflation.

Based on the textual-analyzed data covering 2148 IPO firms in China’s stock market during the 2007–2018 period, the authors’ purpose is to examine the influence of anti-takeover provision (ATP) adoption on initial public offerings (IPO) underpricing and identify the reducing effect of the former.

The authors examine the sample consisting of Chinese A-share listed IPO firms between 2007 and 2018 from China Stock Market Accounting Research and Chinese Research Data Services, with ATP data collected from the IPO firm chapters. Specifically, the authors use text analysis to identify whether there are ATPs in the IPO firm chapters, as well as the number of ATPs. H1: IPO underpricing is less severe for firms adopting ATPs. H2: The effect of ATP adoption on IPO underpricing is more salient for firms in worse information environments.

The authors examine the influence of ATP adoption on IPO underpricing and identify the reducing effect of the former. This effect can be explained by the fact that adopting ATPs in IPO firm chapters can reduce information asymmetry to a large extent by helping external investors obtain more private information, which alleviates IPO underpricing. The authors also find that the reducing effect is more significant in the worsened information environment. Furthermore, the authors explore the influence of adopting ATPs on other IPO characteristics and find positive effects on IPO over-subscription, funds raised and trading activity and negative effects on listing fees.

This study mainly contributes to the literature from the following two aspects. First, the study enriches the literature about the influencing factors of IPO underpricing. Second, the study also enriches the literature about the economic consequences of ATP adoption. This study also has important policy implications. With the coming of the era of decentralized ownership in China’s capital market, ATP adoption has become more important and attracted more attention. Also, investors focus more on pricing efficiency. The findings in this paper provide a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between ATP adoption and IPO underpricing.